Today I spent all of my time (much to my girlfriends distress) researching and collecting information for a massive blogpost (or three) about the Beijing Olympics last year. Saturday is the anniversary of the opening ceremony and in its honour I am making a super blog post about it. So I apologise to myself and any of you that were expecting something exciting about what I had learnt today.... But what I did manage to put together quickly for you is the opposite of yesterday's phrase 很大 hěn dà.

Ok so today as promised I said I would place here what I felt I had learnt through my Mandarin studying today.

I came across a phrase in Rosetta Stone that I hadn't before and had to google to understand it.

很大 (hěn dà)
quite big

This would be used to describe the size of something after you had said the item, for example;

这个鸟蛋很大
zhè gè niǎo dàn hěn dà
This egg is quite big.

鸟 (niǎo) actually means bird (something else I have just found out. :). So I'm not sure if this is right in this context. However it does hope to illustrate the point.

Let us try another one, just so you get the point;

这个苹果很大
zhè gè píngguǒ hěn dà
This apple is quite big.

But this sentence should actually of course be:

这个苹果核很大
zhè gè píngguǒhé hěn dà
This applecore is quite big.

Hope you ejoyed my discovery of the phrase: Quite Big. 很大 hěn dà.



Charlie.




Photo Source:
Flickr

My friend Gabriel, over at learnchinesetoday.info has written a guest post based about histoical figure Qin Shi Huang and his influence on the Chinese Language.

As some of you may know, the official title of 'emperor' was first used by Qin Shi Huang several hundred years before Christ. At the end of the 7 warring states period, the Qin state had conquered most of the other states and unified China properly.

Historically speaking, it was true that under the leadership of Qin Shi Huang, life was harsh and difficult. Many historians viewed him as a dictator who ruled across the land with an iron hand.
Untold numbers died working to build the Great Wall of China.

And yet paradoxically, it was Qin Shi Huang who had help create a lasting legacy in Chinese history. He had played a huge role in maintaining the stability and longevity of Chinese culture.

What did he contribute? Well, before the Qin dynasty, the 7 different states each had their own languages, rules and customs. After unification, Qin Shi Huang went about creating one common language. Everyone had to read and write the same Chinese characters.

This seemingly simple but profound change in standardizing the Chinese language would bind and enable the Chinese people to maintain their identity and culture for thousands of years to come.

If he had not done so, China might have developed differently. The Chinese people might have different languages and writing not unlike Europe (the French, British, etc.)

There were many more changes Qin Shi Huang made that help shaped the future course of Chinese imperial system, but suffice to say, Qin Shi Huang was not merely known as just a brutal dictator.

So the next time you wish to learn Chinese, think back to this historical figure who had contributed much to this ancient language.

I have been trying out several different ways of learning Mandarin as I set upon this language-learning journey. There is a multitude of different ways you can go about learning any language, and it can be overwhelming.

The language is of course overwhelming itself. No alphabet, 56,000+ characters, it looks wildly different from western languages and over a billion people speak it as their first language. The amount of people you can then speak to, after learning increases almost 200% from English to Mandarin. By being able to speak both of course, you are able in theory to speak to almost two billion people. A third of the world’s population.

Mandarin is also now the third most spoken language in the US, and as the Chinese economy is growing, it makes business sense to start to be able to converse in Chinese Mandarin. It makes sense to start learning Mandarin in terms of numbers of people and economics.

Yet of those reasons alone will not give you either the confidence or the determination to learn something so radically different. In my opinion, you have to want to learn Mandarin and have passion for the culture surrounding the language. The more you want to understand and open yourself up to the culture and language simultaneously the more you will take in.

Here, I wanted to just put a couple of links to software and books that I personally feel are good, as well as other resources, and ideas that could help you learn Mandarin. Nothing beats hard work and enthusiasm when learning a new language though.

1. From books:
   
   There are so many different books that usually come with accompanying audio series for language learning, I could not even try to list them all. The ones I have personally found useful are:
   
   Chinese for Dummies
   Complete Mandarin Chinese Book/CD Pack
   
   I also purchased a book that teaches to write characters, although in my naivety I bought the traditional characters guide, whilst most people that use Mandarin use the simplified characters. It seems that mainly those in Taiwan and Hong Kong use the traditional Chinese characters.
   
