Tips on Learning Mandarin
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- Опубліковано 2 сер 2013
- Mandarin is difficult because of the need to learn so many Chinese characters, and the tones. However, there are aspects of Mandarin which make it easier then many European languages. The rewards of learning Mandarin, the process itself, and then the ability to connect with Chinese culture, are enormous. It is well worth the effort.
0:48 - How I learned Mandarin.
1:27 - Chinese is so exotic. Can anyone really learn it?
2:42 - The two most difficult things about learning Chinese.
4:20 - How I learned the characters.
6:38 - Should you learn traditional or simplified characters?
7:12 - Tones in Mandarin.
10:30 - The structure of the language.
11:30 - Spend the time to learn phrases and patterns.
13:06 - Interesting content.
15:24 - A new China.
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I am not conscious of using grammar, I'm only conscious of using the language. I enjoy developing the ability to express myself according to the conventions and patterns of another language. I am motivated by the joy of communicating with native speakers, reading about the history, culture and literature, and using the language.
You are the Grandfather I have always wished for. So many amazing things you speak of! I could spend all day listening to you!
Absolutely.
He inspired me a lot
What about your real grandpa?
@@Rattooo ive never got to know him unfortunately. Apparently i saw him when i was a baby but i dont remember it.
If someone asked me what is most fulfilling in life, I would tell them it is learning to see things from a foreign perspective. I am a native Mandarin speaker. I also speak Thai and English. Looking at another culture and seeing things from the other side makes me a much mature person. To have loved a girl from a completely different culture and loving them using another language is the best thing that has happened to me.
It is amazing how much you learn about your own country seeing it as an outsider.
good words
Really wanna learn Mandarin. My primary languages are Korean and English any tips ??
***** How?
Truthseeker I'm learning Thai and would like to dive into Chinese once I become more fluent in Thai.
Really golden words
All Sinitic languages have tone sandhi. Pay attention to the tone sandhi in Beijing Mandarin. When a word start with a character with tone 3. And start with 一 and 不
Your videos inspired me to learn languages, Steve. You encouraged me over email when I was on exchange in France back in 2009, and I can now proudly say I speak French, Spanish and Chinese relatively fluently - I've even started putting out my own videos to try to encourage potential learners, too! Keep up the good work, and don't stop learning!
Any tips ?
Amazing, I am Chinese Canadian and I have recently began to finally learn the language that my parents speak. I found it very intimidating and wasn't sure if I could do it, then I wandered on your videos and this really motivates me to not only keep trying, but to enjoy it as well. Thank you.
LitHits hiya i just ended up wondering, how has your mandarin learning been so far?
我从你介绍如何学习中文中看出来你确实深入了解了中文，我认为这很难得，因为感觉大部分外国人都无法理解我们的语言，感触颇深啊。 You turly understand how chinese language is working I really appreciate that.
I think there's a lot here that I can apply to my Russian, especially the idea that once you enter into the world of the language and discover it, it becomes a part of you and you enjoy it. Great words, Thanks.
It's amazing, looking through Steve's vast library of UA-cam content, his message has never changed. It's always been fundamentally "reading, listening, and not quitting", and it so obviously works for him. I paraphrase you, Steve, constantly to our music students at school because it applies to instruments so perfectly as well.
This is great encouragement. Seeing someone that's been there, understands the difficulty, and overcame it and became very fluent in the language
Asia is such a mysterious and interesting place for a western person. China has loads of places and ethnic groups. The culture is amazing. So learning the language gives a totally new way of thinking and a new perspective. Luckily I have much time to learn mandarin as i'm only 15.
I love your videos Steve, your enthusiasm for language learning is infectious!
I've been watching this Asian lady try to teach the tones and in two seconds you taught me more than she did lol
Steve, I have worked and lived on and off in Mainland China since 1996 and have attended 2 universities and appreciate everything you have said and love your ability to articulate on who to approach learning Mandarin! Well done to you and thank you for a truly enjoyable learning experience.
Thanks.
Fantastic tips! Thank you very much for sharing your experience!
Steve, I am living in Shanghai learning Mandarin at the moment. You have always been an inspiration to me in my language learning endeavors. I showed my teacher some if your videos on learning languages, and she says I should follow your example lol. Keep up the awesome work! 谢谢您，我希望我以后跟你一样。加油！
As always your videos are encouraging! Thanks Steve
Great to hear it and good luck in China!
