There are so many online language study resources that it requires quite some work to evaluate them and decide which to use or follow. Many of them are paid services, some are based on language exchange, and some are just free. I do think that many of the paid classes can be very useful, and I am ready to pay for good Chinese classes. However, the problem is that there are so many of them that it is very hard to decide which one to follow and I was too worried about regretting a costly decision (being a paid service doesn’t necessarily mean being a good service). I think I’d also rather pay for real-life Chinese classes.

It’s not much easier with the free resources though, and it took me quite a while to go through the abundance of language blogs, language classes that pretended to be free but then ask for credit card details, video based, text based, pinyin-only, or podcast classes. Many would cover only very basic Chinese. Some did not provide enough explanations on grammar. Some talk too fast. Some provide only simplified characters. Or no characters at all. Some have a horrible user interface, some cannot be used on Linux.

I am now sticking with two e-learning classes and one exchange platform. I learn new vocabulary and grammar in the classes and then compose texts (or rather, loose sentences), which are corrected on the exchange platform.

Online classes
In the jungle of online resources I found two classes that I am now following on a regular basis. One is a video-based programme from the mainland and uses only simplified characters. However, it is very good in many other aspects, so I do the extra work of looking up the traditional characters. It starts from zero but advances quite fast. Each class takes 15min, introduces some everyday vocabulary and explains some grammar. It features the family of the Chinese teenager 小明 and the American exchange student Mike. Their stories are fun to watch. The programme is provided by the Chinese Television and can be found here: Growing up with Chinese.

The other is provided by the Taiwanese government and has pretty much everything: Video lectures, grammar overviews, reading practice, traditional characters with the option to toggle the simplified version, and pronounciation in Zhuyin and Pinyin. There is a strong focus on listening, and each sentence is repeated many times on different occasions, in different speeds, and by different speakers. At the end of each lecture there are exercises based on listening comprehension, character recognicion, Zhuyin/Pinyin pronounciation, and grammar. The Programme can be found here: Speak Mandarin in one Thousand Words. The Taiwanese government provides many more useful resources in their Digital Publishing System.

Language exchange
On language exchange platforms, users support each other learning languages. This can include correction of exercises, correction of texts, explanations on grammar, semantics, or culture related issues. I had a quick look at three popular platforms and sticked with one of them.

There is Livemocha, which looks fancy, but doesn’t work on Linux. Yes, that’s pretty weird since it’s a web-based service. I did make it work by running Firefox in Wine, but then abandoned it because I was overwhelmed by its features. The same feeling I had with Busuu. For me, there are just too many features. Too many colorful, blinking things that conceal structure. Livemocha and Busuu not only offer correction by fellow language learners, but a whole learning programme, with lessons and quizzes. I found the lessons to be unstructured and the quizzes to be much too easy.

And then there is Lang-8, which I have really gotten to like. It’s very simple: Write anything you want in your target language and get it corrected by native speakers. In turn, correct stuff other people wrote in your native language. Very straightforward! There are some annoying advertisements in the free version, but I understand that income has to be generated somehow. There is a paid version which eliminates the ads and lets you add more than two target languages. Lang-8 is a lot of fun. I can choose what I want to correct, and I got to correct some really fun texts in German written by people around the world. My Chinese writings usually get corrected on the same day. Often one text is corrected by more than one person, and it’s interesting to see different opinions about some mistake I make.

Supermarket

Last Wednesday morning I had my first Chinese conversation, which was in a small grocery store buying green milk tea, a banana, and a bun, and was mainly about numbers. I managed to understand and repeat the prize, say the amount of money I was giving and the amount I was getting in return. Then the guy asked me where I was from (and I understood!) and I answered (and he understood!). Context certainly helped a lot here, but nevertheless, this first Chinese conversation with a stranger made me very very happy. I think I will be a regular customer in that grocery store.

Rain shelter

When I was caught by sudden and heavy rain last Thursday, I quickly moved to the closest shelter, and so did a Chinese woman. She tried talking to me, and although I did not understand everything, we did manage to exchange information about where I am from, her kid, my husband and his origin, what I am doing in Taiwan, and how long I am staying. She tried to speak clearly and slowly and we did use Pleco  a little. But still, I think I can call it a successful conversation.

The writing system

For a European, learning Chinese is a challenge quite different to learning another European language.  In particular, its logosyllabic writing system adds another dimension to the learning process as there is no relation between the pronunciation and the written form of a word. For any language based on an alphabet, a word can be seen as two dimensional: (1) its semantics and (2) its pronunciation and written form, which are directly related. Chinese adds a third dimension by splitting the second, the pronunciation and writing. This additional dimension makes my brain work significantly slower when it comes to remembering a new word.

