给中文初学者的建议 / Tips for Mandarin Chinese Learners
抱歉，暂无中文版本
The learning curve for Chinese is much different from Latin languages - it is very, very steep. So here come a good news and bad news for you.
The bad news is you really have to show your commitment and study hard from the very beginning, and start from the Characters (NOT Pinyin!, I know it's hard, that's why it is a bad news).
The good news is after one month or even only two weeks, you will suddenly find everything becomes much, much easier - even easier than studying English, which requires continually vocabulary building while Chinese doesn't.
So here are some suggestion:
- Ask yourself whether you really want to learn Chinese
- If the answer of the first question is yes, pick up a period of about two weeks (a whole month would be even better); plan 3-5 hours Chinese study during this period;
- Start from basic characters and their meaning then pronunciation (I know it is not the traditional way to learn Chinese as a second language which seldom works. You have to learn Chinese as your first language, otherwise you will forget everything after learning something)
- Do not use Pinyin unless your teachers tell you to. (Pinyin is the major killer; it is a great tool, but too dangerous for beginners, including Chinese children)
- You might feel totally confused in the first week, but be confident - everything would pay off after the first week. The first one hundred characters are the most difficult ones to learn. But after this milestone, you will find yourself start to UNDERSTAND Chinese, not only "LEARN" any more.
Remember the differences of the learning curves. I speak excellent Mandarin and very, very fluent English and Cantonese, and has been trying to compare and understand languages. What I found important to learn a foreign language is to forget that it is a foreign language. Don't think "how native people speak it". Instead, think "In which way I feel comfortable when I speak", because if you don't feel comfortable, the "native" probably feel the same way.
Hmmm, I can't say I would agree on not learning pinyin. I think pinyin is very helpful for leaning pronunciation. Plus, many people don't have much time to learn.
ReplyDeleteEverbody needs to learn pinyin sometime too because pinyin is the most common method used to type.
It can take a long time to learn the first 100 characters. In fact, for people that I've seen start studying, many had troubles learning 100 characters in a month or even a semester.