Thanks for posting this video. Very inspirational when you are trying to find first gear when starting the Mandarin journey. On a separate note, I would think this man has a story or two to tell that are worth hearing!!
Thank you for this inspiration Steve. My own limited experience, so far, coincides with everything you've said and your results gives me encouragement to keep on the track.
This helped me. thanks steve,2 yrs of vietnamese study,now 6 months to fluency!
excellent video...thank you so much for sharing your precious experience.
I'm so grateful that I found your channel. I'm beginning my second year of Mandarin and I've been having a lot of trouble with wanting to emphasize tones. I also speak Spanish, so I find myself wanting to structure my sentences the same way you would with romantic languages. I have yet to make that natural connection with Mandarin, and am still translating phrases in my head. I will definitely be paying attention to your videos. Thank you!
Here is a Chinese who wants to learn Spanish 😑
This is a really inspiring video !! Thanks !!
This was SO useful. I lived in china for about 3 years when covid hit and now I am back in the US. I have slowly stopped practicing Chinese, because I keep on feeling like I can't learn myself. I am very afraid I will lose my memory of the language and never actually learn it. But this helped me get ideas and motivate me to keep on learning! Thank you for your videos! I love them!
Great video! just started learning mandarin chinese a few days ago and stumbled over this video. Subscribing...
Thank you very much Steve .. for another great video
So good! Thank you for making this video.
I really like these "about learning" videos. They make me more excited about learning languages.
Hi, Steve. I'm impressed with your tips. I'm learning english that I want to understand and make myself understood.
Thank you for your videos.
Cool video. I've been learning mandarin using the audible pimsleur program.
Thank you. I really enjoyed the tips. I am learning Chinese on my own and I am enjoying it.
teach me some of it plz!!!!
Hello everyone reading this, I'm a fourteen year old boy trying to learn Mandarin chinese, I'm learning this language because I love the country and everything about the language in general, I will say that I'm struggling A LOT but my mom and dad encourage me to keep learning this beautiful language and I know that one day I will be able to speak and write it and hopefully be able to travel to the beautiful country someday.
How is it now lol
Thanks Steve - Definitely needed this motivation about salami technique with character writing - I seem to be at a plateau intermediate stage.
Steve is talking about the 20s and 30s but we are in the 20s now. Isn't that amazing?
I am 45...so not really! lol
This guy is the Walter White of language learning. What a badass!
Who is Walter White?
from breaking bad
Walter White is a drug dealer on a tv show. Who is really good at what he does.
Because he is a chemistry genius
I literally just finished the last episode today...
Thank you for the insights sir!
big thanks for you and thank God for this channel!
Thank you :) this is sooo helpful
Absolutely agree with all your points
Great video. Thanks alot!
Awesome information!
Wow this is such an impressive speech! You mister has a better knowledge and evaluation of China than most Chinese and foreigners do. I appreciate it and respect!
Thanks.
thank you for sharing your wisdom, as a naive lad, i treasure such things dearly.
you have a way with words my friend
Thanks Steve! Very good video.
Always great insight and advice. Thanks!
WOO ALAN WATTS!
I really enjoy your videos.
I enjoyed this immensely.
Love this video!
Check out my blog post on my new years spent in CHINA.
chinesepod.com/blog/khilling-with-kurtis-flashback-to-new-years-in-china/
I have been learning for mere weeks but the things you say already ring true I think after some consistency it's not as hard of a language as it is made out to be
I will do videos in French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, German, and Swedish, and follow them with this kind of video explaining a bit about the language. I do not speak Arabic so I cannot do it for Arabic. I may do one for Cantonese and possibly Czech, Romanian and Korean if I get ambitious.
Cantonese has an unearthly beauty to it but if I want to do herbal research I must stick to Mandarin. Cantonese is so enticing I have to be careful to not listen to it or I will be compelled to learn it. Curiously similar in sound to Vietnamese (another language whose sound is of such sublime beauty) though i don't believe the two are linguistically connected at all. I have been told that Cantonese is a better gateway to old China, don't know if that is true or not. Maybe after reading "Twenty Lectures" I will know a bit more. (Sidenote on Russian if you are learning it: Try "Hero of Our Times" by Lermonotov as a first reader, followed by Captain's Daughter by Pushkin. Both classics. That's how we did it in high school. I was in the Russian program so I cold read Russian chess magazines.
