How should I start learning Chinese?

Actually, I forgot. That was part of the point of this article anyway. Exams are our friend, but we tend to use them to be our enemy.

http://chinesepod.com/community/conversations/post/11048

yeah, I have the same weakness in that my reviews are not what they should be. I've somewhat been able to force myself into reviews by allowing myself to be forced into taking an exam on what i've already learned at TLI. This of course forces me into review mode. I'm starting to think that I should get more review in the guided lessons this way.

I forget which Movie Madness it was, but there was one Movie Madness lesson on the Wrath of Khan. I thought that was better than the Upper Intermediate Star Trek lesson, because Movie Madness actually translated real Star Trek dialogue.

Hehe. 我爱星际迷航! Especially the original series :P (my dad is a voyager and next gen fan). But I think it's just a biiiit too cheesy for her to appreciate. We did watch Star Wars together, and I just love Babylon 5 too much not to at least attempt to share :)

as a side note, who knew there was a star trek lesson?!

http://chinesepod.com/lessons/star-trek

oooh, a difference of opinion I see....

Dude, I would never inflict star trek on her. I'm not cruel...

Babylon 5? Don't you get Star Trek Voyager or Battlestar Galactica in the UK? Wait a minute, i'm confusing Battlestar with Babylon 5. I actually liked Babylon 5. Nevermind.

And to finish off this little thread, I had a surprising development, although it's not helpful for anyone else. I complained to my better half that I couldn't watch this sitcom that had been recommended, and did she know of an alternative I could watch? She answered "well, I suppose it's time", which sounds awfully ominous... but it turns out she's a huge huge fan of a particular sitcom called 我爱我家 - I love my home. It's a bit like Friends, it ran and ran and ran and was hugely popular, and she has the entire DVD box set - all 100 episodes.

So we're going to watch that together, and I get my own personal translator and interpreter for when I don't understand the jokes :) I suspect this more than makes up for me forcing her to watch Babylon 5 :)

Guess what it says? :)

Sorry, this video is only available to customers in mainland China due to copyright restrictions.

Says it in English this time too! Hehe! No worries, since you recommend it so highly I will get the missus to find a download of it on powerapple for me :)

i found a good site that seems legitely legal which has the sitcom series i posted earlier in mandarin. i can't bring it up for some reason directly on the site: http://www.qiyi.com/

from what i have read as can check out on the "about us" on the site in english states qiyi was founded by baidu and claims to be China's first television portal and also says it complies with copyright protection laws.

i have managed to bring up the sitcom series which plays on qiyi from the site:

http://baike.baidu.com/view/205463.htm

just scroll to the bottom of the page and under:

全集在线观看

it has a list of the episodes there 1-40.

hey hk boy,

if u want to watch this series in cantonese it is 算很好看。

And I just realized I was confusing cinnamonfern's recommendation with Jaron's in the comments above (I haven't seen jaron's recommended show)...at any rate, here's the link to the one cinnamonfern recomended on the legal site - http://dianshiju.cntv.cn/costume/xianjianqixiazhuan3/videopage/index.shtml

That is all food for thought. One reason that I raised my original point is that from experience here it seems to me that Chinese owners of material are indeed interested in copyright. For example, the most expensive DVDs and CDs in the shops are original Chinese material. They are expensive presumably because piracy of Chinese material occurs less than piracy of foreign material. (The same applies in a number of well-know Chinese brands outside the entertainment industry - they vigorously defend their brands.)

So it seemed to follow that they would protect their rights globally, making it impossible to have their material played/shown outside China. The technology obviously exists - the ABC and the NRL (football league) are two owners in Australia who make it impossible for me to view the product. My son offered the view that if enough people wanted to view it then someone in China would steal it - it's just not popular enough to steal. :)

For my theory to stand up (and taking my son's thoughts on board) there would have to be enough of a foreign audience for the Chinese material for this to even matter. I'm getting less confident I am on the right track..