   
2. Podcasts:
   
   I have been made aware of some podcast series that help you learn Mandarin, whilst I personally do not use them. They are out there and no doubt help conversational Mandarin, whilst furthering the development of hearing the language day to day. The ease of being able to slip on headphones at work, or on the way to and from work, or even in the evening as you are relaxing, is very useful.
   
   The downside to this is as far as I can tell most podcasts tend to cost 99p per lesson, and they do not always cover as much as you would like.
   
   
3. Rosetta Stone
   
   Personally I seem to get on with Rosetta stone well for learning new vocab and repeating the vocab in new ways that reinforces the learning. It is based around a picture system, where you get words and the pictures together and no there is no English spoken or written. I have found that the lack of explanation sometimes causes confusion (though does make you actively learn by trial and error which is engaging and therefore good) especially when first introducing negatives and possessive elements of the language. Otherwise though it is a strong software package which I thoroughly recommend.
   
   Rosetta Stone: Chinese (Mandarin) Level 1, 2 and 3 Set (Mac/PC CD)
   
   
4. Online Mandarin / Mango Languages
   
   
There is a plethora of upstarts and a myriad of compaies that offer Mandarin courses in one way or another. Here I would like to share a couple of the gems I have found and utilised.

One of the other benefits to having twitter is being able to find out about all the other resources out there. I was lucky enough to talk to the moderator of MangoLanguages, and their system is similar in the repetition to that of Rosetta Stone, but without the pictorial element, which means that everything you learn is directly translated from English to Mandarin. The explanations are really good and there is extra narrative to provide a lot of background knowledge that Rosetta Stone cannot provide.

Both of these systems (Rosetta Stone & Mango Languages) are great, one is just CD based off of your computer, Rosetta Stone and Mango languages are quite pricy, though Mango is free at certain libraries. I personally recommend Rosetta Stone, because I believe being immersed in the language and picking it up and working it out first hand is great.

As for other learning Mandarin sites that I have found useful:

BBC offer a small amount of free lessons and games to initiate you in Mandarin learning. I recommend the Mandarin tone recognition game.

[I am open to any other suggestions for inclusion here]



5. Twitter & #Mandarinmonday
   
   Though it is also on the internet this tool I think is immensely helpful so I have given it. its own point. Though social networking site Twitter, I have met several people that have already been incredibly helpful in my learning. Twitter is incredibly useful for meeting people that have similar interests, and I would recommend if you do not have an account, go and set one up.
   
   When you do, you will start to notice that to make things easier to search people use #hash key to keep relevant topics together and easily scan-able. Bill and his friends have started Mandarin Monday, which is where anyone that wants to can get involved speaking mandarin and trying out new phrases, whilst native speakers will correct and aid the learning of everyone else.
   
   It is a growing community and incredibly useful. Again, I would totally recommend that you utilise this free learning resource!
   
   
6. Local Mandarin Get Together
   
   My local town has a small community of Native speakers that share their Mandarin with fellow learners. They meet once a month and only speak in Mandarin. This is particularly useful once you have developed some vocab and want to test it out.
   
   Gatherings like these are invaluable if you cannot afford that trip to China just yet.
   
   
   
7. Chinese Movies
   
   Whilst the internet has YouTube and many online streams of Mandarin lessons on. I have to admit, for me YouTube is not a good learning environment and I am easily distracted. I believe the lessons range between brilliant and terrible and you have to find one that suits you...
   
   Nevertheless, for me personally, YouTube does not work. However, films in Chinese will get you used to the accent, pronunciation and the speed of the language, although you may not understand much that is said, the more exposure to hearing Mandarin spoken will develop your speaking and listening skills.
   
   
8. College / School style Lessons
   
   For some reason where I am based, seems to be a lack of this type of course available and when it is, it is purely just passing the same old language qualification, GCSE or A-Level. I have always felt that you should learn what you need to get by, not what you need to pass an exam. Therefore this type of course, although invaluable would set you back substantial money (if you’re no longer in education) and when in a class of up to 20 others, you don't get the one to one time required to really improve.
   
