Chinese Learners and Expat Resources

Text boxes

I use these to see Chinese characters augmented. Sometimes it is just easier to access a website than to launch an editor and change the font size.

How to learn Chinese

Most books are bad

Initially I expected to find adapted resources for Chinese learners, but it turned out, that the they use the same books, the same lesson by lesson approach in class, as I knew for any other foreign language. But there is one big difference: Chinese characters.

All language books I know have the following problems:

• By reading, you fall into the trap of reading your native sounds in foreign words. That is one source for ugly accents. – If you hear only instead, no wrong associations based on writing can occur.
• No repetition scheme. – You have to create your own flash cards or repetition lists.
• Mostly anti-repetition! – Instead of putting some infrequent words on the vocabulary list again in later lessons, they assume the reader to learn linearly like a hard disk.
• Bad and boring dialogs (some books do it better). – E.g. Lesson 2: I’m a doctor, I’m a lawyer, I’m a taxi driver, a nurse, teacher, student, ... Who needs to say “taxi driver”?? Useless and boring!

• Introduction of Chinese Characters with reading and writing instructions close to zero. (The five/six/seven standard stroke order rules you can find everywhere are plain crap.) – For a proper introduction into characters, see below.
• Presenting the characters of the words in the vocabulary just learned. This leads all the time to multi-character words with characters you don’t know. Instead of learning one easy character with some common meanings and usage, you’re forced to learn a complicated character chain with only one overall meaning! Many set phrases like “How do you do?” are complicated. Don’t learn them first! – Instead, once you know “fire” and “vehicle” it is almost automatic to remember that both together mean “train”.

Non-classroom books exist though, which concentrate on some deficits. But I still don’t know books which include a decent repetition pattern. Maybe the conclusion is: don’t study with books.

Oral first

My advice: learn listening and speaking fist, for all languages.

Start with Pimsleur’s audio program. It is audio only (mp3 or CD, no books) and really entertaining. Look at pimsleur.com just to check out what they have (for Mandarin it’s three levels of 30 lessons, each around 28min). Then get these second hand, as otherwise they are just too expensive.

Pimsleur starts from zero, and if you do five lessons a week (nobody I know did it that fast) you have 4-5 months learning material. Expect 6-9 months, though.

Another audio approach is coming from the free FSI-Language courses. As an alternative to downloading everything file-by-file I provide here two zip archives:

• Overview sheet, Resource Module and Module 1-3
• Module 4-9 and Optional Modules

The FSI course is not audio only, but I use it as such. The audio quality is sometimes a little poor. The original tapes are form the 60’s. The FSI is more concise than the Pimsleur, but less entertaining. Especially the drill tapes can be really boring. The so called comprehension tapes are good though, maybe just right for someone who finished the Pimsleur, because they may answer some questions which you may have pending.

For my taste, I really would like to encourage everyone interested in Chinese to start with speaking and listening (Pimsleur and maybe FSI). You may start studying characters as well, but do this independent of what you learned to speak. There will come a time, of course, where character knowledge and spoken abilities converge.

Characters later

Start characters as late as you wish, but not later. Knowing meaning, sound and usage beforehand is a big aid for remembering. Many Chinese characters have sound components and are way easier to learn once you got some basic oral Chinese knowledge.

As a great introduction, read Wikipedia articles: Simplified/Traditional Characters, why did they split, when, where; how is the situation in PRC, Taiwan, overseas; actually, what means RPC, ROC, SAR. How do Characters relate to Mandarin and other Chinese languages. How is the character situation in Korea, Japan, China and Vietnam. CJK(V) in computers, encodings, Unicode, Unihan unification, Big5, GB23xxx, number of characters in Unicode, outside, common characters, uncommon. Count of frequent characters, categorizing, radicals – for traditional and simplified, differences, radical meaning/evolution/numbers/frequency, character components, stroke order, stroke types, grouping of stroke types, character input, by sound, by stroke, by structure, character input in non-Chinese languages, mobile phone/device character input. Romanizations, types, official use, in which region, why is the Qing Hua university written Tsing Hua? Different fonts for Chinese characters, writing styles, printing styles, writing variations, serifs on characters and relation to stroke types. Invention of the round “zero” character, Hangul, numbers in banking system...

Character learning tools

See Panki Chinese!

Instead, I recommend to start with easy single characters, the composition of characters, character types and radical meanings. This will be a great help to create personal mnemonics for remembering more complex characters and compound words (several characters).

... (to be completed)

De, de, de made easy

A little grammar for the intermediate learner:

1. ___ 的 noun
2. verb 得 ___
3. ___ 得／地 verb

Only the third case is complicated. Use 得 for degree/result (得 is always used for degree(/result), even in case 2) after an adjective. Use 地 after an adverb (only 地 can be used in any adverbial context).

Language maps

The best maps I found on the Internet, though already 20 years old.

• Main page for all maps
• Whole China in high resolution
• Details of the south eastern parts of China in high resolution

Language and dialect resources

• Glossika main page with information on a lot of different languages
• Glossika China FAQ with details about languages and dialects in China
• To make sure what is spoken at any destination look up the corresponding city in this dialect listing
• Factor of intelligibility of the Mandarin dialects and between Mandarin and other Chinese languages. (Remember English and German have 60% lexical similarity! See FAQ.)

Chinese character resources

• WWWJDIC main page (Japanese Kanji)
• Look up a Kanji on WWWJDIC and you may find valuable stroke order information Once looked up a character, don't forget to go to Rick Harbaugh's Chinese Character Links, where you will find another stroke order diagram
• Get the pinyin reading from the Unicode Unihan Database
• More SODs (Stroke Oder Diagrams) here
• English-Chinese dictionary with SODs and character decomposition(!) some are old or wrong, most are missing...
• Stroke order test -- I don’t know anyone (Chinese or not) who does these simple characters all right:
  刀九万龙化虎火发悄忣怀世臣医水壮北匕非韭压成力老考七〇为办乃及里单国黑重尸官叚追贯
• Font test characters: these unicode unified characters are prone to changes in different fonts:
  使与海並丰免主忘全八公具真今再你像前冒凡判包及唐受均将菜房所牙瓜的益礼为為起近