Sunday, March 01, 2009

How much time will I take to learn Chinese ?

This question struk me very hard as the only opinion I recieved from most of the people is that - " Chinese is hard and Learnign Chinese is more harder"

But then I came across one opinion of an expat who learned chinese....aka Mandarin

".........
I speak Mandarin quite fluently and am not too bad at Cantonese. The former is easier. The pronunciation of Mandarin sounds is not difficult. The tones take more work. Is is important to realize that even English is tonal, except that tones are used for emphasis in the sentence rather than to indicate meaning in words. As long as you ignore any and all grammatical explanations of Chinese and just work on listening and reading and getting used to the structure of the language, it is not too difficult except for one obstacle, the amount of time required to learn characters. There you need a system (I had one) and you need to work at it every day..even one day off it and you slide back. It took me 8 months full time to learn the language, be able to read novels, and translate newspapers in both directions.
........."

I was really inspired by his story of his track to learn chinese.........8 months to fluency is not a big deal buddy ......and I am really wiling to invest that much of time...

Now the next question is where to learn chinese from ...........i m currently exploring a lot of options

1. Some sources on net - I found them to be misleading.........
2. some native speaker - hard to find them in new delhi
3. some class room course - how to evaluate which one to join..........


albeit, on thing, I learned abt chinese is that its a phonetic based language......
meanings change with the emphasis of syllables........

so, I finally started a bit ..........so lets see if I can get close inch by inch.............

"WO" - means "I" in mandarin but the same can change with emphasis......

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