What is the best way to learn Mandarin Chinese? Any Tips?
(Without moving there. lol) Any tips, learning strategies, websites, etc.? I REALLY want to learn Mandarin but I don’t have the money to buy Rosetta Stone or subscribe to a really good Chinese learning website like mangolanguages.com or chinesepod.com . T^T weh. Your help is much appreciated ^-^ !
Obviously 24mets24 didn’t even read the rest of my question AT ALL!
(Copied from my other answers, as I do not feel like writing a huge block of text again. Hope you don’t mind =) )
Learn to speak and to write separately. Chinese is a visual language (the only major surviving one to the best of my knowledge) and does not have an alphabet. Learning pinyin and, of course, the associated pronunciation rules would help you tremendously. Most children’s books have pinyin alongside the characters, and are extremely helpful when you decide that you have learnt enough spoken Chinese to begin learning to write.
For writing:
Begin with familiarization of the different components of writing, not the characters. Know how to draw heng (horizontal line), shu (vertical), pie (leftward & downward… curve?), na, dian, zhe, gou, ti. Start with those simpler ones, move on to the more complex compound ones, such as heng-zhe-gou, shu-wan-gou, etc. etc.
Do NOT skip this step (if you do, I can guarantee you your writing will look horrific in the future, and your speed of learning will take quite a toll). Once you have learnt that, the characters should begin to look like writings to you, not just pictures.
When you actually learn the characters, start with the pictograms (ones that come from ancient drawings) and ideograms (ones that represent an idea), as many of these are extremely simple (relative to the rest of the characters), and, due to their antiquity, are often components of more complex characters. Examples of pictograms and ideograms:
? (comes from the drawing of a mountain), ? (comes from the drawing of water flow), ? (farm), ? (sun), ? (person), ? ? ? (self-explanatory…), ? (up), ? (down) … …
Also pick up anything else that consists of few strokes, like ? and ?, as they would be easy to remember and are very likely to be a part of more complex characters. In fact, ? + ? = ? (good).
Then familiarize yourself with the abbreviated radicals, usually found on either side, top, bottom, or enclosed in the middle of a complex character. Example: ? becomes ?, which goes on the left side of a great number of character that have something to do with water, such as ?? (shower), ? (to flow), ?? (to swim), ?? (bathe), etc.
By the time you get past that stage, you probably would have already learnt some phono-semantic compound characters (complex characters that consist of parts, some responsible for meaning, some for sound, hence ‘phono-semantic’). These make up more than 90% of all Chinese characters today. At this stage, you should have a sufficient repertoire of more basic characters to be able to make educated guesses on your own, and your pace of learning will begin to increase dramatically (even exponentially).