Andrew Learns Mandarin Chinese: Part 1 (Introduction)

Hello everyone, I hope you are having a great day!

I'm starting this blog "Andrew Learns Chinese" where I'll be showing you my process of learning the language. I think I should first give you some background on my experience with the language.

Taken from:

I started learning chinese when I was in 3rd grade because the school attended decided to include chinese classes as part of the weekly schedule, I was nine years old, and I had chinese classes from 3rd until 6th grade because my parents decided to take me to another school.

During the time I learned chinese I did pretty well. My teachers were great, they were very patient, very focused on the details, they made us learn songs in the language, etc., the only detail was that very few people were interested in the class even though the school director was putting a lot of emphasis in how learning the language would give us a better future with better paying jobs and great job offers no matter the job you ended up in and that the chinese language was starting to be very important to learn because of the world power and influence that China was starting to get.

Anyway, I did my best to at least pass the class, I wasn't interested in learning the language and I really didn't understand much after the three years that I studied it. But two months ago I started to get really into learning languages, I even put myself a new life goal which is:

Be able to speak and write in 10 different languages (German, Mandarin Chinese, Italian, French, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, English and Spanish).

The last two I already accomplished per se, but that goals means that during my lifetime I want to be able to speak and write in another 8 LANGUAGES.

So, I already know English, Spanish and currently I'm learning French, Mandarin Chinese, and German, and I wanted to start this new blog series where I share with you my journey learning these languages, in this post in specific (you guessed it) chinese.

Breaking down Chinese, it is necessary for you to be able to speak and write it to learn:

The writing system
The phonetic system

They both are really different from what we are used to use in english and/or spanish. For example, in chinese you don't write letters that represent the sounds you are supposed to say or pronounce, in chinese you read a character that represents an object or an idea (pictograph) and you have to remember the way of pronouncing that word. The thing is that in chinese there are FIVE different accents and you have to pronounce the word with the correct accent because if you don't you can end up saying "horse" instead of "mom" for example.

That is what makes chinese look difficult, but the thing is that it really isn't that difficult. It is more like a language were you need more attention to the little details and in most occasions it'll be necessary to have perfect pronunciation.

http://www.lightinchina.org/?p=1694

But that makes it even easier since chinese is a monosyllabic language so you don't have to learn large words like "Honorificabilitudinitatibus". NO. You'll learn words like "mà", "zàijiàn" (in pinyin) etc. with its distinct characters.

The following video is me memorizing how to write some simple chinese characters (maybe you can do it like me as well):

My process for learning chinese characters is the following:

1. I enter the page: https://www.learnchineseez.com/read-write/traditional/
2. I click on a character that I'm interested in learning.
3. I learn the order of the strokes by repeating it throughout a whole page.
4. Repeat.

It has been really helpful and a very interesting detail that is written on the home page which caught my attention is the fact that with only learning 1,000 chinese characters you are able to read, write and understand 90% of the chinese written communication. That means you would be able to chat with a chinese person for example.

The pronunciation part isn't the best on that page, but there is this youtube playlist that will help you with that: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbAdsbBBI1D7wj4UkcGYSmx_RPBT9f0L3
And there is also this app that has helped a lot with learning the language as well, it is called "Lingodeer" it's totally free and a great app to learn languages in general.

And that would be all for today. Thanks for reading, I hope you have a really good day.

References:
To read and write Chinese: https://www.learnchineseez.com/read-write/traditional/
To learn to pronounce chinese characters: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbAdsbBBI1D7wj4UkcGYSmx_RPBT9f0L3
To learn chinese in general: https://www.lingodeer.com/
Images: http://www.lightinchina.org/?p=1694