How to Learn Chinese Through English

Learning Chinese can be difficult for English speakers.

The rapidly growing economic status of China has pushed the nation to the top of the list of desirable places to visit and do business. Learning Chinese will help ease communication difficulties when visiting China. Chinese, one of the oldest languages in the world, is made up of thousands of characters, and learning to read, write and speak Chinese can be difficult for a native English speaker. But, even though there are thousands of characters, there are a limited number of sounds. If you can learn the sounds, you can learn the language.

Things You'll Need

• Internet
• Computer
• Graph paper
• Pen or pencil
• English to Chinese dictionary
• Book on Chinese sentence structure
• Book teaching Chinese characters
• Native Chinese speaker
• Flashcards

Instructions

1. Learn Pinyin. In 1954, the Chinese government reformed the Chinese language and created Pinyin as a way of teaching Chinese phonetically. It's an excellent system for English speakers who cannot read Chinese characters. For example, the character for horse, 马, would be mǎ in Pinyin. Through Pinyin, you will learn all of the proper Chinese pronunciations and intonations. Pinyin can be learned for free online at InstantSpeak Chinese: Pinyin (see Resources).

2. Buy a book that teaches Chinese sentence structure such as, "Beginner's Chinese With 2 Audio CDs" by Yong Ho. Because Chinese sentence structure is different than English sentence structure, understanding it will help you speak coherently in Chinese.

3. Study vocabulary. Buy an English to Chinese dictionary such as, "Pocket Oxford Chinese Dictionary" by Oxford Dictionaries and study it to increase your Chinese vocabulary. English to Chinese dictionaries contain the Pinyin spelling of the Chinese word and the character.

4. Practice with a native Chinese speaker. Once you have learned Pinyin and Chinese sentence structure and increased your vocabulary, you are ready to begin speaking and listening. Hearing a native Chinese speaker will help you properly speak and understand Chinese.

5. 

   Mastering Chinese writing takes practice.

   Practice writing Chinese characters. Find a book on learning Chinese characters such as, "Reading & Writing Chinese: Simplified Character Edition" by William McNaughton. California State University Long Beach has an excellent website for writing Chinese characters (see Resources). Use a piece of graph paper with one-inch by one-inch squares. When you improve, you may use smaller squares. Begin with the simplest characters. The most complicated Chinese characters are created by combining several simple characters. If you begin with the most difficult, you will struggle.

6. Use flashcards to test your memory. Write a character or group of characters that you have learned from writing and see if you can remember the character and its meaning, and pronounce it correctly. If you do this once every day, you will grasp Chinese much quicker.

Tips & Warnings

• Pinyin is not English so do not try to pronounce it as such. Think of it as a language like Spanish or French, which use Romanized characters but have different sounds.

• Chinese has two main character styles: traditional and simplified. Simplified Chinese is the most commonly used on mainland China.

• Each line used in Chinese characters is added to the character in a pattern, so merely drawing the character is not enough.

References

• Omniglot: Chinese Script and Language

Resources

• InstantSpeak Chinese: Pinyin
• California State University Long Beach: Learn to Write Chinese Characters