Like a lot of us here, I’m trying to learn Mandarin Chinese. I’ve been casually doing apps for a while now (Duolingo sucks, HelloChinese seems better, language exchanges are fun but scary) but I recognize some serious limitations to my methods. My reading and typing is getting better, as is my listening, but I still suck at speaking and tones are still hard to remember sometimes. This seems directly related to my learning methods - lotsa reading and listening exercises mostly, not as much talking. If I want to actually be able to speak this language, I’m going to need some more varied education I think.
My first thought was to check the local community college - we have a large Chinese population here so the classes are probably good, but the scheduling doesn’t work well with my boring adult 9-5. I do well in a classroom environment though. One-on-one tutoring might not be a bad option, but I’d prefer to go through the embarrassment of learning a new language as a group, you know?
Anyone else in the same boat? What do you use to learn?
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Hellotalk is full of Chinese folks who will talk with you.
Yeah I’m on Hellotalk and I’ve had some pretty good conversations, but I’m in a weird spot where I feel like I should have more practice before bogging other people down with my baby talk.
App is great for just talking to Chinese people about stuff though, with the built-in translation tools.
You might be projecting a bit there. Most of the people who get involved with those communities are looking to help people learn, not to have interesting conversations with people who already speak their language. There’s plenty of opportunities for that.
Second, consider giving back (or paying it forward) by spending your own time helping people practice English as a second language. I did that while learning Spanish, and it was both helpful and rewarding. It’s been a few years (like 10) so I’m completely out of practice, but I got pretty close to being conversational enough that I could at least have a discussion about basic topics and be understood.
I studied Chinese at a weekend day school that was normally to teach the language to kids of Chinese people living in the States. They had an adults class that was mostly older 白人 (I was in highschool, this was forever ago lol). It was pretty cool, and they hooked us up with free books on Chinese culture and history from the Chinese government. I definitely want to return to something similar when I have the time for it.
There are plenty of one-to-one options online if you choose to go that route. Group lessons might not be ideal for you if your schedule isn’t very flexible.
iTalki is quite popular where I live. I use Preply, and although I do have issues with how their system forces tutors to give an unpaid trial lesson where 100% of the fees go to the company, I’ve been happy with it so far.
Honestly being able to listen and read/write is probably harder than speaking so you’re on the right track.
I’m a native speaker so I can’t give you tested advice and this may be counterintuitive but maybe stop using PinYin/Bopomofo? No Phonetic writing system is going to be 100% accurate to actual pronunciation and this is true for Pinyin as well.
For example Mandarin technically has a “neutral tone” for certain characters in specific phrases that isn’t notated in Pinyin. https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/輕聲
https://baike.baidu.com/item/轻声/5667261 (sorry couldn’t find an English article on this)
Nor is Er-ification notated
https://baike.baidu.com/item/儿化音?timestamp=1702525364647&fromModule=search_box
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhua
For example, 一點兒 will be notated as “yìdiǎner” in pinyin but will be pronounced something like “yidiar”. In contrast 海爾 is notated as "hai’er"in Pinyin and does not go through erification. There’s probably more stuff like this that I won’t notice as a native speaker and even more stuff that’s probably too subtle for there to be linguistics articles about.
So it might be more natural and inuitive to memorize the actual sound instead of the Pinyin notation. Watch TV shows with subtitles on, when you look up a character or phrase there will usually be a pronounciation button that will allow you to hear recordings. You also don’t strictly need to know PinYin to type. There’s stuff like 五筆, 倉頡 and Handwriting Recognition.
