Archive for November, 2010

The best way to learn mandarin–online course

November 5, 2010

One can’t think about the best way to learn Mandarin without realizing that the Internet has changed our lives in so many ways, and has revolutionized the way we do a great many things. In the old days learning Mandarin was a difficult process at best. You would not only have to sign up for a class, but in all probability, if you wanted to truly perfect your knowledge of the language, you would have to sign up for a language club as well. Actually, an online Chinese language course might be the best way to learn and speak basic Chinese. Language clubs can offer their members a lot of interesting and highly beneficial activities, including interactive games, speaking with others who are also learning the language and absorbing more advance level of the language form those members of the club who have more knowledge of it. As it goes, this is an effective enough approach to study a language, the only drawback being that it can take up a lot of your time.

If learning Chinese is your only interest, of course it does not matter much, but if you work at a full time job or if you have a lot of other interests, or if you have a family, you might find going to both a Mandarin class and attending a language club to be too time consuming to suit you. The good news is that with the Internet today things are a great deal more simple, and the internet might be an easy way to learn Chinese. While there is much to be said for on site classes, there are great many more advantages to using the Internet. One of the most important factors is price. Programs in the Internet are much cheaper than a college class, for example, sometimes as low as the fifth of the price. Another advantages that the lessons are usually created by people whose level of the language is that of a native speaker.

Accent is all important in a language, and your local class may not always have a teacher with a perfect command of the language. With an online course there are many innovative and interesting methods of learning the language available, as well as interactive multimedia resources and of course audio and video available for download. In other words, an online course is the best way to learn Chinese language because it matches a college class for the level of knowledge you experience while retaining all the advantages of a more interactive approach. And now we come to the final advantage of an Internet training course for Mandarin – convenience. Learning over the Internet means that you can learn at whatever time you choose and at whatever pace you choose.

You no longer have to fit your Chinese class and Chinese language practice into your schedule. Instead, you can learn Chinese online over the Internet whenever you have a little time to spare and whenever you find it to be convenient. Isn’t that the best way to learn Mandarin? So, Internet training uses all the interactive capabilities of a modern computer, trains you in the fluency and accent of a native speaker, and best of all, lets you learn whenever you like. And that’s why I feel that learning over the Internet is the best way to study Chinese.

reasons to learn mandarin Chinese

November 4, 2010

We now live in a completely different world. It has gotten to the point that it is essential to speak Chinese Mandarin if you do anything internationally. More and more people from around the world especially in the United States are doing business in China. Most Chinese when doing business at home or overseas speak Chinese.This is why it has become essential to study and learn to how to speak Chinese.

It is therefore not surprising that many world leaders today can speak Chinese which makes this language very useful in government. A world leader who learned Chinese and attended Beijing University is Timothy Geitner. Another fluent Chinese speaker is Jon Huntsman who was a former Utah Governor and is now the Ambassador to China. When he was a missionary in Taiwan he learned Chinese characters and to speak Chinese and adapted a child from China. Another prominent leader is Kevin Rudd who is the Austrian Prime Minister known for being able to speak fluent Chinese Mandarin. If these world leaders do not inspire you to learn to speak Chinese Mandarin, then maybe knowing more about the Chinese culture will.

By trying to learn to how to speak Chinese Mandarin language, you begin a quest in learning about the Chinese culture which is more than 5000 years old. Additionally, by educating yourself when it comes to learning another language and culture shows that you are willing to have a better understanding as to how civilization came to be. Also, you will get to know more about Chinese art which includes Chinese poetry that normally gets lost in translation when interpreted in another language. Chinese poetry is known to be one of the most beautiful in the world and by understanding the language, you get the essence of what it truly means.

When you learn another language studies have shown that you create another viewpoint, which is another reason to learn Chinese characters. Research also shows that people, particularly children, who can speak more languages, are noticeably much smarter. This is because words trigger associations in the child’s brain. When numerous mental associations play in the head of the child, it brings about new ideas and opens their minds to new things which only get better with age. It is no wonder programmers claim that learning a new computer language keeps their minds fresh, bold and alert.

learn Mandarin Chinese in winter

November 4, 2010

Do you remember getting the winter blues as a child? I can almost guarantee that you cannot. The reason you did not get the winter blues as a child was because you loved the winter as much as spring and summer. What happened? You got older and found yourself a lot more in demand, you now have a job and you may be a parent or spouse. Now, what you have to do is to learn to use all of these demands as an avantage.

