With the recent happenings in China like the Beijing Olympics Chinese language study has been a popular subject in American schools and as a new hobby for many. The number of pages about learning Mandarin Chinese is over two million and pages about Chinese in general is 438 million!
The sheer number of pages online about learning Chinese is an indicator of how many ways there are to learn this language but there are some tricks that apply to this language as well as many others.
Five Tips for Learning Chinese
- Study sentence and language patterns for 15-20 minutes a day. This is effective because you are not overloading your brain with large amounts of information at one time. Breaking lessons down into shorter time slots can also make it easier to focus on certain parts of a language.
- Make flash cards and review them often. While this is an option that everyone should try it is not necessarily the most effective way for everyone to learn but this option works especially well if you remember things by writing them down.
- Practice reading out loud with exaggerated tones. This helps you memorize the way the tones sound and feel as well as helping to make them easy to speed up to normal speech levels.
- Practice writing new characters at least ten times. Chinese is unique not only in its sound but also in the characters in which it is written this is another reason Western students find it hard to learn. Making associations between characters also helps because it makes you break down the structure of the characters rather than trying to memorize them whole.
- Watch Chinese films/listen to Chinese music. Listening to other people talk is a big part of the way we learn to speak our first language as we are growing up so it makes sense to find as many ways to expose yourself to this sort of experience when learning the second. Sites like YesAsia and Amazon can help in your search for Chinese media in Cantonese and Mandarin. [Sources: Mrs. Yu's Chinese Class, Herrick's Union Free School District/Personal experience]
Using the Internet to Study Chinese
The internet is a great resource for learning many different languages and Chinese is no exception. Not only can you buy Chinese media online but many free resources are available like Mandarin Radio and ChinesePod which are both on iTunes. Doing a Google search for Chinese or Mandarin Chinese will also give you some great resources including newspaper articles about Chinese culture which is invaluable for the savvy traveler.
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