I speak a few languages and have studied many others out of interest or due to travel. I went to China twenty years ago and learned a few hundred words and phrases but only a few symbols.
I have now decided to try to learn a little more mandarin to help keep my brain active. I have an app called HelloChinese which I like very much. It is much more interactive than Duolingo, features many videos of native speakers talking at realistic quick speeds, covers a lot of vocabulary and pronunciation, and is quite fun to use.
I doubt any app would get you past the intermediate level, particularly for a Chinese language, but I am not going for fluency. I would like to get to perhaps HSK 4 and then decide if it is worth further time. Doing this will require study materials apart from the app, even if it is very good.
One of my weaknesses is I currently rely too much on pinyin. I don’t aim to write Chinese, but I would have to know a lot more characters than I do to read it. I think the best way to do this is to finish the HSK 1-3 modules and then repeat this as needed, until I can understand without looking at the pinyin words. But I have ordered some writing books that cover these HSK levels. I liked the look of Chineasy books at the store but hear they are pretty useless for reading.
My questions:
What resources do you think are the best for learning Mandarin, to a basic or intermediate level? More advanced?
Has anyone else used HelloChinese?
Are there similar “next level apps” in other languages that combine native speakers, games, writing, speaking, etc. in an entertaining, practical and immersive way? I have heard YuSpeak by the same people is good for Japanese and Korean…
I have only a very rudimentary knowledge of Mandarin, mostly from a year of study decades ago in college, but one resource that I found very helpful in learning characters is the marvelous book Learning Chinese Characters by Matthews & Matthews. It uses a unique approach where you associate a short 2-3 sentence story with each character. Elements of the story provide clues to the shape, pronunciation, tone, and meaning of the character. The book assumes no existing knowledge of Mandarin though, so it might be a little too basic for what you’re looking for. The preview at the Amazon link gives a good idea of how the book is structured.
In general, I’ve found Chinese apps to be rather poorly designed and ineffective. What worked the best for me was watching captioned YouTube videos, or Chinese song videos with the lyrics on screen. This way, the words are being spoken aloud right as they appear on screen, thus imprinting the written character in your mind in real time.
But you must have had at least an intermediate knowledge of spoken Chinese before tying spoken mandarin to its written counterpart?
HelloChinese does a good job of repeating stuff, including making you draw some characters, and quizzing you on them in real time. It works okay in the moment, but find a few days later I have forgotten that.
You could go old school, flash cards and brute memorization. Make HSK flash cards.
You could check out: Pleco Software – The #1 Chinese dictionary app for iOS and Android. Way back when he still supported Windows smart phones, it was pretty decent. I paid for it for a few years, but he dropped support around 20 years ago for Windows and I haven’t used it since.
I just downloaded HelloChinese to check out. And I asked my son who is starting 3rd year mandarin at University if there are any recommended apps.
Nothing wrong with pinyin as long as you can recognize the character(s). Written chinese is typically di-syllablicized (that is, uses two syllables instead of one. For example, Chinese would be “go out” versus English “go”.) So, if you type in the dual syllable, then it’s only one (or a few) combinations to choose from. As opposed to typing in a single syllable like “li” and have hundreds of potential matches.
On top of that, one uses different parts of the brain to memorize how to write a character vs pattern recognition of reading a character. I can’t think of why you would actually need to write chinese characters by hand??? While at one point I could write 5-6,000 characters, now I’m lucky to be triple digits. Computers (and smart phones) vastly reduced the need to actually write a character as long as you can recognize.
Oh, and if you are memorizing characters, it is critical to learn the proper stroke order and follow it for each character. It’s generally straight forward after you have learned a few hundred (left to right, top to bottom). Again, this tweaks pattern recognition in your brain.
Thanks. Writing is an order of difficulty higher than recognition, which for me would bring minimal benefit. You have to write occasionally in HelloChinese and it tells you if the stroke order or direction is wrong. But you don’t do nearly enough writing to master it or even learn many characters.
20 years ago I used the Michel Thomas tapes. Not bad for picking up a few things fast, and better than a phrase book, but not even 10% as good as the new apps.