Just saw a 2008 news report that the Chinese Govt blocked 8 million plus songs on the i-Tunes store (because of one offensive song) - maybe there is currently another block on. I think it is new because I saw songs there in January I think it was.

Oh, just thought of something on your point bodawei - its possible that the restrictions on chinese sites preventing certain videos from being played outside of china is meant to prevent a site from being sued in that other country. In other words, its not that the site actually has the rights to play that video within China, rather its that risking being sued in China for copyright violation is far less worrisome than risking being sued in the blocked country's court system (most legal systems are going to have rules of what is called 'personal jurisdiction' in the US system, ie if you don't have entanglments with a country its courts will decide they don't have jurisdiction to force you to answer to its courts). Alternatively, it might be the judgment that many copyright holders look at trying to stop internet plays of their videos inside of china as 螳臂当车 (a praying mantis using its arm to try to stop a chariot), but certain western markets as still being feasible to protect, and thus are much more likely to care when a video is playable in that region.

But just guessing on both counts - and I'm not sure how well that line of reasoning really holds up.

cinnamonfern,

Glad I was able to help!

Hmmmm - I just went to the Chinese site for i-Tunes and it says:

iTunes 是供 Mac 和 PC 使用的一款免费应用程序，能管理和播放你的数字音乐和视频，让全部媒体文件保持同步。Definitely says it has music and videos. A few years ago I remember looking there at music (but I didn't buy, I was just after free podcasts.) And in the Apple store in Sydney recently the sales person looked at the Chinese site and there was music.

But like you I changed the country setting on my i-Tunes just now and it does come up with limited headings including App Store, Podcasts and I-Tunes U - need an i-Tunes geek to explain what's going on.

Hmm..I wasn't able to find it, but I didn't search too hard. In i-Tunes you can change your country, but the China and HK stores only sell Apps.

Thanks tingyun! This was very helpful. I'll have to check out that podcast site you mentioned.

Hi cinnamonfern,

I pretty much only know of the 古装戏 genre. In that genre, at the intermediate stage I'd say the goal is to pick one that has the characters speaking clearly, and not too fast, and that about half the sentences are fairly basic. The other half will still be loaded with chengyu and older forms, which isn't ideal, as although its good to have a bit of that exposure, I'd say a 80% basic 20% flowery language mix would be best at this stage - but 50/50 is about the best you can hope for in this genre. From this standard, I'd say 神话 (the tv show, not the movie) is a decent fit, you can find it at the same site, here is the link - http://dianshiju.cntv.cn/costume/shenhua/videopage/index.shtml

The writers for the show clearly lacked any sense of plot structure (and the ending is terrible), and were either entirely ignorant of Chinese history or just didn't care (though this is true of virtually all chinese tv shows, they reimagine their history as being the same thing stretching back 3,000 years - ie they forget that the great walls in the different eras were not the same thing, they forget that the system of castration for inner officials was only fully established in the Han, they have pre Qin emperors use the term 朕, etc) - but I like 'Connecticut Yankee in king authur's court' type plots (2 modern guys travel in time back to Qin), and people waving swords around...plus Hu Ge makes things pretty fun, and they do a good job of creating some interesting relationships.

the only modern one I've enjoyed is 我的青春谁做主, and while very good, its not a great choice at that stage given the language they use and speed. You menotioned Korean dramas - I used them at the intermediate stage, the language is fairly good for that, but the plots make you want to 寻短见. (pun intended) ;)

I don't know of any music purchasing sights - something about the lack of tones makes me think its not the best learning tool, though it is fun at times - but I highly recomend 静雅思听 http://www.justing.com.cn/ for podcast readings of articles, short stories, and the like. They read fairly clearly, and if you select a genre that you enjoy (and have some familerity with the vocab of) then it's not a bad tool.

EDIT - oh, and you might try exploring the site the two links are from - it sorts by catagory and such, and it only takes a few minutes to check out a show and see if the language and style suit you - though I'd recomend for testing purposes you jump into the middle of the 2nd or 3rd episode - many shows use a very different style of lsnguage for the first 15 minutes or so.

