Learning to speak Chinese can be difficult, but we have the guide for you. View our PPT to learn more. You can read the full blog post here. https://blog.laowaicareer.com/learning-speak-mandarin-road-ahead/

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It really isn’t as hard as
people told you it is. With
time and practice you can
be speaking Chinese!

2. When we talk about studying Chinese, what we
actually mean is studying Mandarin. Compared to
Cantonese, which is the second most spoken out of
around 50 languages in contemporary China,
Mandarin is far larger

3. Cantonese confined to Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Mandarin, on the other hand, is also spoken in both
these areas and the entirety of the rest of the country.
This did not come about as an accident. 100 years ago
there were more languages, and Standard Mandarin
was not known as standard.

4. The Mandarin of today is an amalgamation of
different dialects but is mostly made up of the old
Beijing one. The reason that it is so common today is
that it has been artificially promoted by the central
government for obvious reasons: one modern nation
needs one standard mode of communication.

5. When we talk about Mandarin language studies
people often say that they are rather tricky. They are
not a walk in the park, but it is my sincere belief that
people make it out to be a much more difficult task
than it is in reality. The thing we need to remember is
that Mandarin is very different from languages that
have been derived from Latin or the Germanic branch
of European languages.

6. But once those differenced have been dealt with,
learning the rest of the language is much less tricky
than it would seem when you are just setting out on
that particular journey. These initial bumps in the
road can be categorized into two distinct groups; the
difficulties of writing Chinese Mandarin and the
challenges of speaking Chinese Mandarin. I write
difficulties but in reality it is less about difficultness
and more about differences.

7. The first of these two categories, written Chinese, is
mostly hard because there is no alphabet. Instead,
you need to memorize a lot of pictures, aka
characters. The key to success in this matter lies in not
thinking of them as pictures when you try to commit
them to memory but rather thinking of them
regarding their underlying structure.

8. The two golden nuggets of information that you need
to become familiar with are the building blocks that
make up the vast majority of characters, called
radicals, and the way that these radicals are written,
the stroke order. Once you have these two concepts
firmly logged in your head you will begin to see the
characters as a process of writing and not as a
finished product. The picture is complicated, but the
way that it is formed is as easy as pie.

9. It is a bit like riding a bike really – once you get up and
going you will cover a lot of ground very quickly, and
you will never loose that initial effort you put in while
learning the first couple of hundred or so the correct
way.
The second of the categories, spoken Chinese
Mandarin, is mostly different regarding pronunciation.

10. The grammar is not that hard. Chinese Mandarin
pronunciation, however, is. It is hard because as we
know, Mandarin lacks an alphabet. Instead of being
made up of letters that make a sound when put
together we have pictures which give little or no
indication regarding how the words sound when
spoken. To muddle things up, even more, the
Mandarin language is not only dependent on
syllables, but it also involves modulation of the pitch.

11. This is what is more commonly known as tones, and it
makes Mandarin a tonal language. However, both the
difficulties with getting to grips with Characters and
their radicals and stroke order, and the trick to
wrapping your tongue around tonal modulation while
speaking, can easily be dealt with in a small class size.

12. Learning Mandarin without the individual attention of
a teacher is very hard. Although, once you have help
with pronunciation and writing it becomes easier. By
learning the language, you will hold the key to the
greatest paradigm shift of our century – the rise of
China as the economic and political superpower.

13. If you want to learn to speak Mandarin, you must
know that it is not an easy process. In fact, learning to
speak the language should not be done in a hasty
manner otherwise, you will end up learning the
language erroneously.

14. Here are some of the steps that you may follow to
learn to speak Mandarin properly:
First, you have to break the language learning goals
into smaller, more achievable and realistic goals. The
learning process is procession; wherein there are no
cutting corners towards achieving your learning goals.
The same philosophy should be applied to learning to
speak Mandarin. You must create short term wins.

15. For instance, you should start learning the characters
before learning the words and afterward, learning the
phrases. These short-term wins will lead you to
achieve the bigger goals of learning to speak the
language. For one, there are thousands of characters
involved in the Mandarin language.

16. It would be best to break down the number into
smaller modules that you have to learn on a daily
basis. The goal is studying one or a few characters at a
time. Master each character if you must, with which
comes mastering the entire Mandarin language.
Second, you have to consider having a language
buddy who is also learning the Mandarin language.

17. This person may be English or an other non-English
speaker. Nevertheless, figures show that the latter is
more efficient in learning to speak Mandarin than
English-speaking individuals. Perhaps, the reason
behind this is the wide difference in the English and
Chinese languages. If English is your mother tongue,
and you language buddies is not, you will not be
tempted to fall back in communicating in English.

18. Your partner will not understand what you are saying
as well, and you will be left with no choice but to
converse in The Mandarin language. So, choose a
non-English speaking language buddy, that is if you
are serious to learn to speak Mandarin. With this, you
will become more fluent in speaking the language
eventually. Considerably, you will not be ashamed of
the mistake that you are going to make since your
language buddy may make the same mistake as yours.

19. Third, you have to learn to speak Mandarin using the
most appropriate method for you. Again, learners
have different characteristics and thus, different
learning styles. The same with learning Mandarin,
there is no right method for each learner wherein one
method may be effective for a learner, but not for
another learner. Put simply, the learning method that
works for other language learners may not necessarily
work for you. Thereby, learning to speak the language
is not universal.

20. If you must develop your learning strategy, integrating
different language learning methods in your strategy.
Some of these methods are reading Mandarin comics
or books, watching Mandarin shows or listening to
Mandarin dramas on the radio. You have a lot of
choices that you may try, and then choose which of
them will work for later.

21. These are the three basic steps that you must follow. In no time, you
may determine the difference between a broken and a fluent Mandarin
speaker.

22. Bonus
Click on the link below to read the full blog post!
https://blog.laowaicareer.com/learning-speak-mandarin-
road-ahead/

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