Very encouraging indeed
yea, i've found there are 3 phases that you need to go thru over and over in learning chinese/japanese.
1. learn a character
2. learn a word
3. learn a collocation (seq of words, ie when and how to use the word).
repeat that a bunch of times over and over for the win.
I think a lot of people wait too long for #3 or skip it altogether. I guess in other languages you just have to worry about #2 and #3.
Thank you, I want to start learning Mandarin next year.
Both Japanese and Mandarin are difficult languages that will take a long time to learn. In a way Chinese is more useful today. Japanese can be more rewarding in some ways. What matters the most is which language you are most interested in learning. I don't see any relevance to the fact that Thai is also a tonal language.
How did you keep up with Chinese after returning to Canada? I lived in China for a year on a Chinese government scholarship but now that I'm back in the US I'm forgetting a lot of it. Your mandarin is amazing.
I agree with so much of this. We definitely use tones, and I don't think too many people realize that, we just don't use them to change definitions of words but instead emphasis. And I also think much of chinese is very rational. Beef = cow meat. I think the biggest challenge for me right now is all the different "measure" words.
You'll get used to them. Just don't fight them. And use 一个， 两个， etc. when in doubt.
Steve Kaufmann - lingosteve thank youuu :)
水哦~解釋的很詳細! 順便練英文 :)
Thanks Don, I must have missed this question. I would say in answer to the original question that I speak Mandarin 10 to 15 times a year.
Thank you!
Thank you!
thank you
I’m here in 2020 and this is till a very useful video ✔️
In my day we did not have computers with Chinese language word processing. I simply don't know if it's possible to learn characters without practicing writing them. I suggest you do it and see how it turns out.
No I haven't read Mo Yan's novels. I have been focusing my attention on languages other than Chinese for the last 10 years or so.
thank you so much!!
Thanks for the tips Steve!
What resource would you recommend for studying chinese history in chinese (audio + text)? I could not find any on Lingq so far.
Cheers
Hi Steve,
You’ve made an interesting comparison of Chinese tones and English intonation. I’ve heard many English learners saying that it’s much easier to acquire the English intonation if you live in an English-speaking country. It was the only one aspect of their pronunciation that improved dramatically over a relative short period of time. So do you think that living in China is extremely helpful to acquire right tones or no more than with any other aspect of the language?
Of course it is always helpful to live in the country where the language is spoken. But it is not necessary. My tones are not that bad, and I have never lived in China, only visited. It is necessary to listen a lot and also to speak a lot.
A question to you Steve; what is your favourite part of language learning? Personally I love understanding and using the grammar that I learned, but the thing that drives me on the most is being able to switch between languages and speak with natives.
Thx for giving learning tips for international friends, em learning French now~
Your welcome
Salamat po, Gracias, Xie Xie, Arigato, Grazie, Thank you
Im loving these videos ^.^ so I hope Steve "gets ambitious" XDDD
a chinese friend of mine once told me, that chinese language is based on emotion and feelings whereas english for example is based on intellect. so in this way, chinese was more of expressing feeling and emotions rather than intellectually expressing things.
Hello Steve! I posted a similar comment on your Russian video, but I should have posted it here. Sorry about that! I have a course registration deadline soon, should I pick Mandarin or Japanese? I can command Thai fairly well (not quite conversationally fluent, but close). Do you think learning Mandarin would be better because they are both tonal languages? Or would that be more confusing perhaps? I will continue to study Thai at the same time. My roommate speaks Mandarin too. Thanks a lot!
Thanks for the tips! I'm learning Thai language, although I cannot call myself fluent yet. But I'd also like to learn Chinese. I've become fascinated with learning other languages. Do you recommend studying more than one language? And what are your tips for keeping up with multiple languages on a day to day basis?
I try to focus on one and occasionally read or listen in another.
Steve, what would say are the pros and cons of learning japanese (my current goal) before learning mandarin. Are there any effects worth highlighting?
How long did it take you to be fluent in Mandarin Chinese? And how long did it take you to be able to read articles and write in Chinese?
Thanks Steve!
I learned Thai for 3 months but then changed to mandarin. Even telling the time in Thai is challenging. But learning some thai prepared me for the measure words. As both thai and mandarin use measure words for everything. There are also a few other similarities. At some point i want to return to thai.