I would like someone to explain that; which copyright rules they are. There is quite a bit on Australian web sites that I cannot watch when I am in China - but that is definitely Australian rules, not China. Australian copyright prevents it being played outside Australia. From that experience I would have thought it is Chinese rules preventing something Chinese playing outside China, but maybe not.

Oh, sorry xiao_liang. I was responding to Jaron who lives in China; thought he was talking about China.

Hi cinnamonfern

i-Tunes has a Chinese site. But you need a credit card address in the country as I understand, or buy with Chinese vouchers. Which you may have to buy on the mainland. That's what they told me in Australia but I haven't tried it yet. You can go to the site and see the products of course to see if they have the kind of material you want.

Hi Jaron,

Thanks for your responese. I live in the east of HK, in TKO. I look forward to hearing more about the book you will write. Yes, it has been a struggle to get good Cantonese materials but know I've got a fairly good supply of study materials - mostly from Greenwood Press. Almost all of those books are pretty good.

Thanks tingyun, This is great! Especially since I only have two Mandarin Channels on TV...one is CCTV1 and the other mostly plays Korean dramas. :P If you have any other recommendations on shows (funny - not super dramatic) that would be good for Intermediate level, that would be wonderful.

So, do you know of any Chinese sites (kind of like Amazon in the U.S.) where I could pay for and download MP3s? I like to buy songs and not entire CDs. And I'd rather not download off of Baidu.

I'm pretty sure it has less to do with it being a certain show, and more to do with whether that particular upload has been flagged as not viewable in the region. You are best off running a video search on baidu - this should turn up instances of the video on a variety of sites, and perhaps more importantly, each site will generally have many instances of the video (ie Tudou will have that video like 10 times over, and one likely won't be flagged). You can keep trying until you find one that works. Also, if its one of the videos that baidu offers the automatic option of finding the best site for a selected episode (allowing you to click to go to next if the chosen one is slow, and generally it will try 5 or 6 automatically), it seems to bypass any region blocking, so that will make virtually any of them work. Also, often there are high def versions available.

I never watch videos without owning the rights (as I consider it theft), so I buy dvd series either while in China or from amazon. However, even though I buy the most expensive 豪华 version (and of course never a pirated one), chinese dvd production is of absurdly low quality - generally, about 1/2 the series will have some dvds that will not play in whole or part, and of these series, about 1/3 of the dvds are subject to this problem. Thus, I end up having to go online to watch the missing episodes.

BTW, I'd suggest you also check out a more official website, sort of like a Chinese edition of hulu (and completely legal, and without area restrictions to my knowledge). You can also search by catagory fairly easily. Here's a link to the page of a show I recomend if you like the martial arts knight genre - http://dianshiju.cntv.cn/liuxinghudiejian/videopage/index.shtml

I love 仙剑奇侠传3 (the one menotioned by Jaron above) as a language learning tool - it has a huge variety of different language styles (from very colloquial used by certain charecters, to insanely formal by others), and has some interesting dialogue. However, I think its really only an efficient tool for very advanced learners - the charecters talk rather fast, half of them aren't really speaking modern chinese...unless Chinesepod advanced and media lessons long ago became far too easy for you, its probably not the best choice (of course, any exposure is beneficial...but there are alot of choices)

The one I linked above is perhaps more suitable for more learners - no wuxia genre story is going to be an easy watch, given the kind of language that shows up, but that one is compartivly light on the complicated expressions, and the charecters tend to speak rather slowly and clearly.

You can't watch some things outside of the Mainland because of copyright issues. I'm guessing it's due to the HK (or UK) rules...not China's. What I don't understand is why you can watch some shows but not others.

Error message on Jaron's recommended TV show.

"抱歉，由于版权原因，非大陆地区暂时无法观看该视频还望谅解。若有疑问，请联系土豆客服。"

Yea, but you're in China, bodawei. The message it gives, is "you can't watch this, china only" - (I had the missus look at it) .

