Not really knowing anything about the Mandarin language and alphabet, or about Chinese culture and context; knowing where to start was tough. Complicated obviously (in my opinion) by the fact that Mandarin doesn’t use the Latin alphabet. I’m not a language learning pro either, so should I be starting with the alphabet, with pronunciation? Or with vocabulary and writing characters? Should I buy a book, an audio course, find a tutor? This was going to be an ongoing project, I needed to be organised – and not necessarily by following someone else’s tried and tested method, this was also going to be about me finding the *best* way for me to learn.
I decided the first thing I needed to know, was to find out what I didn’t know. It just so happens that when it comes to Chinese – apparently, you could fill a library of volumes with that.
First up was Google. I’m a scientist at heart, I like definitive answers. So wading through the varied articles that are thrown up under ‘Learning Mandarin’ was quite stressful. Lots of people telling me I could be “fluent in three months” or “speak in thirty days or your money back”. Quite honestly I felt like I wanted someone to hand me a process map – one that showed me the foolproof method for going from English to Mandarin.
The danger for me was always going to be spending too much time in the research phase and never actually moving to the doing part! (I do so love to plan!)
After a day of reading online and trying to locate myself some resources to build my own learning plan, these are the things I learned, discovered and decided.
1. I stumbled on an interview with a chap called Dan – who writes a language and culture blog called Chinese-Breeze his opening line in the interview:
“If you spend too much time worrying about whether you will ever reach fluency, firstly, that is time you will not be spending injecting Chinese into your brain, but secondly, and most importantly, it will become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy – you won’t enjoy the process, will associate Chinese with stress and essentially never become fluent.”
this was timely advice for me, and I’ve bookmarked Dan’s site as I think it will really help me in future (I’m not digging too deep into other people’s journies yet, I wanted to focus on exploring options that would work best for me) – but do read the interview on Lingoholic, it has some excellent start up tips.
[this is the point when I realised that there were some great resources in form of online blogs, written by people not to dissimilar from me – create a bookmarks folder and log all the resources you find in organised categories]
2. After reading a few extracts of articles I came across lots of people talking about ‘Chinese Tones’ – how difficult it made learning the language and that it was essential to master them.
I could already see that when reading Chinese Characters – of which I have NO idea about, how the heck was I supposed to turn what is essentially (at the moment, to me) a scribble, into a correctly pronounced sound?! I did stop breathing for a while here.
Fortunately I already knew about Pinyin from a news article I read, it had a discussion about how some Chinese organisations felt that the Chinese Characters were holding back it’s economy because of the apparent communication difficulties it creates. Had I taken my own advice (above) I would have bookmarked the article and shared it with you here!
Pinyin is the official system used to transcribe the pronunciation of Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet. It was also the shining light in my hopes of being able to pronounce anything in Mandarin – pinyin has a system of marking the ‘tones’ of which I was so afraid. But still, there were going to be a lot of new sounds, and I read something about ‘intials’ and ‘finals’ and looked away before I got scared.
Don’t let tones scare you. I suggest you quickly jump into a detailed explanation – I watched this YouTube video and found it extremely helpful.
[I now knew that YouTube was going to be a great resource for me too]
3. I wanted a way to track my learning, and make sure I was progressing. Lots of language sites mentioned Anki – this is a piece of SRS software which I had never even heard of. In fact, in this context I had no idea what SRS stood for. The tip – be prepared to log your learning and have a system in place to review it. I haven’t got started with Anki yet; but I’ll let you know how I get on!
-Don’t concentrate on the mammoth task ahead, focus on small and measurable bits of progress.
-Try not to get ‘stuck in the research phase’ to delay getting started.
-Bookmark and follow interesting blogs, and consider subscribing to a YouTube tutorial
-Get a notebook – use it
The Mandarin Mystery 