Now, when learning a European language as a European, say, Spanish as an Austrian, the usual approach is to first know the alphabet and then start off with some useful, every-day language, like the words with the semantics of “please” or “thanks”  along with their written form based on the alphabet. For Spanish that would be “por favor” or “gracias”. Try this with Chinese: 謝謝 (or 谢谢 in the simplified version). Pronunciation? Can be tranliterated by “xièxie”. How is this actually pronounced? Well, that again is a different story to which I will get back later.

It is important to know how to say “thank you” and I think that it should be the first phrase  one should be able to say in any language. However, a brain completely inexperienced with Chinese characters might not be able to cope with the 3-dimensional attack of semantics, pronunciation, and character. At least mine wasn’t. I ended up spending hours writing the same complex character over and over again with the result of forgetting it three days later. Sounds frustrating and so it was indeed.

The problem is that the words usually learned first are not the ones represented by the most simple characters. I researched a bit on how other people deal with this problem and found that this had been recognized at least by James W. Heisig, who wrote several books on how to remember Hanzi and Kanji (the Chinese and the Japanese version of the characters), e.g., Remembering Simplified Hanzi, and by Zhang Peng Peng, who wrote the trilogy of “Intensive Spoken Chinese”, “The Most Common Chinese Radicals”, and “Rapid Literacy in Chinese”. Both authors promote a separation of semantics/pronunciation from semantics/character for the reason described above.  This means that in the beginning, the student should follow two separate lines of vocabulary: (A) containing words studied with their semantics and their pronunciation, and (B) containing words studied with their semantics and their character. (A) will start with words frequently used in daily language, like “thank you”, or “my name is Alice”. (B) will start with words represented by simple characters, such as 口 (mouth), 日 (sun), 月 (moon) and then follow up with characters containing these characters, like 明 (bright), 朋 (friend), or 唱 (sing). With progress, the overlap of the two sets will increase.

I am currently studying Heisig’s book by myself for the (A) set, and taking Chinese classes (group and individual) and working with Zhang Peng Peng’s “Intensive Spoken Chinese”, which comes with a CD, for the (B) set. For the overlap of the two sets, I use “Rapid Literacy in Chinese”. For both sets, I use hand-made paper flashcards and electronic Anki flashcards. All material concerning (B) is based on the simplified version of the Chinese characters, which for me, being in Taiwan, is not optimal, and I am not yet sure how to deal with it.

The pronunciation

The pronunciation is the second big challenge for a European learning Chinese. It is based on four tones plus a neutral pronunciation. A tone is a certain way of modifying the pitch of a syllable. It can be high and stable (tone 1), rising (tone 2), low and falling, then rising a little bit (tone 3), and falling (tone 4). But it’s not just the tones. Additionally there are many diphtongs and triphtongs and, for many Europeans quite unintuitive, different sounds of “Sh” and “S”.

Several phonetic alphabets have been introduced in the past to transcribe Chinese. The most widely used is Hanyu Pinyin, which is based on the English alphabet with some extensions. In Mainland China, almost all transcriptions are in Hanyu Pinyin. However, here in Taiwan, Pinyin is hardly used anywhere. An alternative system to Pinyin here is Zhuyin fuhao, also known as BoPoMoFo, which is the pronunciation of the first four letters ㄅㄆㄇㄈ. As can be seen, it is not based on the English alphabet. BoPoMoFo consists of 37 letters divided into three groups: (A) Letters that are only used at the beginning of a syllable, (B) letters that are used in the middle or the end, and (C) letters that are only used at the end. Each syllable therefore contains one, two, or three letters in BoPoMoFo. In Taiwan, many books for children have a BoPoMoFo annotation. Since they are usually written in traditional style, that is, top down, this annotation fits in very nicely. I have been learning Pinyin-based Chinese so far, but am currently switching to BoPoMoFo in order to be able to practice with such books. I have the feeling that BoPoMoFo captures the sounds more nicely and helps me to learn them without the bias of the English alphabet towards specific (English, German, or even Spanish) pronunciation.

The grammar

At last, some good news. Most of the complicated grammar we have to deal with in European languages doesn’t exist in Chinese. No articles, no cases, no tenses, no subjunctive, no declination. Only a somewhat strict word order, however, this is actually very useful as it gives good indications when it comes to understanding spoken or written Chinese.