The one that cinnamonfern linked seems to work though. Will check it out tonight if I can! :)

Nope - you just open ｗww.tudou.com in a browser and Bob's your uncle. I just watched a news report on 利比亚，或者利比亚人民会主义民众国．．　

are you sure it is China only? that series is from years ago. maybe it is a flashplayer or something else issue, i think i had to install something on my computer in the past to watch tudou. hmmm. not %100 sure but think i had to install something to be able to watch the videos. that would be pretty crazy if you could enter the site and look around the whole site but not open the videos because of restriction. i highly doubt that is the case. hmm...

I tried it too, and it doesn't work in Hong Kong either, so apparently only in Mainland. I think maybe you can watch shows as long as they are not a season in progress?

I don't know how you feel about fantasy, but I saw an episode or two of this one (仙剑奇侠传3) on TV when I was in China. It was kind of ridiculous and amused me, so it's next on my list of things to watch. My friend told me it was based off of a video game. This one should work for you because I can watch it here in HK.

Oh apparently that's right. It's China only.

http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/OiaLKFKsBXU/

Hmm. I did try and watch this. But it just freezes on loading. I get a KFC advert (which I've now seen about 5 times thanks to reloading), then just the loading screen with a little bit of text saying if you can't see this click here for help, with a bunch of not helpful help on the resulting page. One time it stopped loading and changed into a static iphone advert...

China only?

全中！You got it!

Here is a couple examples from within the last hour i've seen of cantonese pinyin based on the yale system:

for the word 部分 the pinyin is bou6 fan6. if you pronounced this literally (fan, with an A sound) people would think you were an idiot or wouldn't know what you are talking about.

the literall pronounciation should be bou6 fun6 as the word is clearly pronounced with a "u" sound entirely no a sound in the word.

for the word 充满 the pinyin is chung1mun5 it is wonderful for such a resource as the yale pinyin system for cantonese but what an awful system. the literal and accurate pronounciation is chong1 moon5. absolutely no "U" sound at all in the word.

hence i am planning on creating my own pinyin in the book and probably adding the yale pinyin for controversy, comparison, and contrast sake and just so people are more likely to accept the book but can also learn a more literal accurate pinyin translation which would produce much more effective and easy study for cantonese learners.

全中！ your friend is exactly right! i have been corrected and laughed at so many times in the last three months after moving to mainland because of translating my cantonese with the same grammar structure and sentence patterns into mandarin only to understand more and more clearly the vast difference in grammatical structure and sentence patterns between mandarin and cantonese. so it only does justice for books authored by people who are fluent in cantonese not by a computer translator. so hopefully the book gets published, helps alot of people, and i can give some free copies out to people on Cpod. that is my hope. in comparison to what people have been willing to publish for cantonese study, surely this book has got to be published for the benefit of people to study good and accurate cantonese.

That's awesome! I'm in HK now (living near Sai Kung) and am only here for 8 months. So I haven't tried to learn much more than a few words because I didn't want to trip up my Mandarin progress. I find trying to understand how to speak Cantonese from books to be the most painful thing and impossible thing ever. How can you learn to say a sound without hearing it? My good HK friend here has told me that the sentence structure is quite different between Cantonese and Mandarin. I can't imagine the disasters people would write if they directly took Mandarin sentences and assumed the structure was the same in Cantonese. Geh.

another easy way for translation error is because of the difference in spoken and written cantonese. just after i replied to u i went to MDBG to do up some mandarin flashcards, many times i put cantonese pinyin then mandarin pinyin with chinese characters on my flashcards without english. what i have found over and over again is that the pronounciation of written cantonese could lead someone to have alot of error and speak a bunch of cantonese writing and not know the spoken cantonese. like what i just looked at for the word 游泳 it shows the pinyin for the cantonese writing which is yau4wing6 but no one says that in spoken cantonese they say yau4soi2. these things have to be clarified and the real spoken cantonese has to be put out there so that people can effectively learn cantonese well. i don't want people to have to go through all the pain i did to learn cantonese. i am planning to start writing this book soon. thanks for hearing me out. the more i have been going over this cantonese pinyin online the more i want to get so much spoken cantonese out there that is not found in the popular books that aren't worth looking at for studying cantonese. The bright side is there seems to be more resources out there now than their was 3 yrs. ago.

