Mandarin Chinese Resources

Just like I did for Latin a short while ago, I'd like to give an overview of what resources I've been using so far for my very early stages of Mandarin. However, I need to expand the list with some decent content which I have yet to find. My goal is mainly spoken Mandarin, so learning the characters will have to take a back seat. The disadvantage is that I'll need to convert everything to pinyin which isn't always reliable because sometimes the exact same character is pronounced in different ways and with different meanings (of course!). However, this is just something I'll have to deal with.

THE BIG ONE: Assimil's Chinese with Ease (vol. 1 & 2)

I'm using the edition from 2005 which is the latest I believe - check it out at Assimil's site. You might find them cheaper to order from here and here if you decide to get them. Although the book says it was printed in 2005, it feels a little dated, as though the content had just been revised and brought up to date rather than being completely rewritten in 2005. I could be wrong about that, of course. In any case, although from just looking at the book one might get the impression that the book is somehow of a lower quality, that would be wrong. I've enjoyed the lessons so far, the audio quality is excellent and consistent (unlike the Latin edition!) and I feel like the pace is quite good. I can imagine being able to get through it at a pace of one lesson per day if I had just a little more time and focus. I see no reason why it was split into 2 volumes, except to either make more money or keep the book size more manageable like they used to. I got a good deal on them both when I bought them about 3 years ago, so I can't complain. I do appreciate the older style books precisely because they are smaller I can pop them into my pocket more easily and they have the built-in red cloth bookmark which I think is great. Of course, once I start doing the active phase (if I do it the way you're supposed to) it means I'll need to carry around both books with me all the time anyway!

There are some negatives with the audio, some of which were shared with Le Latin actually - no one seems to have bothered to tell the producer or the voice actors who is supposed to say what lines so if someone in a dialogue gets two numbered lines in a row, things can go haywire. I just did lesson 44 in this book which is a dialogue between a butcher and a shopper. It's all going smoothly until the butcher is supposed to say 2 numbered sentences in a row but the voice actors inexplicably swap on the second line and for the rest of the dialogue the shopper becomes the butcher and vice versa. Bizarre! I believe there's some of this somewhere in Le Latin, although it's hard to tell because sometimes it feels as though no matter what all of the voice actors are crammed into every dialogue. It's great to have a variety of speakers (well, four in both cases), but all in every dialogue? It overloads my primitive foreign language speech recognition circuitry!

Another comment that applies to both is that they are lacking in humour. However, the "humour" that was in New German with Ease was often so wide of the mark as to be utterly perplexing and certainly not funny, so I can live without out it in these books and don't count it as a criticism.

As for the text of the book, it doesn't aim to teach you the characters but it does show them with pinyin underneath throughout the whole book which has been allowing me to learn a few without trying too hard, which is great as learning the characters is currently not a goal for me. One review I read did comment that the Chinese text contains a lot of exclamation marks for no apparent reason, which I hadn't noticed so much before but now I can't help but notice. It's not really a big deal, though it'd be good to remove from a future edition. The typesetting and editing are both very good. I've only noticed the occasional error on a tone mark, etc. This is in stark contrast to New German with Ease which was riddled with type-setting errors and the inclusion of random bits of the original French version of the text splattered throughout the English version. Lucky the course itself was so good!

I'm almost halfway through the two books now, and although I haven't made the big effort I should be to talk (although I have had a few short chats), I feel like it is starting to sink in a bit, at least to recognise words that I know, which is an important attribute!

Verdict (based on only being half done and not having done any official test): RECOMMENDED!

Web Dictionaries

I haven't checked out heaps, but http://www.nciku.com has been good so far and has a nice interface. BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE: Call in the next 20 seconds and you get a free set of steak-knives! No, wait, that's not true, but if you are looking at a Chinese character somewhere away from your computer (let's call it "the real world") and you want to know the meaning, you can scrawl an approximation of the character into the box on Nciku's homepage and it will show you a list of possible characters that match your scrawl. It's been really good whenever I've needed to use it (which hasn't been very often so far) and my drawings were terrible, so it's very robust! I've also used ChineseTools.eu for measure words, although Nciku gives you these too. There are usually a few and I don't know enough to pick the best ones always so this is still a confusing aspect for me, but I try not to worry about it too much for now.

Understanding Radicals

Until a few days ago I still had my anki list for mandarin set to "recognise" as well as produce. This really, really slowed down my anki reviews. Since learning to recognise the characters is not part of my initial plan, I have dropped this for now. However, while I was trying to do this I decided that I needed to breakdown the characters into their components to improve my chances of remembering them. To do this, I used the excellent tool at Hanzicraft. See an example here. You can enter the component parts separately and see if that helps you make sense of the characters any better. There are some books on this topic and other resources which I'll look into in more detail whenever (if ever?) I get round to focusing more on the characters.

Online Radio and Podcasts

I don't have anything here yet. Something the equivalent quality of, and with equally interesting material, as DRadio, SWR2 or even DeutscheWelle, would be greatly appreciated if anyone wants to let me know in the comments below! I'm still in the early stages so I'll worry more about this later.

Past and Present Workmates

Mandarin speakers are really out and about in the world these days, and especially so in Sydney. In fact, as I've mentioned before, especially so in my current team which has two native Mandarin speakers out of five people (including me!) and one of the others understands it a little (he's a native Cantonese speaker). I also made good friends with a Mandarin speaker while I worked in Germany and I plan on practising on him a bit. I just recently sent him a short email which had 2 simple sentences in Mandarin. Sure, one of them was based heavily on the dialogue from Chinese with Ease which I had been reading most recently, but what better way to practise what you know! My two Mandarin workmates are most helpful - teaching me new words, correcting my tones, providing me with Chinese movies with English subtitles and not laughing at me too much. I tried out my first "original" sentence just two days ago on one of them, via instant message:

请来吧

I thought it just said "please come", which it does, but he laughed at me and said "I suppose you mean you want me to come and help you". Nice :-) He suggested instead:

有空来一下吗?

which means something like "have you got a moment?". It's literally more like "are [you] free to come a little?". When I told my other Mandarin colleague this story, she said that what I said originally makes sense and that she thought the second would be too long to remember. So, she's just being nice I guess.

I think as I learn more and more words and phrases, conversations with my colleagues will start to form more and more part of how I learn. They're very keen to teach their language and share their culture, which is awesome.

That's all for now. I'll post more (useful) resources as I find them. I'll also try to come up with a more testable goal than just finishing the Assimil course, but I haven't figured out for now just what that will be. Any suggestions will be welcome. My next post will probably be on a topic in German, just to mix things up.