What do you think about foregoing learning to hand-write characters? I've been totally ignoring it for the simple fact that I don't think I'll ever need to write Chinese by hand. I've mostly been focusing on reading and reviewing vocabulary to recognize characters.
Hey steve your video was very helpful.Thank you. I am eager and wanting to learn mandarin, so can you suggest me some good sites with the pdf content of all the characters if possible with audio files. Thank you again
so true
in english we use letters (sounds) to make up individual words,. whereas in chinese they use symbals to represent meaning, rather than individual sounds to represent meaning. though the tones in chinese indicate meaning itself, and english our tones represent expression to a meaning.
I thought I answered this question but perhaps I answered Don instead. I would say in answer to the original question that I speak Mandarin 10 to 15 times a year.
What do you mean by a few languages? Achieving a high level in any language takes time. How many languages you can speak to a high level, will depend on how much time you have to spend with these languages. Once you have achieved a high level, maintaining them is not difficult.
I don't know, but to me English is the hard language to learn in the planet. Chinese hard at first but very easy when you get it down because the foundation never change it there. English so many rule so many changing on and on never stop.
Good English there my friend
@@nnekaelechi4855 Me too
I've planned to learn Chinese!
This is a very impressive speech. I am from Hong Kong and i speak Cantonese. Mandarin and Cantonese have the same grammar system, however, there are still so many different between them. For example, Cantonese has 9 tones while Mandarin has 4 tones only, the totally different pinyin system, etc. That's why it is so hard for us to master well Mandarin no matter the way we speak or the accent we have, etc. Let alone the way we write( traditional and simplified).
Will you try to learn Cantonese? it is challenging.
I also speak Cantonese after a fashion.
A discussion on language learning in Cantonese
I like your fluent english, Steve
Альбом Длямарков very impressive
Well Thai and Mandarin are tonal and have similar grammar structures (correct me if I am wrong) and they are both monosyllabic with short words, unlike Japanese. I am not really more interested in one of them over the other. Both I have equal interest in learning. I was thinking because Thai is also monosyllabic that maybe it would be an easier process to learn Mandarin? Or maybe I may get mixed up between Mandarin and Thai? I've never studied 2 languages before at the same time either.
Eres sorprendente
What helped me with mandarin tones was thinking about how we talk in english at the dentist or with food in our mouths. We say "un hunh" for yes "un un" for no "unUNun" for I don't know "hunh" for what etc.
Nice
Excellent introduction Steve! I had to laugh when you mentioned reading about Chairman Mao...if anything is designed to put you off learning Chinese, it's reading political speeches. ;-)
HI Steve, I'd like to study in China (Beijing most likely) for a year, starting next year in September. Now, I would have the option of taking only classes taught in English, but it would mean a lot to me being able to take at least a few classes fully in Chinese.
Considering I would start learning Chinese "from scratch" starting in June (I'm currently working on my Italian) and that I already speak 4 languages (counting Italian, since I can speak and write it, but make a few mistakes and have limited vocabulary), do you think that's a realistic goal?
If it helps, I would be studying computer science / applied mathematics and I can currently speak Spanish, Portuguese and English fluently.
Thank you, you really are awesome!!!
Not sure if you are still logged in here...But im pretty much in the same route as you. Hopefully you are doing alright in life, 7 years later
I believe there is power in positivity!
Do not be intimidated by learning a language, and I can say from experience, especially Mandarin Chinese!
It really isn't so hard! Just keep after it!
You CAN do it!
Don't get bogged down, or even slowed down by what you might, at first, perceive as difficult!
YOU WILL CONQUER IT! :D
Great tip about learning tones in phrases rather than individual words! It really helped me with my pronunciation!
Chinese characters get easier as you go, it helps to look up what the components mean, it'll pay off! For all those who just begin to study the language, I make videos about character components, feel free to check it out.
the way you pronounce chinese word is quite good .
Using particles 啊 (ah)， 哇 (wa)， etc..., or the grammar form 是。。。 的 (shi ... de), putting the phrase or word emphasized in between the two characters. Also, they will very explicitly pronounce a word's tone in order to emphasize it.
Very true. If the syllable being stressed is third tone, the pitch goes right down to the bottom of hell. If it's a second tone, the pitch launches straight up to the top of the heaven.
为什么(for-what), what for/why,
makes perfect sense.
Yeah,patterns
要不是xxx 我才不xxx
xxx的话就好了
Lattern approach should apply to most languages.