Common Mistakes to Avoid in Learning Chinese

From research, we found some common mistakes made by many Chinese learners. We have listed some we consider serious one below. If you any happen to you, you’d better recover it.
Think knowledge as skill

Let’s take swimming as an analogy. Suppose you read a book on swimming to learn how to swim. Even after you have gone through the book and had professional knowledge on swimming, you are not able to swim. Why? Because swimming is not a kind of knowledge; instead, it is a kind of skill as well as Chinese language. Practice is not only the core of skill learning, but also the efficient way to turn the knowledge into application. You should learn how to use what you have learned through practice.
Believe in instant learning

I have no faith in some advertisements with slogan ‘learn Chinese in ten days’. Lots of learners fall into their traps, wasting time and money. Every serious learner should realize that no pain, no gain. There is no short-cut to learn Chinese, only existence of good way or poor way. For example, it is not good to recite a Chinese word by the way of dictating it as it only trains your eyes and hand. The good way is to keep your eyes on the word, write the words down and read it loudly as to improve your speaking and listening skills.
Use pinyin as character

I have read an article saying pinyin will soon take the place of Chinese characters in China. How ridiculous it is! There are only about 1700 syllables in Chinese and every character is single-syllable. There are more than 80,000 Chinese characters. What does that mean? It means that same pinyin leads to many different characters. So I strongly recommended that serious learner do not rely on pinyin too much, it is only used to indicate Standard Mandarin pronunciation. As an intermediate learner, you’d better read some books with no pinyin. If you encounter any Chinese symbol without knowing its pronunciation, consult this character in dictionary by radical and stroke method.
Lack of systematic learning

There are too many learning materials on the market. It is good as you will have more choices, but it will cause some problem. Some learners switch from one set of textbook to another frequently. The best way is to concentrate on a suitable set of text-book and have some other reading, listening materials as supplements.

Have not made any of above mistakes? congratulations! Go ahead. But keep in mind, always try to avoid them.

Elementary: Finding an Apartment

中国人和老外容易发生的10大误会 6

Top 5 鼓掌

　　当众发言的时候，如果别人给自己鼓掌，为了表达谢意，中国人通常都会暂停发言，而后随着听众一起鼓掌。 In this way he expresses his thanks to the audience. 可是老外就不理解为何要自己给自己鼓掌。自己给自己鼓掌，多不谦虚啊。Of course, when a Chinese speaker claps his hands as the audience is applauding, he is not applauding himself, but expressing his thanks to his audience. As noted earlier, Westerners feel puzzled when watching such a scene, since they think the speaker or the performer is applauding himself. 所以，以后老外在场，发言的人不妨用鞠躬或者挥手代替鼓掌。当然，微笑站立也是一种选择。

Chinese Characters

Chinese Characters are the foundation in Chinese language. If you totally have no idea of Chinese language or Chinese symbols, we recommend that you read the Chinese Character Overview first.

How to Write Chinese Characters

Chinese characters consist of strokes as their fundamental elements, the same way as English words consisting of letters. The stroke order refers to the way in which Chinese characters are written. The stroke order of a character gives the order and direction in which the strokes are written.

Here is an example how the character 永 is written stroke by stroke. The number of strokes is five. The number of strokes of Chinese characters varies from one to thirty.

» Tip

The number of strokes used to make each character is used as index when you come to look them up in a dictionary.

How to Pronounce Chinese Characters

There is a large and very diverse group of Chinese dialects spoken across northern and southwestern China. Standard mandarin is the official spoke language in Mainland China and Taiwan. In English, phonetic alphabet symbol provides the way how to spell the words. In Chinese, pinyin, a system of Roman alphabet, is used to express the sounds of characters.

For example, the character 车 means vehicle. Chē is pinyin for the character 车, while [`vi:ikl] is phonetic alphabet symbol for vehicle.

	Chinese	English
Pronunciation	chē or che1	[`vi:ikl]
Writing	车	vehicle

Pinying Tone Chart

There are four tones represented in pinyin by marks above the words. The tone of a Chinese symbol indictaes how the pitch of the speaker's voice changes as the character is said.

The diagram to the right shows the pitch changes of the four tones on a five-bar scale going from lowest (1), to highest (5), while the four tone marks are:

First tone	ˉ	high level
Second tone	ˊ	middle rising
Third tone	ˇ	low dipping
Fourth tone	ˋ	high fallin

There is also a neutral tone which is unstressed and usually goes unmarked.

Pinyin with tone	Simplified Chinese Character	English meaning	Name of tone
mā	妈	Mother	1st tone
má	麻	To bother	2nd tone
mǎ	马	Horse	3rd tone
mà	骂	To blame	4th tone
ma	吗	Grammatical marker used in a question.	Neutral

» Tip

As it is hard to type mark above pinyin in computer, 1, 2, 3, 4 is commonly used to represent 1st tone, 2nd tone, 3rd tone and 4th tone separately. For example, mā is written as ma1

Newbie: Do you have....?

Mandarin Lesson : Telling time in Chinese Part 1