When I tell people that I’m studying Mandarin Chinese, their first reaction tends to be incredulity. Generally they want to know what on earth possessed me to study such an ‘obscure’ language. Let’s deal with that myth right away. Far from being obscure, Mandarin is in fact the most widely spoken language in the world (there are about two Mandarin speakers for every one of English). So, in the great scale of things, French, German and Italian could be regarded as rather more ‘obscure’ than Chinese! However, if my experience is anything to go by, French, German and Italian are also a good deal easier than Chinese for an English speaker to learn (see our guide to learning languages online).
The Chinese Outpost :: bitwise recommended site
for more information
on this award, see HERE |
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If you are interested in learning Chinese, The Chinese Outpost is a good place to start
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For all their differences of grammar and vocabulary, the European languages have a great deal in common. They use the same alphabet, they have a similar grammar with the same range of tenses and similar types of conjugation. Frequently, they even have similar words. If you know the word ‘cat’ in English, it won’t be too difficult to learn ‘chat’ in French or ‘cath’ in Welsh. But in Chinese, everything is unfamiliar.
Chinese Puzzles
The good news is that Chinese has a very simple grammar. It doesn’t have conjugated verbs, its nouns don’t have genders and it doesn’t have tenses. When you want to express a future or past time you often only need to add a special ‘time word’ to a sentence. The bad news is that the writing system is fantastically complicated. There are about 50,000 different characters, many of which are extraordinarily difficult to write. While only the most erudite Chinese person is likely to recognise all the characters, you will need to be able to read and write several thousand in order to make sense of a newspaper or book.
To add to the complication, mainland China uses a ‘simplified’ form, of many characters which differ from the ‘traditional’ forms used in Taiwan and elsewhere. Moreover, unlike the Western alphabet, the characters rarely contain much information on their sounds. This means that all too often you can’t look at an unfamiliar word and guess either its sound or its meaning. You have to learn the script, meaning and sound of each character one by one.
The sounds of the language present their own problems. Many of the consonants and vowels have no exact counterpart in English. Worse still, their meanings change according to the tone of voice in which you say them. There are five tones in Mandarin (rising, descending, descending-plus-rising, high and neutral tones) and if you say something in the wrong tone, it may be impossible for a native speaker to understand you. There are also phonetic versions of the Chinese language written using the Western alphabet. The most popular phonetic system is called Pinyin and the learner will inevitably need to master this too.
First Words
To ease myself into the study of Chinese, I started by looking for help on the Internet. There are numerous web sites which teach you words and phrases by way of a gentle introduction to Chinese. However, after whiling away a few hours mechanically repeating the Mandarin for “dog”, “giraffe” and “hare” on The Learning Chinese Site, I started to feel that I really needed to get a firm grasp of the fundamentals of the language.
I eventually discovered The Chinese Outpost which provides a simple introduction to Mandarin pronunciation, grammar and characters. This was just what I needed. If you have even the vaguest curiosity about the Chinese language (why for, example, is Hong Kong called ‘Hong Kong’ in Hong Kong but Xiang Gang in mainland China even though it is written the same in both places?) then this is the place to go.
When looking for help with your chosen language, you will find it useful to have a good ‘index’ site containing links to other related sites. The best way to find an index site is to search for appropriate keywords on Google. For example, I entered “learn Chinese Mandarin” and, after visiting a few of the sites located by Google, I discovered an excellent link index at Learning Chinese Online (link to mirror site - may be faster).
One thing every Chinese learner needs is a good dictionary. Luckily one of the best is available online. Zhongwen.com contains the complete text of the best selling book, ‘Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary’. You can search for an English word and it will displays the translation in Chinese characters. To view the complete dictionary entry you just click the character. This really is an invaluable source for the student of Chinese.
Online Courses
If you are looking for a more complete course, you may want to try out the online material from Rutgers University. This has a large number of graded lessons with sample dialogues in English, Pinyin, Simplified and Traditional Chinese. Each lesson comes with grammar notes, vocabulary and a recording of the dialogue.
In principle, this material is intended to complement the courses taught by the University. In practice, it provides an excellent supplement to a ‘learn at home’ course. As with most American University courses, it probably assumes that you have access to the text of ‘Practical Chinese Reader’ (see below). Good as it is, the Rutgers course would be more useful to self learners if it provided a more detailed course guide which explained the ‘required texts’. The online lessons are so detailed that they almost constitute a standalone tutorial. However, unless you have access to a Chinese teacher, I would recommend that these lessons be used in conjunction with a book aimed specifically at the home learner.
A gentler, but much less thorough, introduction to Chinese can be found at Tianwen Xie’s ‘Conversational Mandarin Online’. This comprises fifteen lessons with recorded dialogues transcribed into English, Pinyin and traditional Chinese characters. If fluency is you goal, these lessons won’t take you very far. However, if you just want to try out some Chinese to see if it appeals to you, this is the perfect introduction.
Update (November 2011) GraspChinese.com is a new site that offer ten free lessons for beginners and a range of subscriptions to gain access to a growing set of more advanced multimedia lessons. GraspChinese claims to offer "An Immersion Experience" in which you will learn interesting facts about Chinese culture while you learn the language.
Learning Chinese Characters
Other useful sites includes Ocrat which has everything from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice translated into Chinese to a set of animated Chinese characters (mostly the simplified forms) which show you how to write the characters one stroke at a time. Online Chinese Tools also provides help with writing characters and has a Java Flashcard applet to help test your recognition of sets of characters. One of the best online animated character tools can be found at the USC’s Chinese Language Program. This displays large, smoothly animated characters which are introduced in graded lessons.
