Cracking Mandarin Chinese Starting Pack - Part 1

Hello, Steemians! Today I would like to take a look at how to start learning Chinese language in the comfort of your home without spending a single dime. In 2016 I studied Chinese language for 3 months, after which I travelled to Shanghai and managed to use basic Mandarin to talk to taxi drivers, order food, hang around shops, etc. What made me succeeded in learning basic Chinese in such a relatively short time period? Let’s have a look at it, step by step.

Online Teacher

I was very fortunate to find an online Mandarin teacher who was very passionate about her job and made me progress at an impressive pace. You can find your language partner on italki and barter English lessons or other language you speak for Chinese lessons or just pay as little as 10 USD per hour, if you are not willing to teach anything back. Pretty good deal, if you ask me! On top of that, Chinese teachers are usually very hard-working and conscientious, they love spreading the word and teaching foreigners their language, culture, etc. Be aware of cultural differences though and Chinese sensitivity.

Duolingo and ChineseSkill Apps

If you’re into learning languages you must have heard of or used Duolingo, the most popular mobile app to learn languages. Duolingo have recently introduced Chinese course to their app and you can join over a million of Mandarin learners on this great software! It will serve as a useful supplement to your online Chinese lessons or might even replace the classes completely, depending on how experienced you are in learning languages. The other similar Mandarin course app, which has been actually around for way longer than Duolingo’s Chinese course, is ChineseSkill. The app offers way more options than Duolingo and one of them is particularly important for mastering this oriental language: Pinyin.

Learning Pinyin

Contrary to Thai, there is a stardardized romanization system for Mandarin Chinese - Pinyin. You will use Pinyin when talking to your Chinese friends on WeChat or when typing Mandarin on your computer. The other good thing is, there are only about 400 different sounds/syllables. Once you learn those you will be ready to read pretty much any word in Chinese transcribed to Pinyin. This is a great for foreigners learning Mandarin, as well as for native Chinese children acquiring their mother tongue. You can learn Pinyin from ChineseSkill I mentioned before.

_{Looking back at my efforts to write Chinese makes me want to get back to it badly! It was a lot of fun, after all.}

Learning Strokes

This is the most interesting and difficult part of learning Mandarin Chinese - writing. It is a necessary skill if you want to master Mandarin, as learning writing facilitates learning reading to a large extent, because of the stroke system it is made of. Writing Mandarin Chinese is like writing magic runes to me, even the strokes have their own names. You will need tens of hours of practise to get your hand used to this system. Once you get it, though, you will enjoy it a lot. Check out the polyglot Stuart Jay Raj teaching writing Mandarin:

Those are some of the first steps that you should take while learning Chinese without ever going to China or to a Chinese language school. Mandarin is not the most difficult language in the world and you can crack it free without leaving the comfort of your home. Stay tuned for the next part.

Earworm