HelloChinese apparently used to be mostly free (except for bonus immersion and stories) up to HSK3. Now it is only free to HSK1, then $8-15 per month, which I find reasonable. It has a second version which I use and like. They recently came out with a third version, which I liked less on brief trial. The second version makes you think, and if you get the concept right a few times moves on to other things. If you get it wrong it tells you the answer and the same question shows up again in a short time. The third version just asks the same thing many many times in slightly different ways, and is boring if you are quick at getting concepts - but not everybody is. If not good at languages, the approach may be better for some.
I can recognize some characters, but once I have mastered the pinyin and grammar will redo everything until I can succeed just by recognizing characters alone.
Would be interested to know what your son says about apps. I have used Duolingo from time to time, but was quite blown away with how good HelloChinese is. I didn’t realize an app could be that good.
I bought some premade flashcards. They help but only cover very basic phrases, maybe fifty to a hundred. I bought some similar used books online.
My own experience is with “classical” Chinese, but as far as writing you are supposed to write each character, as well as sentences, down, many times, using pen and paper, not just recognize them on a computer screen. Ideally, you would be able to get some feedback as it is possible to write characters “wrong” or not the way they are supposed to look like. Also, people’s actual handwriting might be a bit “semi-cursive”, which can be its own thing.
I think writing mandarin must be very hard unless you do it all the time. There are a lot of very similar looking characters. The mind is a wonderful think and very good at recognizing patterns. But it must be easy to forget something you have not much done since computers became commonplace.
I’m sure you know that most characters are composed of two or three radicals. There are only a couple of hundred radicals, so if you know them all, it’s easier to remember a character in terms of its constituent radicals. Nevertheless, you are correct that there is a perception that even native Chinese speakers tend to suffer from so-called “character amnesia”, forgetting how to write well-known characters, due to the widespread use of computer technology to input characters in modern times.
It’s probably a generational thing, but my mom (who is Taiwanese, so never learned pinyin) still uses a stylus or her finger to handwrite characters, even on a computer or phone. Although there are a variety of much faster Chinese input methods available (not all of which are reliant on pinyin), she just never learned them and stuck with an e-pencil instead. Or she just dictates these days.
Meanwhile, I was forced to learn many years of written Chinese, but forgot so much of it I literally can’t even write my own name anymore…
It is true that the number of radicals is limited and there is usually logic to the way they are combined. I would guess this is more useful in reading than writing, and more useful for simpler words taught earlier than later. Again, the writing is hard enough I think you would have to do it often to remember unusual characters that are only used occasionally. However, this is a guess uninformed by long experience, and could easily be wrong.
HelloChinese has the option of turning off the pinyin. I’m repeating HSK 1 and 2, and recognizing the characters is usually easier than I thought it would be.
Besides the ones mentioned, I use Ka for practising tones. But the ads are horrific.
At some point, I had to turn off pinyin, otherwise I just default to reading that all the time. I found it much easier to learn characters by writing them. It’s easier to grasp them when you know how they are put together.
Writing is not difficult exactly, although my writing is shit, aesthetically speaking. You can get little notebooks with squares to practice fitting everything into the space. I knew maybe 1,000 characters, but I’m really out of practice now. I just used to write each character 10-20 times every day for 3 days (depending on how hard the character was), and then I would know it well enough to distinguish it in different contexts (It’s much easier to remember characters that you always see in the same context, but then you see them somewhere else and realize you don’t know them as well as you thought you did). Pleco will give you the stroke order. Also, if you can write characters, you can write ones you don’t know into Pleco. There are others ways to find their meanings, I just find that whole kinaesthetic process helps me to remember.
I used to not worry about the stroke order, but then one of my classmates watching me write commented that I did every stroke out of order (I was writing 我). So I started making more of an effort. Doing them in order did help with the whole process of creating a structure in my mind for how these characters work.
Ka has a paid version. It’s around $80, I think. Lessons are really short, like 10 rounds or so. It starts off with two words, the same letters in pinyin, but different tone, like 妈 and 马. It does single words, then it puts them into short phrases or sentences. I think these are from native speakers but could be synthesized. You will have to pronounce the word 2-3 times as well, and it will give you pass/fail on the initial, the final and the tone. Once it gets up to two words together, it only judges tones. I have no idea how accurately it matches a native speaker’s perception of tone, but it has helped me a lot in knowing what to listen for. Picking tones on single words is pretty easy to learn but catching them in a sentence is so much harder. That’s the reason I like Ka, because it gives you these short sentences.