best way for a beginner to learn Chinese

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:YouTube Chinese cartoons and teen dramas. Also Netflix

This + music

native speaker here and TBH sometimes when people are singing Chinese I cannot understand them. Chinese is a tonal language and the tones get really messed up when you're trying to keep a tune

[Anonymous]

Hope Chinese school has several campuses in the DC Metro area. It's aimed at heritage speakers but they usually have a class that is aimed at students like your daughter. I think they are all online now. It's dirt cheap and worth a look.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I've been learning Chinese for a few years. I'm not bragging when I say that in living in multiple countries and knowing many expats going in all different directions, I have never met anyone who has a better accent in foreign languages. In three different European countries I lived for just a couple years each, I was frequently mistaken for a native speaker of those languages despite only learning the language briefly.

I have now been told by several people that I pronounce Chinese *almost* well enough to be considered native. But this was a struggle. With Chinese, I tried to use rosetta stone, other online courses, and books that I ordered. I listened to the speakers over and over, and practiced speaking for months. Then, I visited Singapore and tried to speak some Chinese to my colleague, and he was like "dude what are you saying?" Apparently pronunciation is much more subtle, and a lot of it is because of the tones (but there are some tough sounds for a lot of speakers - q, x, r, c). So, I got an online tutor. She went over speaking drills and sounds over and over and over. It is fairly common knowledge online that unlike french, spanish, german, or other basic European languages, Chinese is really something not advisable to learn from a book or online course. You need a live person there telling you how you're butchering the language in real time in order to really improve.

I'm impressed! Any tips on how you were able to learn how to pronounce?

In cognitive psychology there is a concept of a phoneme space, sounds and combinations of sounds that some brains are wired to hear and others are not. It's thought that we all begin life with somewhat of an infinite capacity for hearing sounds but that as we learn to process the language around us, our brains specialize in hearing those distinct sounds and the ability to add new and unique sounds to the space is more difficult as time passes. There is some research suggesting that people who are more musically inclined and better at hearing musical tones and reproducing them are also better at hearing sounds in languages and reproducing them. The chinese phonemes are very different from the western european phonemes. Unfortunately you're either born and raised with it or you aren't. I'm not sure that you can train to hear new phonemes as an adult. For example, I don't think my mother literally can here the "ch" sound as they pronounce it in the Czech language. She literally thinks she is hearing a "k" no matter how many hundreds of times we've tried to explain it and practice with her. Multiply this by 100 for Chinese.