Learning chinese/mandarin....

[manny78]

I'm looking for advices from people who tried (successfully or not) to learn chinese. Hard ? easy ? What is the most difficult part ? Grammar ? pronunciation ? I'll most likely take a business oriented class in a few weeks so need some info !

 

[gtrcivic]

pronunciation is difficult in my opinion...went to china last year for 18 days...had the lonely planet cheat books for mandarin to english /vice versa....hard to pronunciate what i wanted to say and just pointed to the quote and they understood...other times it was like Win, Lose, Draw....pen/paper to get my point across...

my ex was fluent in mandarin and gave me a quick course..its just a tough language to learn...

 

[jaded]

I think it's a touch language to learn...pronunciation is tough.

I took classesc for a little while when I was younger, but all the kids in the class had parents who were fluent in the language and spoke it at home, so they were able to understand and communicate in it, but needed to learn to read/write it. My parents don't speak Chinese, so I didn't practice what I learned in the weekly classes at home and they couldn't help me with reading/writing (my grandmother could but I didn't see her regularly). Also, the teacher would say 'Put your hand up if you don't understand' but she said it in Chinese so I didn't understand when she said it

 

[redguru]

Since the language is tonal it is very hard to pick up the differences in phonetics. The word for beef and murder are very close to each other. One being pronounced Me-yen, and the other may-en. I used to go to Taiwan once every quarter to performance test a product. Mandarin is very tough.

If you can get your hands on Pimsleur's voice tapes, they help a great deal.

 

[manny78]

Since the language is tonal it is very hard to pick up the differences in phonetics. The word for beef and murder are very close to each other. One being pronounced Me-yen, and the other may-en. I used to go to Taiwan once every quarter to performance test a product. Mandarin is very tough.

If you can get your hands on Pimsleur's voice tapes, they help a great deal.

Looks like it's going to be a tough job but I have to.

 

[Lestat]

Nee How Ma

 

[mylife]

mininova.org + "pimsleur mandarin"

you'll need a torrent client such as azureus

 

[GoldenDelicious]

Nee How Ma

shirr shirr ni ne

 

[redguru]

Nee How Ma

Wa ung how

 

[Island Son]

it's not THAT bad, but you need feedback on how you sound... if you can recognize the 4 tones and how the then you can pronounce anything correctly.... understanding the dialects...good luck.
i have a ton of CD's but i slacked off

nihao ma.... wo hen hao, ni ne?
xie xie
zaijian