umm.. how do i answer such a question... my wife says i am above upper intermediate but not advanced level yet. so i guess my level doesn't exist. ha. i love chinese people's honesty.

what part of HK are you in? i live pretty far from Cantonese land now so i only use the language to speak to my wife and baby for the most part, but very helpful in guessing mandarin words sometimes and also learning quickly mandarin vocabulary which's pronounciation is very similiar to cantonese, and understanding what people are saying in mandarin. it is best to advance far in one language than juggle two and not progress exceedingly fast, that's what i found best. if you want to be fluent in both go for the toughest one first, then studying mandarin will feel so much better. i am planning to write a book for people to study cantonese. it just irritates me the lack of good resources for studying cantonese. and seems that so many of the popular books to study cantonese have so many errors, i am no expert but assume the reason is because many of the books were written for people to learn mandarin or another language and then people directly translated all the characters over from mandarin or another language straight to cantonese. if u get what i mean. but it shouldn't be justified to do such a thing as i think it degrades the dialect. it is a different language you can't translate things and expect a dialect will line up with mandarin, there are some good resources just be careful to stay away from some popular ones. ok. i'll stop there. wish good studies to you. i plan to be back in HK in July for a couple weeks or so. miss Cantonese land. peace.

yes, good idea. I watch them every night. Jaron, may I ask your level in Cantonese? I really don't undersand much of it but I can pick out words.

Fabulous. I'll give it a go. Really hope it helps!

I think fluency in a situation where you're not able to speak the language day-to-day and hear it all around you is a much tougher challenge, comparatively. Still, it's everyone's end goal, so hopefully we'll get there eventually.

Thanks again.

my first language is english, though i don't think my english is very good.

your second question is kind of complicated for me; years ago i studied mandarin for maybe about 6 months commitedly then i put down mandarin to learn cantonese. now i have picked up mandarin and have been dedicated to studying the language now again for about 6 months or so. so i guess u could say i have studied mandarin for a year.

lots of people have a different standard for what they consider fluent. i was willing to consider myself fluent after many different local chinese people said i was fluent and many people asked me if i grew up in HK and after having used cantonese in my home as my main language of communication. i wouldn't have considered myself fluent if it wasn't for many chinese people who knew me over a span of years and said i was fluent in the language. everyone may have a different interpretation of fluency. those were just the things that led me to accept that i am fluent in cantonese. we know fluent means flowing, being able to speak with ease, flowing like a stream.

the citcom is pretty funny and possibly sometimes cheesy, cheesy funny. if u focus on almost nothing but listening for a season that will take you leaps and bounds. that' s what happened to me anyways. it works.

That's fantastic, thanks 忠Jaron! I'll check out that sitcom tonight if I can.

By the way, I hope you don't mind me asking, what is your first language? How long have you been studying mandarin, and how do you define "fluency"?

Thanks again!

wonderful testimony. thank you.

listening to citcoms, radio, and TV took me milestones in the listening arena with a chinese dialect. i noticed at one point listening had to be my main focus for a season then just spent maybe over 90 percent of my study time or most of all my study time listening. fluency came not long after that. so i would encourage you to listen to whatever u can and not just Cpod. i am now watching this citcom in mandarin:

http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/OiaLKFKsBXU/

helps alot in upping your listening level...

oh, and just one more thing.... :-)

when I said I listened to the dialogues in the car for about 9 months, I meant that I listened to the dialogue, then tried to repeat along with the dialogue at the same time out loud. The tendency is to speak a couple lines of dialogue out loud, then mumble a few more, then nothing on the last few. This is partly why you'l never be bored; you have to pay attention to this (in addition to driving at 70 mph/120kph). Oddly enough, speaking out loud helps your listening.

