I live in the US. Although I’ve thought for a long time that I should learn some Spanish, recent world events have convinced me to think about learning Chinese instead. I imagine Spanish speaking people will need to learn Chinese soon, too.
What are some good methods of learning Chinese?
I’ve heard that Anki is a good learning application.
I heard an advertisement for Duolingo on NPR news today. It was probably meant for people who are thinking similarly to me.
I made my own theoretically multi-platform graduated interval recall software that might help.
What about people who are willing to teach Chinese in exchange for learning English? Is there a good way of finding those people?
Chinese is too hard so I learned Spanish in college and university as elective courses. I had one chinese teacher who said that his language is more visual, like he wrote the word horse and showed us how it looked like a horse.
Yes, I think that Chinese uses its visual symbols to unify its various dialects such as Mandarin and Cantonese. Maybe I should focus on learning some Hanzi characters first.
A good place to start learning Chinese letters is the Drops app. It’s free but it offers a paid version. You can study free 5 minutes a day. If you purchase it you can study unlimited time. Duolingo is a good place to start for the basics.
Funny story. I used to know a little Japanese, like stuff for tourists and conversational, and one time I said a few polite things to the cashier at a Chinese restaurant. I hoped he might know a little of it but the Japanese and Chinese are kind of Frenemies. As far as I know they haven’t had major combat in quite some time but every so often they go into each other’s territory I guess in the waters surrounding the area between China which is on the Asian continent and the island of Japan.
So I’m thinking “Uh oh, holy crap did I offend the guy!?” But I think he thought I was speaking broken Chinese. He was super nice and we talked a bit about Kung Fu movies, which I suppose sounds like a stereotype.
Some people think Japanese and Chinese are the same but Japan has actually invaded and occupied parts of China going back I think to the 40’s or 50’s or sometime thereabouts.
I use the site tealit.com to find language exchange partners. I feel it is a useful way to learn through those who are fluent. note the site is based in Taiwan where they speak Mandarin.
I don’t currently plan to speak Chinese very well, either. I intend to start with small goals, and then work up from there.
Maybe if I can recognize a few characters, at first, I might be able to read road signs and not accidentally walk into the woman’s rest room and such. I think that I would like to recognize basic words and phrases like ‘stop’ and ‘put your hands up’ or whatever they say during an arrest. I would like to be able to recognize such basic phrases in a few dialects.
And, of course, one of the first phrases that I should try to learn in almost any language is something like “I don’t speak Chinese well. Please speak slowly.”
