Moving from oral (pimsleur) to written

[stuartf]

OK, my wife and I have plowed through about half the Pimsleur Mandarin CDs and are now ready to expand. The Pleco looks like it might fit, although originally I was looking for something that would "say" the words.

Our son, fluent in Mandarin, says we need to learn Pinyin. My question is can we learn it quickly sufficently to make good use of this program? Will we really understand what the words sound like? (I still can't figure out the word for hot).

Thanks for any guidance.

Stuart Friedman
East Montpelier, VT

 

[KangSir]

Pinyin is not hard to learn. A concerted effort of one month, and you'll have it down pat.

By the way, you need to know pinyin to be able to use just about any dictionary, so dig in and get it mastered.

 

[mikelove]

I'd agree that you definitely need to learn Pinyin - not just for dictionaries, but because even character training textbooks will generally use Pinyin to tell you what the characters sound like.

We are working on a speaking feature, but at least initially it will probably be confined to single syllables only (and not to entire words). Really though I don't think it's possible to learn to speak Chinese well purely from recordings (and certainly not from recordings played back on a tinny Palm speaker) - re4 "hot" for example is something you can hear a hundred times and still not actually be able to say correctly. So for the sake of improving your pronunciation it would probably be best to do at least a little work with an actual tutor - with just a few sessions you should be able to get to a point where you can pronounce all of the syllables well enough to be understood.

 

[Jim]

A small helpful trick for learning how to pronounce re, ri, zhe, zhi, che, chi, she, shi, etc. The problem seems to be that Chinese has these sounds at the begining of words and the only place English has something similar is at the end of words. Re, ri are very similar to the er sound at the end of words like mother, zhe, zhi like the end of words like judge, che, chi like sound at the end of church and she, shi like the sound at the end of crush. You can train yourself by repitition moving from English to Chinese. e.g. Church, church, church, chur-chi, chur-chi, chur-chi, chi, chi, chi. It is not exact but gets your tongue trained enough that it can make the final transition more easily. This combined with a native speaking tutor to help you polish the sound, in particular the difference between the i and e sounds can have you talking like native. Keep in mind though that there are many accents in China and many Chinese cannot pronounce these sounds as well as an English speaker who has studied for awhile. Pick your tutor carefully.

 

[koreth]

I also started off with Pimsleur and branched out into other sources.

PlecoDict is fabulous as a dictionary and wonderful as a review and drilling tool. But it doesn't do everything. It won't tell you which words to learn; you will want to either get a vocabulary book (Schaum's "Chinese Vocabulary" has a lot of practical words to get started with) or a structured coursebook like "New Practical Chinese Reader." A lot of coursebooks, NPCR included, have audio recordings available separately.

If your goal is to learn to read and write, you might try McNaughton's "Reading & Writing Chinese," which has a new edition as of this year. I'm working my way through that at a rate of 5-10 characters a day and entering them all into PlecoDict as I go, so I can review whenever I have a few minutes of downtime during the day.

If you want lots of vocabulary pronounced by native speakers, you might also try the Rosetta Stone software on the PC. It's nice because it uses audio and images -- the native speaker says "yi ge nu ren gen yi ge nan ren" and you have to pick out the picture of the woman and the man, etc. You also get Pinyin and Chinese characters (both forms) for everything that's spoken aloud. It has a feature for recording your voice and both playing it back to you and analyzing it to try to rate how close you were to the native speaker's pronunciation.

Pinyin will be easy for you to learn if you create flashcards with the Pinyin for the vocabulary from your Pimsleur CDs; you already know all the sounds, so it's just a matter of matching them up with the written form. There are also books like "Modern Chinese: A Basic Course" that describe the Pinyin system in detail as well as discussing how to make all the sounds. But it's no substitute for drilling with a native speaker.

That said, I agree with the previous posters that you want to be careful about your tutors. My girlfriend is from southern Taiwan and a lot of words sound very different coming out of her mouth than out of the mouths of the professional speakers on the various language programs I've heard. For example, when she says "chi1" (eat) it sounds more like "ci2" (word). She usually understands my Beijing-ish accent just fine, but I've seen Chinese people have a hard time with her accent. It would stink to have a tutor who teaches you to speak with perfect fluency in an accent that nobody can understand when you're out in the real world.