Introduction - Beginner help?
Hey hey, I just returned from two weeks on vacation in China and I'm returning seriously embarrassed about how bad my Mandarin is. I live in the US and have very little experience learning Mandarin so far and my pronunciation is horrible. I want to work to improve my vocabulary and pronunciation. The 4 tones are very hard for me, as my hearing is not great to start.
Any ideas for a complete beginner would be greatly appreciated. For instance, will I learn faster with a teacher / in person lessons, or is online learning good enough these days?
I have experience learning other languages, FYI, including Spanish and French and a little Dutch. Cheers for keeping this community alive!
Nothing will help more than practice, while you're studying consider anything you pronounce with the wrong tone completely incorrect.
I personally try to use spacial memory techniques to group words with the same tone together, anything first tone I remember above me, third tone below, second tone left, fourth tone right, neutral right in the middle.
The final advice I have is to pay special attention to how native speakers pronounce tones together, for example two third tones in a row become 2,3. Most won't even be about to tell you the specifics so you'll have to learn on your own.
Good luck out there, it gets much easier with time
Great tips, thanks! I am goingb to need to listen for the tones a lot! That "spacial" idea should help.
I found this video, talking about the tones - I hope this is correct, ha. She says, for instance, that tone 1 is not really as high as the carts usually shows, which is very helpful for me.
https://youtu.be/eIP8yVcDZRI
Yes, I came here to recommend you this video, but I’ve seen that you’ve found it. It’s a great resource, she 100% nailed it
Awesome that you're interested in Chinese. A really good website resource is HackingChinese.com which has a lot of free resources on how to study Chinese.
Other than that, comprehensible input, listening to content that you understand 80-90% off is a great way to improve both pronunciation and listening. I recommend Learn Taiwanese Mandarin, Talk Taiwanese Mandarin With Abby, TeaTime Chinese, Chinese Podcast with Shenglan, MaoMi Chinese. Peppa Pig is also great.
I'd also recommend checking up chorusing/shadowing technique, which is mimicking native sentences and words. It's a surefire way to improve your pronunciation even though it's grindy. HackingChinese has posted a lot about it. Also: work on tone pairs! If you know how a word is pronounced with proper tones, you can transfer that pronunciation to another word with the exact same tones.
Having a teacher that can correct you is also great if you can afford it, but with proper self-discipline self-studies go a long way.
Get praat and use it to listen to and practice tones.
oh boy, I just installed and tried to use Praat. It seems like it would take a long time to learn, which seems like it would end up helping but I'm not sure I have time for that rn. Thanks though, will keep this in mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvyn_6lbH4E
There is a bunch of demonstrations of how to show the tones in Praat. It's super helpful, worth the time to use the software.
I don't think I really recommend Praat at this point tbh.