Chinese Flashcards - a great way to learn to read Chinese characters
On the other hand, if it’s Flashcards you are after, I strongly recommend that you download a copy of Eric Youngdale’s excellent Chinese Flashcards program from Andante.org. Versions of this program are available for both Windows and the Palm Pilot. As with so many Internet Chinese resources, this program is aimed principally at students of the Practical Chinese Reader (PCR) course as the flashcards are divided up into characters from each of the PCR lessons. It will, however, be useful for students of other course too. It can optionally displays traditional and simplified characters in addition to Pinyin as long as the appropriate character set is available on your computer. Microsoft Windows has quite extensive support for Chinese characters though you may need to install additional software to take advantage of this (see Chinese Characters On Windows).
Getting Serious…
If you decide to focus your study around the Practical Chinese Reader course you will be spoilt for choice. In addition to the resources already mentioned, the California State University has a superb PCR E-Book site. Based around the blue-cover traditional character version, this contains supplementary material for eighteen of the thirty chapters of volume one of the course. There are study guides, explanations, tests and recordings. There are also animated characters to show the correct stroke order and character practice sheets to download. These sheets are divided into grids with the correct form of the character shown in one square and empty squares marked out beneath for the student to copy the character repeatedly. Audio and video files for each chapter are grouped together.
For students of the simplified version of PCR (the green books), there are vocabulary lists for books one and two at Ktmatu.com. There are additional vocabulary-building activities at California State University.
CyberChinese can help to improve your Chinese writing skills
Liwin’s CyberChinese Calligraphy site provides perhaps the best animated character samples on the Internet. The stroke order for the characters in book one of PCR is shown for both the simplified and traditional form. And if all that is still not enough, the PCR Supplementary Links page can guide you towards more sites with audio, video, character practice and vocabulary based around the PCR text books.
Practical Chinese Reader
The green edition of PCR uses simplified characters
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The blue edition of PCR uses traditional characters |
Probably the most widely supported Chinese course on the Internet is a series of books called Practical Chinese Reader (PCR). Although not specifically intended to be used for self-study, this course is, in my view, better than some other courses which are aimed at the home learner.
Vocabulary is introduced fairly slowly and each new point of grammar is thoroughly explained. Given the huge amount of supplementary material available for PCR on the Internet, this is definitely the course I would recommend for the serious student. The audio and video files available online, at the sites mentioned above, are a valuable addition. It would be almost impossible to learn Chinese pronunciation from a book alone. Nevertheless, unless you have access to a Chinese teacher, I would also suggest that you should invest in the optional cassette tapes for the course.
Just to confuse matters, there are two separate editions of PCR. The original edition, with green covers, was published in Beijing. It teaches the simplified characters which are used in the People’s Republic of China. The same lessons have also been released in a Traditional Character edition by the Cheng and Tsui Company in the USA. This edition has a blue cover. The text and the lessons in both editions are almost identical though the blue edition is printed in a larger format on better quality paper. On the other hand, the green edition also contains tables showing the stroke order of each character. In the blue edition, character stroke orders are shown in a supplemental book which must be bought separately.
Which edition you choose, largely depends on which type of Chinese character you wish to learn. By far the largest number of Chinese people (in the People’s Republic) now write the simplified characters. The traditional characters are, however, still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong - though most of the people in Hong Kong speak Cantonese rather than Mandarin. It is a curiosity of the Chinese language that the written characters can be understood by speakers of dramatically different dialects such as Mandarin and Cantonese, while the spoken language of one dialect may be incomprehensible to the speaker of another dialect.
But while simplified characters may now be the most widely used, you should also remember that many older books will be written in traditional characters. Moreover, some Chinese communities ‘abroad’ (in America and Britain, for example) use traditional characters. Many academic courses in the USA favour traditional characters. For these reasons, some students prefer to learn both the simplified and traditional characters simultaneously. Unfortunately, to do this would require that you buy both versions of PCR. Alternatively, you could study the other character set using the Internet resources mentioned earlier.
Just to confuse matters, there is also a course called “New Practical Chinese Reader” which contains seventy lessons spread over six volumes. Reputedly these texts are more up to date than the original PCR and there is also a support CD ROM available. However, I have found very little supplementary support for this course on the Internet.
Chinese Characters On Windows
Modern versions of Windows support a large number of foreign languages - even those such as Chinese and Japanese which use non-Western character sets. In order to be able both to display and enter Chinese characters, you need to install the fonts and an appropriate Input Method Editor. With Windows XP, these will be supplied on your installation disk. You can also download an IME for earlier versions of Windows such as Windows 95, 98 and ME, from the Microsoft Web site.
Here the Chinese language bar is selected (the 'CH' in the taskbar) and I am entering Pinyin in order to be able to pick a matching Chinese character from a list
Once an IME is installed, you will be able to view Chinese characters in web pages. If the characters do not display, it may sometimes be necessary to select an appropriate encoding. To do this, right-click the page and select Encoding from the pop-up menu. Then select either Chinese Simplified or Chinese Traditional (assuming you’ve installed the fonts for both variants). The page should then display Chinese characters. To enter characters into your word processor, you need to switch to the Chinese IME. You should by now have a ‘language bar’ installed to the right of the Windows task bar. The letters ‘EN’ show that the current language is English. You can click this bar and select ‘Chinese’ from the menu. You may also be able to switch between languages by pressing hot-keys such as CONTROL-SPACE. These hotkeys can be selected by right clicking the language bar and selecting Settings, then Key Settings. When Chinese is activated, ‘CH’ will be displayed in the language bar. Now, in your word processor, you can enter Pinyin and this will be automatically translated into Chinese characters.
See also our guide to learning languages on the Internet
June 2005 |
LEARN CHINESE ONLINE