Hi

[thipe]

As a complete newcomer to learning Mandarin I thought it worth a post here. As some background, I'm going to be spending 4 months in Beijing for work from the end of May and so I'm looking to get some basics together before flying out. Unfortunately my timing means I can't really join a formal course prior to my departure

Comments

[rocketgirl_85]

I've been living in Taiwan for the past 5 weeks and putting this app on my phone has been a life saver. It's really good for learning vocabulary, you can easily search up words via English, pinyin, zhuyin, writing them out by hand or speaking (via internet connection though). Hanping Chinese Dictionary

Also, prior to coming to Taiwan I used Rosetta Stone. And while I found it semi-useful, I think just like you I understand and don't understand what is being said. Honestly, that program needs translations in my opinion if you really want to learn and comprehend EXACTLY what you're learning...

Other things I've used were Schuam's Outlines: Chinese Grammar and Practical Audio-Visual Chinese textbooks. And as for memorizing pinyin... I believe it just takes practice like all things. Just sound things out and try writing them in pinyin and then look it up to see if you're correct or not. I know it's tedious but I think that's just the best way to learn. Hope all of this helps in some way.

[thipe]

Ah, yes - I installed the free version but have yet to play with it - is the paid version worth the upgrade?

I'll grab Schaum; I hadn't heard of that series before so glad to have a recommendation for the grammar side too. In terms of the Practical Audio-Visual Chinese - from what I've read this is based on traditional characters, right?

Sadly, I had the feeling that would be the answer on pinyin hehe. Guess I need to start practicing!

[rocketgirl_85]

I played with the free version for about a week or two before upgrading. For me, the Hanping upgrade to the pro version was worth it. I guess it just depends on your preference and usage.

Practical Audio-Visual Chinese teaches traditional characters but there are simplified versions if you look at the index in the back of the book. I suppose for you this would be more of a pain since Beijing will use simplified and it's cumbersome to continuously look in the back... :/ But it's been a great book/series so far (happens to be my textbook at NTU) and pretty useful if you want to learn Chinese.

[frances_bea]

Good luck in Beijing. That sounds like an exciting move

[frances_bea]

Also, if you have an Android/iOS phone/tablet, you should look into installing Plecodict (pleco.com). At it's base it's a free Chinese-English dictionary app, but it's a lot more than that. They have moved to an a-la-carte feature model where the base program is free (and quite useful), but you can buy additional features including quite a few high-quality licensed English-Chinese and Chinese-English dictionaries for it (also one Chinese-Chinese dictionary) and audio recordings of the 36,000 most common Chinese words being read aloud, so you can hear words sounded out from their dictionary entries. Other add-on features include OCR-recognition of Chinese characters by pointing your phone camera at them, hand-writing recognition of characters, flashcards, stroke-order animations, document reader, etc

[thipe]

Ooh great, thanks for the tip - will add it to Hanping :)

[thipe]

Thanks muchly, that seems similar to my experience with Pimsleur for Japanese, so I guess it's worth giving the Mandarin a shot (Also, I can borrow the CDs >.> - I'm willing to spend some money but I'm somewhat broke at the moment heh).

People I know who went out to teach have fed back similar things about Pinyin, but it seems more practical to learn the standard, especially for typing purposes.

I'll also give Chinesepod a shot, thanks!

[dynamint]

For learning characters (both reading and writing), I recommend taking a look at skritter. It costs money beyond the initial trial period, but it's a good system.

[alirose]

Have you looked into Chinesepod.com? it's awesome, much more worth the time than Rosetta Stone, IMO.

[craniumsoftener]

I second this. Thipe, you can get a free one-week trial subscription to check it out. They have thousands of lessons. Also, if the problem is that you don't understand how to pronounce pinyin, maybe you can check out this: http://www.quickmandarin.com/chinesepinyintable/

[frances_bea]

I like the technology behind this table, but it's surprisingly sloppy in its construction. Three things I notice offhand are:

1. I can't find 'er' on the table at all.
2. The bottom row labeled "Nofinal" actually contains syllables with no initial (not no final).
3. In the bottom row, 'ai' appears twice, and syllables to the right of that are in the wrong columns.

It's a nice resource, though, and would be better if someone could fix it up a little.

[thipe]

Cheers, will give chinesepod a shot as that seems to be the primary recommendation.

I was previously using a combination of listening (and mentally trying to link up the pinyin form to how I'd pronounce it), but was curious if there were any specific tools beyond this (I've also used this on about.com). That looks pretty useful, subject to frances_bea's comments

[wangzirui1997]

As you did，I want to study english ，maybe I can give you a little help with chinese