When you find yourself home during them cold days or evenings, why not use this time to learn to speak a new language, like Chinese. The most extensive way to learn Chinese is to take a class at a local School or College, if this is not something you can do, then your next step may be to try a computer software learning tool. If you want to start picking up a few words and simple phrases the easy way, there are a few methods you can use that will help.

To learn Chinese language, like any foreign language can be learned a little at a time.

One of the easiest ways to start learning a new language like Chinese is to start by using everyday situations and items that are all around us. A lot of folks do not even understand the power of these things, and the ability they have to allow anyone to learn a new language. Here are some things you can use in your daily life, to start learning a little basic Chinese, the easy way.

Turn the TV onto one of the many Chinese stations that are available on the satellite channels, this is a great way to start picking up some common words, greetings and phrases. Browse the Internet and use it’s resources: The Internet has numerous free sources to help you study Chinese. You can visit GOOGLE and use it’s free translator tool.

Here you can enter words or phrases and have them translated into Chinese.

Go to a Chinese area of your city, or town, where a lot of people speak Chinese, and listen to some conversations, this is a great way to pick up some words while hearing the correct way to pronounce them. Another great resource is to purchase Chinese for children books that are written in Chinese, books with plenty of pictures are perfect, as the words on each page usually relate to the pictures or scenes being shown. The next time you find yourself with nothing to do during the cold months, why not broaden your mind by learning to speak some Chinese, it’s a great way to help shake the winter blues.

There is a website that describes numerous activities and other methods to help eliminate the Winter Blues, this website is called: Winter Activities – and it may be found at this url: http://www.winter-activities.com

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Learning Standard Mandarin can be made a lot easier than mainstream opinion holds it today. The first thing you should do is naturally to come to China. The reason that being China is absolutely necessary is that even though there are ways to make learn mandarin easier, it is never going to become a walk in the park. You need to be here, on the ground, and experience the language in its natural setting in order to be successful. I have written a previous article for this web site where I clank down on studying the standard mandarin language in a university class size. I mentioned then that the two largest obstacles that you will be unable to tackle in an efficient manner in large class size in pronunciation and the Chinese writing system. This remains true.

Everyone can learn Chinese

November 3, 2010

I decided to come to Taiwan because I wanted to improve my Chinese, and heard Taiwan was a better place to do it. I had some friends who studied Chinese on the mainland, and they didn’t seem to improve that much, so that’s why I decided on Taiwan. I did all my research online.

Even though I speak Cantonese at home, I’ve hardly ever learned Chinese in class. All my schooling was in English, so I felt I need to work on that. I wanted to live and work in Asia, so even though I haven’t exactly decided how to use it yet, it will definitely be useful in one way or another.

I started in June last year, and it’s been really, really great so far. I feel like I’ve definitely improved a lot. It’s a separate department at NTU, the International Chinese Language Program (ICLP). Our schedule is basically three group classes, and one individual class a day. In the group classes, there are at most four students, so that means you get a lot of personal attention.Also, the workload, homework, is pretty heavy. Every day you spend 4-5 hours on homework. So I guess because it’s so intensive you improve. All the classes are in Chinese to learn Chinese language, meaning that they don’t explain it to you in English. I came in at the intermediate level; even though I hadn’t studied Chinese before I could still recognize the characters, so that helped. Keeping the scholarship is based on attendance, and there’s a term final, so you can’t fail that! But it’s not that hard to pass.

I think Mandarin’s definitely a lot easier to learn if you’re a non-Chinese speaker, because for not just Cantonese but all Chinese dialects the tones and grammar are really hard for foreigners to pick up. I don’t know how else to say it. Cantonese is definitely harder [than Mandarin] for foreigners. If you put a lot of time into it, you can learn Mandarin without an accent. but to learn Cantonese, or even Taiwanese, it’s really hard.

Shanghai bid adieu to the 2010 Expo, a six-month party for a booming China and the rest of the world.
The mega-event started with a few glitches, with suspicion and criticism ranging from excessive spending to poor preparation in facilitating services and crisis management, as well as visitors’ behavior such as faking a disability to jump the line.

