Learning Chinese

WARNING

One of the comments to this post contains a link to a marketing affiliate Web site promoting Rocket Chinese. Affiliate marketing floods search engines with links to reviews and testimonies about a product, posted by people who are paid for promoting it, which come to the top of search results. To learn the truth about an affiliate marketing product, it is not enough to follow the first few links that come up in a search. If you don't already know of a reliable place to look for reviews, you may need to look through several pages of search results.

In this case I went through several pages of search results without finding any reviews of Rocket Chinese that were not posted by affiliates. I tried searching for language learning software, without any name, and I found this:

How to Choose Language Learning Software

I'm using Rosetta Stone language-learning software to help me learn Chinese. It's an immersion method, no English, only Chinese, with pictures.

Another way I'm trying to learn Chinese is by reading Tintin books in Chinese, using my electronic dictionary to look up the words. In the beginning, it sometimes took me days to find one word. Chinese characters are not phonetic. Most words are composed of one or two characters which may or may not have clues about how they are spoken. Here's a fictitious example:

#@

Those are not Chinese characters. I'm using them to represent a character that sounds like something between "dzai" and "tsai" and one that sounds something like "jien." The "jien" is pronounced with the tip of the tongue at the bottom of the lower teeth, and the middle of the tongue against the roof of the mouth. Both sounds are spoken with a falling pitch, like at the end of an English sentence. That means "goodbye." If the same sounds are spoken with a rising pitch, like at the end of an English question, or with a steady high pitch, or with a pitch that falls then rises, they might be written with entirely different characters, and mean something entirely different.

The easiest way I've learned to find Chinese words in my electronic dictionary is with the CKC system. The number keys represent various combinations of strokes. For example "1" represents a single stroke from left to right, horizontally or diagonally upwards, and "4" represents any combination which looks more or less like an x, a plus sign, or two plus signs in a row. I enter codes for the four corners of the character, then choose from a list of possible characters. In the beginning sometimes it took days for me to find the right combination for some characters.

Some time ago the government of the PRC (People's Republic of China) adopted a phonetic system for writing Chinese words, which in English we call "Pinyin." In Pinyin, the word above would be written "zai jian." To show clearly how it's pronounced, it would be written with accent marks over the vowels.

In Rosetta Stone, the words can be displayed in Chinese characters, in Pinyin, or both. First I went through the lessons using both, to help me with the pronunciation. Now I'm going through them again, using only Chinese characters, to help me learn the characters.