Comments on: …so, you want to learn Chinese?

By: zahli liddicoat

zahli liddicoat — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 03:30:32 +0000

im doing a poject on china and it wood be very nice of you to help me.

ps thank you

By: alina

alina — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 08:01:22 +0000

who wants to learn chinese

By: ArtOfWar

ArtOfWar — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 07:55:12 +0000

@Don

Be careful now on how you translate, if you dont have the tone or a basic feel of the Chinese Language.
The complexity of the Chinese Language comes from 6000 years of Stewing and is still stewing, like the ChongQing Hotpot.
Eg if you write to your Girl in Naning
Nin Kan Shen me5?
( What are you doing ? )
and
Nin KUNT Shen me5?
(What are you Fucking ! )
You will be in HOT soup.
:-) :-) Better to study in Beida First, for a better chance.

ArtOfWar

By: Will

Will — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 00:13:49 +0000

Don,

You’d be better off finding a Chinese poem… Poetry never translates that well between any languages, let alone English and Chinese! My girlfriend and I use the poems about the cowherd and the weaver a lot, very appropriate for lovers separated by distance.

Will

By: don

don — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 16:04:34 +0000

I spoke English all my life I met a girl on internet from Nanning China,she quit a bit of English now yet still has to translate a lot of what I write her,I have some words,like a poem in English I wish to write in Chinese as a surprize and send to her,or is their somehow I can write in English myself and push a button and have it translated into Chinese so I can it my self,I want to write in my own hand writghting and mail in a letter to her in China,can you write for me if I email you what I want to have translated.thankyou Don P.

By: Singa

Singa — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 16:03:41 +0000

Hello everyone,

I am from a Chinese from Singapore, hence, both English and Chinese Languges are very commonly used in my daily life.

However, I would like to say that studying of Chinese should not be totally for the sake of China’s economic growth. Rather one should study for the interest in Chinese Culture and Art.

By: Chinese Tools

Chinese Tools — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 06:31:01 +0000

For beginners who want to get some basic knowledge about chinese, I can also advice you to try this online audio lessons:

http://www.chinese-tools.com/learn/chinese

It’s free and available with audio files for the pronunciation.
Hope you like it!

By: J Dangu

J Dangu — Wed, 16 Jun 2004 15:08:59 +0000

Dear All,

Some months ago I presented my Chinese learning software, Learn Chinese 2003.
Thanks to the support of many enthusiastic users I’m glad to announce the second version in this forum.

Features Summary
- Your personal wordlists
- A selection of 400 characters representing 70% of commonly used characters.
- A 16,000 characters dictionary
- Pinyin pronunciation for all characters

New features
- A comfortable user interface
- A new Toolbar
- Configurable list boxes
- Right click on your list to add / remove and more
- Change fonts : If you have installed Office, you can use SimHei for example, instead of MingLiu
- Resizable window, your custom size is automatically saved
- “Open list” / “Save list” more comfortable (date follow-up, support for long descriptions)
- A comprehensive help
- New quizzes !
- Character from pronunciation
- Pinyin tone from pronunciation
- Added a registration wizard

Fixed problems
- The word list is now hidden during quizzes
- When the current list is empty, quizzes and stats are warning you.
- Quiz engine recoded for more reliability
- Lots of Minor bug fixes

Check http://www.lchinese.com for the list of features !

Kind Regards,
Jerome Dangu.

By: Fu Yang

Fu Yang — Tue, 25 May 2004 12:15:51 +0000

Putonghua is not only beautiful, but useful. Though i do agree w/ the conunudrum presented by the majority of jobs using the language being in one State Dep’t or other… That said, i find Chinese to be quite easy to study. It is very different than English, but grammatically simpler. Tones must be internalized as meaning-bearing, that’s it. Soon tai1 wan3 sounds nothing like tai2 wan1. The way words are structured and synthesised in Putonghua continually delights me. And Putonghua is one of the world’s loveliest languages, along with Portuguese and Japanese (spoken by a woman, that is). Polish too is exquisite.
Being a polyglot in training, the one modicum of advice i can offer to all is: When met by seemingly insurmounatble crazy difficulties (like where the hell do I put le?), just accept that it’ll make sense later and move on (being a Christian helps this sort of cogitation, heh heh…;)

By: eggers

eggers — Thu, 13 May 2004 09:44:08 +0000

Chinese might have its easy points early on, but for advanced learners and translators, Chinese becomes increasingly difficult because of syntaxt. Chinese words do not correlate with their so-called English “equivalents”

i.e. the sentence - “AP News released the information on Saturday” in Chinese might read “AP NEWS XINGQILIU GONGKAI XIE XIAOXI.” Here, the word “released” alone means “released to the press”, not release as in “let him go” release, and not as in “release from your grip” release.

its one thing to say “WO YAO DIANCAI” (I want to order). its another thing to say “TAI GAOYUAN JINJI CAIDING - XUANPIAO HUNFANG YILV GAIJI WEI WUXIAO PIAO”. (Newspaper Headline for “Taiwanese High Court Rules Miscast Votes to Be Invalid”).

The Chinese learning curve is steep. And it gets steeper the farther you go.