All of these are valid methods for Learning Chinese although I can’t speak personally for the osmosis system (I do think you learn well by playing a Chinese MP3 just before going to bed though). The point here is to immerse you in the learning and the Chinese Language. To Learn Chinese intensively, even to listen to Chinese radio stations or watch Chinese films. I find listening to Chinese news very helpful – you get a good mix of different stories and the subjects are constantly changing. If you have the facility to record them you can play them back with Chinese to your language dictionary at hand. Even if you don’t get all of it, you’ll be surprised how much sinks in if you do it regularly.

So if we have to make a choice of one style of basic Chinese Learning, which should it, be? Not long ago we would have been restricted to either trying to learn from a book, a tape or a class. Now we have the additional resource of the pc and the internet and it’s a revolution in teaching.

How to speak Chinese?For the first time we can buy a single program which will allow us to listen to MP3s in the car, on the train or just walking around. The same program can challenge us with games and puzzles on the PC and give us written exercises as well. It lacks just a physical teacher to be the complete educational resource.

So if you were looking for a single method to learn to Speak Chinese fluently I would recommend one of the downloadable systems available online. If you’ve been looking into Chinese CDs you’ll probably have seen price tags in the $300 range but there are much more affordable and more extensive programs available for a third of the price or less.

learn Mandarin

November 2, 2010

Like most instances of learning, Standard Mandarin, the lingua franca of contemporary China, is imparted in a large classroom environment. A university class typically holds no less than thirty students per teacher. This is not optimal for most students, as those that desire to learn Mandarin are most often not familiar with the tonal nature of the language or the concept of character, as opposed to an alphabet.

Education, regardless if it takes place in a public or private institution, is a service. It is something of value that is imparted by one party onto another party without goods changing hands. It is the small things that make the big difference, in life, in products and in services. The difference between a manufactured product and an experienced service is this; in manufacturing, attention to details means that every product that is produced is identical, in services attention to details means that every experience is unique.

The answer to this is simple. There is a great social force that comes from how we are taught as children, Such as Chinese for children,which is a reflection of how our parents were taught, which go back until the public school systems around the world was formed. During most of this time, and still today in the vast majority of instances, there were not, and are not, sufficient resources in place to impart education as an optimal service. However, that is not to say that there have not been instances, and still are instances, where it is not possible.

Today the world is rich. By any possible standard we are wealthy. Even the poor are rich by the standards set for most of humanities time on earth. With the advent of computing, we took another step into the future. We made the first tool that did not make manual labor simpler, but actually made thinking simpler. With all this change, there should be sufficient resources, and new types of resources to reach for an excellent service in education in more instances.

To study Chinese should be such an area. The relative wage difference between western countries and China should allow for students to gain access to a much smaller class size than they are able to today. The benefits of a smaller class size are those that can be harnessed from more attention from the teacher. Those benefits can be divided into two categories.

The first of these categories is communication elicited by the teacher. In mandarin language studies such benefits will be mainly oriented to correction of pronunciation, which can be very difficult indeed. Not only is the Romanization of mandarin, called pinyin, in many sets of sounds, directly counter institutive. There is also an added dimension to pronunciation dealing with the pitch of words. There are four categories of words that even thought they are made up of the same letters, have different, and multiple, meanings.So if your kids want to learn Chinese for kids,these are important impacts.

The second of these categories is communication elicited by the students. It is basic Chinese.This is especially interesting for language studies in general, and therefore also by the subset of Mandarin language studies, because the individual ambitions each students have. A person will be interested in a small proportion of the language that other people will not care on iota about. This interest cannot be addressed in a large class size, as it would take up much more time than a teacher has available. But in a smaller class size this interest can be addressed and used by the teacher to impart more sections of the language.

The argument is dead simple. It should be possible, to a much larger extent than is done today, for a teacher to be alone with 5 to 10 students at a time. Especially for language studies in China. It is difficult to learn Chinese language. This action could be taken today and should be taken by private language schools, which have the resources to be able to teach in this way.

idea of learning Chinese

November 1, 2010

Hello, I just moved here from California. I am an English teacher, fresh out of college and to be honest I am really here because I want to learn Chinese characters. I am wondering, do any of you know of any good resources for foreigners how to learn Chinese fast? I’m doing the usual Language Exchange and make friends with the Taiwanese thing, but I still have a lot of trouble understanding. I’ve only been here two months, and have studied Chinese for 4 months total, with NO formal classroom training.

