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?
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.