The cool thing is, once you've done this with a dialogue, you create a really cool stereo effect between you and the podcast. Plus, you've now burned the dialogue into your head, and you can repeat it back to Chinese people at key times, and delude them into thinking you're fluent! I do this when I feel mischievious (or when the teacher asks me to use a word she's taught me, and the word is one used in a cpod dialogue. They sound so amazed. then I start speaking other sentences, and my awkwardness returns....)

Worth a try, thanks pretzellogic! My listening is definitely my worst skill, it's pretty shocking. I'm going to download every studied dialogue I've got and put them into a playlist then put them on random in the car when I've done a lesson. Can't hurt I guess.

in that case, I would just suggest that you challenge yourself, and listen to new intermediate dialogues along with some of the old elementaries. You will definitely not be bored.

Another gentle suggestion would be to use some type of randomizing function to your playback in the car, so that you don't immediately know the topic for the intermediate you listen to. This makes you pay attention (or gets you lost so fast that you lose interest right away. If this happens, then look at the pdf so that you can get a sense of the words in the dialog, then start listening again). Obviously, the first few times you hear it, you won't understand much, but after about 10 listens, you'll start to get more and more.

Yea, I already study in the car, but I just listen to lessons, and then review the dialogue and listen to the audio review. The idea of listening to old ele dialogues on repeat doesn't thrill me, but I'll try anything, because my progress is like a snail at the moment.

I think I listened to about 50 elementary lessons in the car over 6-8 months. 1 hour commute one-way to work gave me plenty of time to do so. I got bored with it after about 9 months, when it looked like I wouldn't be going back to China for years and years. But not before I could recite plenty of lessons off the top of my head. Studying in the car definitely works.

Wow, really? I'm going to try this - I may not be hugely patient, but I'm perfectly happy to just listen to dialogues on repeat in the car if needs be.

Will let you know how I'm doing in a couple of months!

iaing,

That is quite a plan and I hope you come back and tell us more personal details.

Personally, I went through only the dialogues with the newbie and elementary lessons just fine. You only need the podcast at those levels for cultural aspects, language nuances, and for a guided pace.

That being said, patience is key with language learning. Don't try to do too much too fast. As boring as it may be, listening to the same dialogues over and over does have amazing results.

Hey iaing

Actually I agree that it is possible to communicate within 12 months at an elementary level .. I think that maybe three or four months is enough. I've met some people who get the language down way fast. And there are even easier ways of achieving this than the way you describe.

Hey, what is you own experience? Are you theorising here? Wishing it were true? Or reporting on the results of your method?

哇，你真厉害！

I think users simonpetterson and themainman posted at some point that they were spending multiple hours per day listening to dialogues, repeating them out loud, and progressing up the lesson chain. They seemed to have had the success you're indicating can be had with learning Chinese. It would be cool to hear what their metrics are for "fluent".

Hardcore indeed! I think it takes a very special person to keep up that kind of level of self-discipline, and boredom. Because listening to the same 300 dialogues for 4-5 hours a night for THREE MONTHs would indeed be quite tiresome.

That's not to say your method wouldn't work, I absolutely believe it would, and if you had the stamina, and more importantly the time, you could definitely achieve your goals that way.

The problem is that the majority of people listening to Chinesepod don't have 4-5 hours a night to spare just to learn chinese. I don't. Which is the type of person that Cpod is aimed at. Mandarin on your terms, remember?

But in any case, if you've followed your own method there and are indeed fluent by that method within a year, I absolutely applaud you. I wish I had your tenacity and time!

If you believe "important language" points are "only" found in the main podcasts then, undoubtedly, that is where you will find them.

I'll occasionally listen to a full podcast - particularly when the dialogue screams "important Chinese tidbits may be explained elsewhere". But it is more often than not forgotten the next day, and I find I've wasted 15 minutes that is much, much better spent listening to Mandarin-only dialogues.

If you don't listen to the main podcasts, how do you pick up on the important language points that are only found here?