learning Chinese?

Question

Was wondering if someone might give an opinion as to how long it might take an American to learn Chinese.. Well enough to translate and typeset simple business cards.
The person is fairly talented with languages, but knows only latin derived languages.
thanks!

Answer 1

How come you are posing the question instead of "the person"? Oh, well. What do you mean by "learn Chinese"? Do you mean learn to speak one of the languages or learn to write one of the languages?

The most common written language is commonly called "Simplified Chinese" and there are about 40,000 characters. But you could learn 10,000 and do quite well. It is not at all like learning a western language. You just memorize the useful meaning of the character appearance because they have no exact pronunciation based solely on their appearance. If you want to learn to type the characters on a computer, you have to learn the Pinyin spelling for them because keyboards don't have Chinese characters. They would be mighty big if they did! That's a whole other thing and must be more precise than just learning the meaning of the characters. Then you type "zhe", for instance, and the Pinyin software shows a little window with several choices of characters that might be associated with Putonghua pronunciation such as "zhen" or "zheng". Then you choose.

To learn to speak, your friend should choose one of the two most popular language choices: Putonghua (often called Mandarin) or Guangdonghua (also called Baihua or Bendihua in China but called Cantonese in western countries). The Chinese government has declared Putonghua to be the official language of China but this irks many Chinese Americans who mostly speak Guangdonghua and may have bad feelings for the Chinese government. Speaking is much more difficult because you must memorize the correct tone for each character and subtle vowel and consonant pronunciations. Also, Chinese have hundreds of odd accents in different provinces and even in different counties of a province so be careful to get a standard accent teacher or CDs.

Don't think in terms of years. Think in terms of hours. Maybe 1000 hours of listening/ speaking practice. Maybe an equal number of hours of writing/ reading practice. If you, er, the person, spends about one hour a week at it, expect 20 years. If person spends about 60 hours a week at it, expect 4 months.

Answer 2

I point out three key method :interest,input,practice.

First,interest is the best teacher.If you want to be good at Chinese,you must bring up your interest of learning Chinese .Interest can help you fight against whit dull.Find something you like to do.For example you like to watch TV ，so you can watch some Chinese TV with your mother language caption.If you like to chatting ,you can using Chinese to chatting with Chinese throughth internet,or by other ways.

Second ,you must insist on studying.No input,no output.So you must learn some chinese character or phrase every somedays.After studying,it is better to use the character you have learn to write some chinese article ,or chatting wiht chinese.So you can not forget the character or phrase. Do not stop learn for long,and learn continue to learn .If so,it almost impossible for you to be good at Chinese.But i advise you that not to learn too more by one time of learning Chinese.If so ,you may be feel dull and then stop to learn Chinese.

Third,do not afraid to make mistake.Do not afraid make joke.Do not be too care with grammar.If you are too care with the grammar ,it will be too dull to do practice everytime ervrywhere you want to practise chinese.Remember that if you want to be good at chinese ,you must do more pratice.


The last.Creat a chinese environment as we know.The best way to learn chinese is to creat a chinese environment.Because it has more pritise chance,less dull,and you can remember what you study for long times,may be all your life.So many foreigners come to china for studying.But if you can not come to china ,you can use the internet ,or some other ways.

I hope that you can use the methods to learn chinese.So you can make greate progress by using less time.


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Answer 3

If you've got that "Asian bug" in your blood, as fast as 1 and a half year will get you going on the basics. Chinese is very different to Latin derived lanuages because they don't use an alphabet system to write (each character has a different meaning when put together, brings another meaning). Also Chinese pronounciation is quite confusing for Westerners at first, because the same sound can have many different meaning.

Most people I know learned for 2-3 years before learning enough to get by.

Answer 4

We study through memorizing characters and associating them with portraits, just like what kindergarten youngsters do. We additionally have got to memorize the pinyin. Pinyin refers back to the intonation is which the phrase is learn. In Mandarin chinese language, there are four pinyins for every phrase, and in Cantonese chinese language, there are up to eight. I cannot say the identical for different Chinese dialects as I do not talk all of them. Apart from that, chinese language characters have quite a lot of "ze phang" to symbolize quite a lot of classes of phrases. Say for illustration, the man or woman water has its particular ze phang. Anything related to water will comprise this ze phang in its man or woman, corresponding to ice. That makes it less complicated for us to memorize hundreds and hundreds upon hundreds and hundreds of Chinese characters

Answer 5

if ur a fast learner for mandarin: maybe 1 and a half year
cantonese: 2-3 years
but to write u'll never finish learning just learn the basics its ok>
but if ur reading business cards u have to on a higher level

to speak really fluently about 5 yrs!
some tips: try talkin to ppl who know chinese.

sry to tell you but its kinda true

Answer 6

i think it really depends on how much the person want to learn chinese. if the person doesn't want to learn chinese then it might take a long time. if the person does then it depends on his/her learning ability. knowledge of latin derived languages might not help but good luck!

Answer 7

2200 hours in class for an English speaker.
It is about 3 times more than learning Spanish.

Answer 8

TalkingLearn - Learn Chinese on http://www.talkinglearn.com/ is your best spoken language training partner. This app is dedicated to helping mobile people make full use of their spare time to practice oral Chinese. It covers the courses ranging from Life, Business, Traveling, Entertainment, Early childhood to many other categories in different difficulty degrees. In addition, it collects lots of useful Mandarin phrsases for you to use in your everyday conversations.