Chinese for the Casual Learner

Introduction

Most users of our Chinese Language Center are enrolled in formal course of instructions, usually at the high school or at the college level. Therefore our initial tools were designed to supplement rather than to serve as the main instructions material. More recently, however, we have seen a lot of interest in us offering teaching materials for casual learners, usually travellers or businessmen who would find it useful to learn some basic Mandarin Chinese but do not have the time or inclination to devote to a formal study program. This section of the YellowBridge is designed to fulfill that need.

Our approach

The goal of this section is to support a limited range of learners. The lower end of the spectrum, which we could call "icebreaker" Chinese is for learners who just want to learn enough Chinese to break the ice with Chinese counterparts who are fluent in English. The higher end of the spectrum, which we could call "survival" Chinese is for learners who want to be able to communicate with Chinese speakers with little or no English skills, such as people you may encounter on a trip to China. So how do we intend to accomplish this?

• First of all, we will focus solely on the conversational aspects of the language. The written characters will be limited to a very few "survival" characters, such as the characters for "men" and "women" that you should look for before entering a public bathroom. However, we will still show the Chinese characters in case you need to point them out to a Chinese-speaking friend or tutor.
• Secondly, instead of a defined sequence of lessons we will have a set of short topics which few interdependencies so that you can study as few or many of them and in the sequence that makes the most sense to you.
• Thirdly, we will emphasize quality over quantity, i.e., it is better to be able to say a few important phrases correctly than to know a large repertoire of phrases that are used improperly or pronounced incorrectly.
• We will provide cultural notes where appropriate because there are times where a straight sentence translation may be correct grammatically but not culturally. For example, given a compliment, an English speaker is likely to respond by saying "Thanks" whereas the customary answer in Chinese would be the equivalent of "Who? Me?" (Nali, literally, where?).
• Finally, we recommend the use of online tools such as the online flashcards for memorizing new phrases and the YellowBridge Talker text-to-speech software to learn the correct pronunciation. While entirely optional, we believe that these tools have proven themselves with users of our Chinese Language Center.

Next

• Is Chinese Really Difficult? Get some basic understanding about the major differences between Chinese and Western languages.

Roadmap