Learn Mandarin ChineseSo you're considering learning Chinese. It's spoken by 1.12 billion people, in 5 countries, and is ranked the 6th most influential language in the world. As we all know, there are sizable populations of Chinese speaking people living in cities all around the world. As an example, San Francisco probably has the largest Chinese-speaking population of any city outside of China.Of the different dialects, Mandarin is spoken by 836 million people. It is the official language of the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan, and it is the most widely-spoken form of Chinese, so it's a very good choice. However, it has to be admitted that Chinese is not an easy choice. Chinese doesn't have an alphabet, so you'll have to learn each word. In an effort to make the strokes of Traditional Chinese easier, we now have Simplified Chinese - but "simplified" in this case does not mean simple or easy. As well, the Chinese language is a tonal language. What does that mean? It means that any given word changes it’s meaning depending on which tone you use. For example, Mandarin Chinese has four tones: flat, rising, falling then rising, and falling. However, other Chinese dialects can have as many as nine tones. Yes, that sounds very intimidating, but don't despair; more than a billion people before you have been able to master it, so if you practice, and stay committed, you can master it too. Free Online Resources to Learn Mandarin ChineseLanguageGuide.org provides a great deal of Chinese vocabulary words. Since it uses pictures and audio, it's great for both children and adults.The Western Kentucky University has provided a site for parents who have adopted a Chinese child and want to learn Chinese. The site is a good beginning, and includes online audio for pronunciation of Chinese phrases and sentences. Check out their other Chinese pages as well. Free Online Chinese GrammarChineseon.net provides free courses explaining Chinese grammar, including: nouns, verbs, auxillary verbs and adjectives.The site also provides a course that gives full information of
pinyin,
including Alphabet, Shengmu and Yunmu lists, as well as the pronunciation methods and standard pronunciation. Here you can learn pinyin and build up a solid basis for your further study on Chinese.
Free Online English - Chinese DictionaryA good free online English to Simplified Chinese or Traditional Chinese is http://www.freetranslation.com/ It's simple to use, and you can translate words, phrase and paragraphs. Unfortunately you can not go the reverse direction from Chinese into English with this dictionary.Another free online dictionary is Babel Fish Translation This dictionary allows you to translate from English to Simplied Chinese or Traditional Chinese and also goes in the reverse direction of Chinese to English. It allows you to translate words, phrases, paragraphs even websites. Site NavigationBack to - Learn a Foreign LanguageBack to - Course Ideas |
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