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Learning to speak the Chinese
Varinn
Vancouver, BCRegistered User regular
Vancouver, BCRegistered User regular
I understand how politically incorrect that title may be, so let me explain. My girlfriend was born in Hong Kong and both her and her family speak their local language of Cantonese, with little to no experience in Mandarin. I live in Vancouver, BC in Canada and we are an extremely culturally diverse city and my work is in an area where the population is easily 75% Chinese. My job involves dealing with many Mandarin speaking people who's english is poor and Mandarin is their primary language making it very VERY hard to figure out what the issues are with the machines they operate. I have done some searching and talked to my girlfriend about a desire to try and learn a language out of the two but she has been telling me they are very different in the details with Mandarin being the simpler of the two.
I was really hoping to learn Cantonese to help with talking to her and her family as I always feel rude not being able to join into conversations with her parents plus she would be able to help me practice what I learn. On the other hand, Mandarin is obviously the better choice in a professional aspect with a large amount of the people I work with speaking this language and I could likely use a few of my direct co-workers to help practice at work.
Which of the two languages would my fellow arcaders choose, and how should I go about learning it? Is it worth the cost of signing up for a once a week course at a college or should I learn the basics by grabbing some form of textbook (Rosetta Stone I believe is a popular choice?) or maybe software?
I was really hoping to learn Cantonese to help with talking to her and her family as I always feel rude not being able to join into conversations with her parents plus she would be able to help me practice what I learn. On the other hand, Mandarin is obviously the better choice in a professional aspect with a large amount of the people I work with speaking this language and I could likely use a few of my direct co-workers to help practice at work.
Which of the two languages would my fellow arcaders choose, and how should I go about learning it? Is it worth the cost of signing up for a once a week course at a college or should I learn the basics by grabbing some form of textbook (Rosetta Stone I believe is a popular choice?) or maybe software?
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That being said, your odds may be a little bit off from the normal person, given your personal relationships, so eh, that's up to you.
Your girlfriend is correct in that they don't have much in common. I don't know all that many details about Cantonese, but I think it has some vague number more tones than Mandarin? In which case Mandarin would be a bit simpler, but I don't know if the other aspects are as well. Either way, though, it'll probably be a challenge and it's a lot different than English, so their relative difficulty probably isn't such an issue.
As far as how to learn it... have you ever learned another language before? There are lots of different methods to learning a language, and some work better than others for different people, it's a very personal thing. You definitely will want more than just a textbook. A class would really be a nice idea, if the cost/time isn't too much of an issue, especially just so you can get some of the fundamentals down with a real person. If you can, I would recommend that as your core "method," and a book or software as a supplemental. I personally like the Rosetta Stone software, but that's fairly hit-and-miss, so try it before you buy it.
Really, though, the method that works best is entirely dependent on you. Practice, practice, practice!
And once you learn some, if you want to chat in Chinese just send me a PM, I like practicing my own
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I don't know if textbooks and programs would be as helpful as they would be for Latin alphabet-based languages. Do you want to learn how to read and/or write? It's kind of a different skill, and if you're not interested then I feel you might be better off focusing on speaking, for which you can also learn using transliterations off the Internet.
I only speak Mandarin, but the big thing that makes non-speakers stick out when they try to say hello or whatever is not paying attention to the tones. It's worse than Peggy Hill's Spanish. So when you learn a word or phrase, make sure you have the tones right, and write them down or do whatever necessary to make sure that you remember them. Spend however many days you need to learn to distinguish and reproduce the tones by ear before you start speaking to people.
I'm in a similar situation as yours, barring Mandarin having a use in my professional life. I took a couple semesters of it at the local university, and found it at least marginally useful when we visited her family in Hong Kong this summer. Between the few words I could pick out that were similar, and the English words that get injected in conversations I could at least tell the topic sometimes if not the actual content.
his mom is currently here and we just moved into the big house with her. Now she speaks english, but I think it might not be a bad idea to try and learn some Mandarin myself. Was thinking of Rosetta stone.
Although she has taught me how to say "big Cat' and 'little cat'. since we have cats.
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I think I may do some research into entry level courses for mandarin and see if when it comes down to it I actually want to follow through with this idea.
Not sure if I flew over it when i read the thread, but are you doing written Chinese as well? It is fun as all hell to learn the reading/writing system, and it can become a hobby if you like it enough.
Learning Cantonese is heaps harder, more tones and more complex characters. The key is to pick the one you are most interested in though, so you stay motivated.
Add to the fact that Pinyin is in Mandarin - you'll have an easier ride.
I've been using Chinese Pod and it's pretty useful. Uhh, and the My Chinese Coach game for the DS :oops: . Whatever works!
They are related, so learning one will help you learn the other, but they're different enough that you will have to put in the effort to do so. There are many people in Hong Kong who speak 3-4 languages anyway, so it's not impossible.
I've been recommending popupchinese to people because I've been listening to it myself and it could be fun to talk about if you are learning chinese with the aid of another person. As for Cantonese, I highly recommend starting out by learning to order delicious Dim Sum dishes, which coincidentally is the limit of my Cantonese, but that might be just me.
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Most people in China speak Mandarin, it's the official language. If you go to China and speak Cantonese, no one will understand you, except for people in Guangzhou.
If you plan to live in Hong Kong however and not go to China much, well, Cantonese would be your primary target, however, people in Hong Kong knows Mandarin too so.....
As far as language-learning tips. The best way to learn a language is immersion, another good way is make learning the language fun. Fun meaning anything that you think is fun, movies, music etc...
Now a really fun way to learn Mandarin is to watch Hong Kong movies (which isn't any different from your usual Hollywood stuff), all Hong Kong movies are dubbed in Mandarin so you don't have to worry there. But they are fun as heck to watch, and you can learn a lot of Chinese from it.
Some of them do, possibly even most of them. All I know is when I was there with my mum a few years ago we were having difficulties finding a certain location, we struggled to find someone who could understand mandarin and wound up asking for directions in English from some high school kids.
As for the professional Mandarin vs. the personal Canto, which do you think you'll keep longer? Your job or your girlfriend? :P Seriously though if you're anticipating a long-term career where knowing mandarin would be valuable then I'd go with that. If your job is a temporary one and you don't anticipate going into an international industry then it's worth considering Cantonese.
Finally, porque no las dos? A lot of people, especially in Europe, are multilingual. Admittedly learning Asian languages from a Western background is harder but if you're already going to learn one of them you might as well learn both. I'm Australian and I've got loads of friends who speak Cantonese, Mandarin and English. Admittedly they generally have Cantonese as their native language but with decent application I'm sure you approach it from the other side.