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Guide to Learning Chinese
While this guide does focus on Mandarin, it will note how to approach other varieties of Chinese and should be useful in general. Since this is a guide that is ongoing, and other logistical problems, you can likely only really expect Cantonese to be consistently mentioned, but the advice for how to approach non-Mandarin varieties should still be sound. If you have any suggestions or corrections please contact me on this discord as Araia#2067.
Before getting started on learning, let’s get some necessary bits of out of the way.
As with any language learning, you must know that you're getting yourself into a long grind. There's simply no shortcut; you must practice and practice so consistently. It doesn't matter if sessions are just five minutes a day or one three-hour a week, do it frequently enough that you can remember what you last learned, and most of all don't force yourself.
Not a single problem with a language's grammar, writing, etc. really compares to problems with staying motivated. Being consistency in your schedule right after.
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- Grammar: Chinese Grammar Wiki - Good, concise, but lacking on nuanced explanations.
- Vocabulary: Find a path suitable for you from the guide.
- Translation Dictionary: Linedict or Pleco professional for the phone.
- Browser Mouseover Dictionary: There's really no replacement for this convenience.
- C-C Dictionary: Zdic for Mandarin, JyutDict for Cantonese.
- Usage Examples: Linedict or Jukuu.
- Questions: Baike, Chinese forums, Chinese Stack Exchange, If googling your problem or checking these sites don't help, only then should someone for help.
- Material of Interest: Ideally you want something you’re interested in, a friend to speak to/music/TVB dramas/Viki dramas/Qidian webnovels/etc.
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This is by far the most easily accessible, tailored to your own pace source of native material. Seeing words in the context they’re intended to be used is several times better than seeing example plain definition, translated or not, or even example sentences for two reasons: 1) human memory retains information better when you have an accompanying story 2) you hone in on the right feel for the word that may not necessarily come across just by reading a dictionary; translation dictionaries can be particularly misleading. And what’s more is that you can read at your own pace.
Some even choose to jump straight into reading native material head first, perhaps reading up on some grammar beforehand. However, beginning reading at a point where you have to lookup every single word is incredibly discouraging for most. I recommend starting
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While this where I, and indeed most resources, would recommend learners start for Mandarin (or any appropriate romanization system for other varieties), you by no means have to start with pinyin. Some learners learn best through just listening, some through speaking with friends. Some dodge pinyin and learn zhuyin or a different romanization all together. Some learn by avoiding pinyin all together and just learning via similar characters (similar to rime dictionaries). In short, there’s many options.
Clearly, if you want to write or type to anyone who speaks Chinese, they simply don’t use pinyin or any romanization to read. So clearly if your goal is to be able to type to a native, then exclusively learning romanizations isn’t helping your case. However this doesn’t take away from the fact that romanization is a very useful tool.
Although this is a popular. When it comes to language learning, never discount any tools, just make sure you use them in a way that suits you. One example of a good use of a more romanization based approach is one friend found accents difficult to remember so choose a to learn a different romanization Gwoyeu Romatzyh where tones are letter changes. As long as you have sound reasoning when approaching a tool, there’s no reason to discount it.
It depends on your goals. If you do not plan on reading or writing to anyone in Chinese, then no. However be aware that you are depriving yourself almost all resources (dictionaries, subtitles, most grammar guides, etc.), the ability to text chat with natives, a memorization tools that Hanzi have inbuilt (radicals, etc.), native reading materials, etc. If none of those things interest you, then of course you need not bother with characters.
Getting tones correct can be quite challenge for learners if it’s your first tonal language. While intermediate speaker with somewhat random tones will still be understood, complete disregard for tone is just plain hard to decipher. Saying a word with the wrong tone is equivalent to pronouncing it completely wrong. Don’t cheat your way through learning tones, you only end up hurting yourself in the long run.