   Whilst a great way of learning and the motivation of learning in a group, I feel that there are better ways to learn Mandarin. Especially more personalised speed of learning, as lessons are very rudimentary, and can therefore get boring and stuck in a routine. Learning a language should be for fun and for your own enjoyment when you are motivated to learn.
   
   
9. One on One teaching
   
   An expensive but fruitful way of learning. But one that will be suited to your speed of learning and will not have a set syllabus like the lessons that you may find at schools or colleges. And the teacher will be able to spend a lot of time on the things that you personally want or need to develop upon.
   
   
10. Go to China
    
    The best way to learn any Language is being immersed in it, and thrown in at the deep end learning everything and anything around you. It is probably the best way, but again expensive. For me personally, the allure of a trip to China is huge, but I want to have the basics in place first. Certainly to be able to read a little before I go is essential as I want to be included in my trip to China, not a tourist peering into a new World.
    
    There are so many other helpful resources and over time, I hope to get a large list of resources that people can utilise in their discovering of the Mandarin language.
    
    Please feel free to give me links to other sites here, and I will have a look around, and include them here.
    
    
    
    
    Charlie
    
    

There are three things that makes Mandarin hard to learn for westerners, and these three seem to be the biggest reasons that put people off learning Mandarin or as it is in Chinese pinyin Pǔtōnghuà ('common speech').

1. The Look of Romanised Pinyin
For English speaking people who are not as willing to learn, the Romanised pinyin uses many characters that are barely used in the English language the majority of the time. Many people are dismissive over lots of Z, X, Y and J’s as looking the same. This of course is nonsense but is a major hurdle for those learning to get over.

2. There is No Alphabet
Instead there are thousands of separate characters, used to represent the syllables. Knowledge of about 3,000 characters enables you to read about 99% of the characters used in Chinese newspapers and magazines. To read Chinese literature, technical writings or Classical Chinese though, you need to be familiar with at least 6,000 characters.

Every character is given exactly the same amount of space, no matter how complex it is. There are no spaces between characters and the characters which make up multi-syllable words are not grouped together, so when reading Chinese, you not only have to work out what the characters mean and how to pronounce them, but also which characters belong together.

The largest Chinese dictionaries include about 56,000 characters, but most of them are archaic, obscure or rare variant forms.

3. Intonation of Words

Western languages are very simple in the way that they are spoken, with a fairly open intonation where you can change the way you say something on your mood. Mandarin demands that you have the proper intonation of words, otherwise you could end up calling your mother a horse, as many Chinese syllables have four or more other meanings depending on the tone that you use.

Chinese Mandarin has 5 different possible tones that each syllable can be said with. This is briefly depicted in my pinyin vowel chart where intonations are represented by the 'accents' placed above them in the pinyin Romanisation.

There are many homophones in Mandarin; this is words that sound the same in terms of both syllable and intonation. These homophones are usually paired with other syllables to make words and phrases that are understood in context, and when written have their own syllables.

There are about 1,700 possible syllables in Mandarin, which compares with over 8,000 in English. As a result, there are many homophones - syllables that sound the same but mean different things. These are distinguished by the tone they are spoken with and in written Chinese by using different characters for each homophone.


Put the hours in to recognise the Chinese Language and break the mystery;
To clear this trickiness up, when you start to learn and religiously decide to put the time into learning this language, the words become clearer and the more you use it the easier it becomes to distinguish between words, syllables and sentences. The characters themselves are also recognisable the more you use them.

Please give mandarin a go, and leave comments here about your experiences.

Picture Source:
FlickR

In Chinese pinyin, the most popular Romanisation style (now that the Wade Giles [link] system has been shown to be less helpful to Westerners learning the language) has six vowels, though each vowel has five potential ways of being written depending on the tone of the syllable and the positioning of the vowel itself.

Although I have started to make this blog public now, there are still a lot of things that need doing and I realise that for a while, there are many sections that appear in my menus that won't have any content yet.

I assure you I am getting to it, I am happy for people to request anything they cannot find, and I will try to prioritise this information. If you are interested in writing for me, and helping this procedure speed up, then also feel free to get in touch.

Please do feel free to drop me a comment here, or email me at;

discoveringmandarin@gmail.com

If there is anything that you would like to see here that isn't already, or any further information about anything specific please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Hope you are enjoying and learning from what is already here.


Charlie @ Discovering Mandarin