Chinese Mandarin :
Registered on : 2008-10-11
Language : None
Posts : 17
Responses : 3
Comments : 0
From :
Karen delos Reyes
Date : 2009-09-26 / 09:33PM
hi benny,
i’m just wondering, do i need to study the characters while learning the language? or language first before studying how to write the characters?
xie xie ni!
Views (1378) Replies (3)
Latest Responses
Chinese Mandarin : Registered on : 2007-01-01 Language : English, Mandarin Chinese Posts : 0 Responses : 2359 Comments : 75 |
| | Benny the Mandarin Teacher bennysland.com
2009-09-26 / 10:03PM | | Hi Karen,
It really depends on your time, if you are still a student and is willing to spend lots of time everyday. Then I would suggest you to learn Characters at the same time, If not that would still be ok.
You may start the characters after 1 year or when you have enough vocabulary
Benny
Learn Chinese, Learn Mandarin from AskBenny | |
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Chinese Mandarin : Registered on : 2008-04-28 Language : English Posts : 0 Responses : 9 Comments : 0 |
| | Andrew Przepioski yahoo.com
2009-09-28 / 06:49PM | | I’ll just say what I did. When I first starting going to this site, my goal was just learn how to speak. I watched Benny’s videos and wrote down how I would say it, I would say it to myself, ask others if I am saying it correctly, and etc… I found out though that I was remembering visually what I saw on the video also and I was able to partially write the characters (very easy ones at the time such as ni, wo, hao, bu, ro, ma, etc…). For me, I decided that it was worth spending the extra few seconds to write down the Chinese character also and if I remember it, that’s great, and if I didn’t, bummer. So I didn’t prioritize it, but I did consider it, and I think that if you can do the same, it would be great.
One thing that has helped me a lot with writing also is to use it when I can. I write all sorts of little notes in Chinese (even if it’s partially or one word that is in Chinese). Getting to use a language helps a lot. I’ve been learning German way longer than Chinese mandarin and I think my Chinese mandarin skills are much superior to my German skills just because hardly anyone in my area speaks German. | |
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Chinese Mandarin :Registered on : 2008-04-28 Language : English Posts : 0 Responses : 9 Comments : 0 |
| | Andrew Przepioski yahoo.com
2009-09-28 / 06:49PM | | Oh, and in my honest opinion, Chinese writing is very much like writing English natively (for me). I don’t natively speak or write Chinese, but I’ll tell you what I mean right now… when I write in English, I don’t often think “Hm.. how to write English? E-n-g-l-i-s-h!” I just think of the word as a single entity, and I believe most people who natively speak English are the same. They have even done some test where they move around the vowels in words, yet people can still read it because people don’t read words by individual characters. I think the same goes for Chinese, just being able to associate each syllable with a character. Unfortunately, if you forget how to write a syllable, it’s hard to guess it unlike in English, haha.
Again this all comes down to what kind of student you are though. There are supposedly visual, auditory, and tactile learns. Some people are a combiantion of two or of all three. What kind of student do you consider yourself to be? I expect that if somebody is auditory only, it would be very difficult and extraneous to learn how to write Chinese. :D | |
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