If you have experience learning a language but are first timer with a tonal language, given the a normal schedule for pronunciation/grammar/vocabulary/practice, I would double the amount of time spent on pronunciation at the beginning. In other words, spend enough time on it until you have grasped a feel for tones, then double that. It’s fine to not be able to produce tones 100% in your speech as long as you can hear the difference: if you can hear it, then you can rely on exposure osmosis to teach you tones naturally. However, I would still recommend learning thoroughly during vocabulary acquisition.
I recommend deciding on one system, either traditional or simplified, and keeping to it. Once you are reasonably comfortable with Chinese, it’s not difficult to pick up the other set. To talk to everyone, you’ll probably end up learning both. The two sets are not exactly one-to-one; that are a couple traditional characters map to one simplified and vice versa, refer to this list. Traditional is commonly used in Cantonese/Taishanese communities, Taiwan, and global Chinatowns; simplified elsewhere.
No, I don’t. Mandarin is as much a dialect as Cantonese is. Without really diving into definitions, ‘dialect’ tends to be a politically charged word, hence I prefer to call the different languages normally associated with Chinese as different varieties of Chinese. Keep in mind that, if you’re interested in linguistics, Sinitic languages isn’t exactly synonymous with Chinese varieties.
The reason this distinction is important is that, although it is common knowledge (albeit incorrect common knowledge) that different varieties are somehow ‘dialects’ of an meta-Chinese language, each variety is often mutually unintelligible to another variety contrary to what ‘dialect’ might suggest. That is to say for example that if you were to learn Mandarin, there is no reason why even a native speaker would be able to understand Cantonese without having to learn essentially a new language. Though the differences in varieties mainly only differ in how they sound, there are also actually differences in vocabulary and grammar.
As with any language you learn, it is important to distinguish between written form and spoken form and between vernacular and formal language. Between all the various varieties of Chinese, the written Chinese has always served as the lingua franca or bridge language that. In the past, up until the 1900s, it was Classical Chinese (文言文); now, it is written Mandarin. Anyone who learns a non-Mandarin Chinese language ends up learning how to write in this more standard form of Chinese (aka. Mandarin), especially for more native contexts, a transcript which might not be a 100% faithful representation representation of what they are saying.
You’ll often find that quotes in Hong Kong newspapers in and subtitles for media in general being written in standard written Chinese (SWC). Calling it ‘standard written Chinese’ rather than Mandarin highlights its use as a mostly faithful conversation to a common language. A canonical example is 台湾 (Taiwan) is typically rendered as 台湾地区 (‘The Taiwan Region’) in subtitles regardless of what is said.
No, you do not. However know that due to its status as the primary language of joint communication (lingua franca) Chinese spaces, Modern Standard Mandarin is learned in school by virtually all speakers regardless of the Chinese variety and is used very often. Thus, not only their Mandarin usage but also their other Chinese tongue usage are affected. A common phenomenon is for the younger generation to increasingly speak the Standard language and for speakers to have particular emotional associations with each language. So while it’s not necessary, it is certainly a good idea to learn Mandarin to understand all the usage nuances.
Although Modern Standard Mandarin is advertised as having four tones and Cantonese as anywhere from six to ten. The way modern literature treats them, Mandarin has four + one tones and Cantonese has six. The fifth tone of Mandarin is known as the neutral tone that, despite its name, does indeed have a tone that is set based on the preceding tone. Modern Cantonese technically has three pseudo-tones but for more on Cantonese please refer to this short introduction to Cantonese.
An important phenomenon to observe depending on the variety of Chinese you intended to learn is something called tone sandhi or when tones change depending on adjacent words. In Mandarin for instance, the neutral tone, two consecutive third tone (change to second third), 不, and 一 are affected by their neighbours. Cantonese has no sandhi. In contrast, Hokkien has complex sandhi rules.
Note: The sandhi phenomenon (Mandarin: 你好 nǐ hǎo → ní hǎo and 我好 wǒ hǎo → wó hǎo) is different from bianyin (Mandarin: 哥哥 gē gē → gē ge). The former are automatic changes based solely on the tone pattern whereas the latter are due to semantic change or derivational/inflectional morphology.