Also, I am interested in getting a Masters degree over here and am wondering if any folks know of any good programs or scholarships? I have a 3.5 GPA with an Economics degree and previous experience in the Financial Services industry. Why teach English? The US economy SUCKS, I always wanted to live in another country and learn a new language, and getting a job teaching English is pretty easy, and given that the cost of living is rather low in Taiwan compared to California it just all sort of made sense. Like I said, it is basically a doorway into this interesting culture that is Taiwan and greater China.

But in reality I cannot see myself in this crazy buxiban industry for more than 2 years but don’t necessarily want to return to America in 2 years. Thus I am searching for masters degrees. . I feel the buxiban prevents me from learning Chinese because the Taiwanese staff kind of freak out when how to speak Chinese. I know they are paying me to teach English, of course. Also I am very shocked at how many Taiwanese speak good english! In a way I am dissapointed because they all seem so obsessed with English and excited to speak English to foreigners that I don’t get much of a chance to speak Chinese other than when I buy stuff from shopkeepers (On a side note, I’ve been to Japan before and although it is a rich and educated society they don’t speak English NEARLY as well as Taiwan does!)

Yes, it is difficult to learn Chinese characters if you are in a buxiban. Speaking Mandarin in class will result in some parents complaining and then your boss. Especially since you are killing most of your free time speaking English with your girlfriend. I picked up Mandarin by hanging at local bars and talking to girls in Mandarin. At the beginning that can be difficult but every time your try you get closer to your goal.

How to speak Chinese?You should start to take some Chinese reading/writing classes and a formal course 2 hours a day 5 days a week, you will be glad you started as early as possible later on. If you want a solid career it’s better to start with something formal in the US though…my two cents.

Why should you learn Chinese?

November 1, 2010

For most Westerners the mystery of the Orient has always been cloaked in the seemingly impenetrable complexity of languages based on characters. The frustration of wanting to learn Chinese language is usually heightened by the fact that a ‘character’ can mean a word or a concept and for the Western mind to step away from the building of words from a set of 26 alphabet letters requires releasing the security so ingrained in our ‘inside the box, phonetic approach’ to learning language.

It the current era, lots of people are learning a second, third or even forth vocabulary. There are probably numerous reasons to learn languages other than your personal. Some people just love learning about foreign cultures, and therefore they choose to study an overseas vocabulary to help them understand the lifestyle even further. Others become familiar with a vocabulary such as Spanish or basic Chinese to help put together them for a profession which they hope to possess or for preparation to go to an overseas property.

If you’re considering starting to learn another vocabulary, no matter how old you are or of other languages you’ve learned, you should consider learning Chinese. There are numerous great reasons to learn Chinese. One of the biggest factors that i, being an artist, cherished learning Chinese was because of exactly how artistic and stunning to the eye the written Chinese language is. When I joined my first Chinese course I possibly could not really get over exactly how intriguing and fantastic this appeared on the chalk board. In fact, as the weeks of the course went on and i was getting frustrated by my failure, it had been the physical great thing about written Chinese which held me personally going.

Another great cause to start learning Chinese is which the nation the ones of The far east are unquestionably increasing as much as end up being some of the planet’s most powerful people. Business, travel and industry are increasing with The far east, therefore it will not harm you to begin learning Chinese.In addition,Chinese for kids is popular now for your kids future. In fact, Chinese would likely become the following world vocabulary and be used with the frequency of English. If you’re ever thinking about worldwide company or industry, or should you just like to visit, then consider critically exactly how learning Chinese online might be of benefit for you.

There are numerous ways to really begin learning Chinese. You can buy books in a local bookstore which provides you with the basics to start learning, or you can even purchase video or dvd and blu-ray models that will help you learn. A level better way to learn Chinese, however, is to enroll in the Chinese course in a local college or university. Getting in the classroom and becoming encompassed by other students might be the best way to really study Chinese language. Therefore take some time to research the opportunities with regard to Chinese that exist in your town. Or even perhaps you have the Chinese buddy that will agree to provide you with individual lessons. Better still.

Understand that learning another vocabulary such as Chinese could be fun and it is certainly valuable for anybody. Start the process today and also you won’t be I’m sorry.