Want to learn to speak Chinese?
If you're planning a trip to China, you might be thinking about learning to speak Chinese. If you are, you may be thinking that learning Chinese language is terribly difficult.
Yes, it’s true that learning how to speak Chinese very well takes time and patience and much practice, but learning Chinese language onversationally for your trip is not that hard. It is available. And it’s fun to learn.
You’ll want to learn Standard Mandarin Chinese if you’re going anywhere on Mainland China or Taiwan. In Hong Kong, they speak cantonese, but in Hong Kong exchanges they speak mandarin.
I was surprised to find that there were some things that came pretty easily to me in Chinese. First of all, the number of the method is very simple:ling, yi, er, san, si, wu, liu, qi, ba, jiu, shi – that is from zero to ten in chinese. Then, for the teen numbers, it’s shiyi, shier, shisan, etc. — so it’s ten plus the other number. That makes more sense than our teen numbers, especially “eleven” and “twelve,” although our thirteen through nineteen roughly follow the rule of adding “teen” to the back of our three-through-nine numbers, more or less.
Also, the days of the week work the same way. A week is “yixingqi.” Then, the days of the week are numbered, so it’s “xingqiyi” or Monday, the first day of the week; and “xingqier” or Tuesday, the second day of the week. Can you see how they use the numbers again to name the days of the week?
I found some Chinese words were easy to remember because they sound like the thing they’re describing. For example, “mao” means cat (referring to the sound a cat makes).
To learn conversational Mandarin Chinese, I have several CDs to listen to and practice with. I also got a workbook called “Chinese in 10 minutes a day.” It included lots of stickers that I could cut out and put around my house (and outside) to the Chinese vocabulary label materials. That helped a lot for learning everyday words such as “chair,” “table,” “bathroom,” “car,” “book,” etc.
Tags: china, chinese, learning, learning Chinese, learning Mandarin, putonghua
This entry was posted on Saturday, April 4th, 2009 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Reference and Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.