Cracking Mandarin Chinese Starting Pack - Part 2

Hello, Steemians. Today I would like to give you a few more tips on how to start learning Mandarin Chinese without spending a single dime on it, going to a language school or travelling to China. Let's have a look at some basic stuff you should do once you start cracking Mandarin Chinese.

Tones

Similarly to Thai, Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language and if you don't deal with tones at the beginning, it will just mess everything up later on. There are four basic tones in Mandarin, plus a neutral tone. To my mind they are easier than tones in Thai as there are no consonant classes. Here's the notation, you have to remember it first:

1. The first tone (high level tone) - mā
2. The second tone (rising tone) - má
3. The third tone (falling-rising tone) - mǎ
4. The fourth tone (falling tone) - mà

This is what the tones sound like:

Now, something I figured out quite quickly when trying to learn the tones properly is that you should learn to pronounce tone clusters, as well. Even though you might be pretty accurate in pronouncing single tones after just a few days, or perhaps even a few hours of practise, things change when you have to pronounce words and phrases consisting of two syllables. Here are some useful tone pairs drills:

Practise Handwriting With Chinese Worksheets

As I mentioned in my previous posts, it will take some time before your hand gets used to strokes in Mandarin. However, there is some major resource that can help you facilitate the process - Chinese worksheets. You can just download them from the website here and print them. I suggest practising your strokes every day, your muscle memory has to develop to master them and it will take weeks and months before you are confident in writing. The good news is, after those first few weeks of regular practise you will learn new characters faster and it will actually be more fun to do that.

Dictionary

There are, of course, lots of apps available but the one I would recommend at the beginning is this dictionary by Written Chinese. The app is very convenient cause it offers the strokes tutorials for each word, as well as flashcards to monitor your progress. You can look up both Chinese and English lexical items and it is very intuitive to use.

Youtubers

I would like to say DTubers, perhaps you know some worth recommending (waiting for your commends below)? Anyway, I will again have to give kudos to the polyglot I have mentioned many times before, Stuart Jay Raj. He is a revolutionary language expert, check out one of his videos on Mandarin Chinese:

You can watch many Mandarin teaching videos on his youtube and some Mandarin courses available on his website. Apart from that, I recommend ChineseFor.US!, a pretty professional channel with lots of useful videos.

That's all for today, guys. I hope this will inspire some of you to take up Chinese. It is really pleasurable to learn this fascinating language and it is totally doable for anybody make some effort!

Earworm