How to learn Chinese on your own
The Chinese language and chinese to english is intimidating in its complexity. It seems to many that only superhumans with some special and mysterious “talent for languages” can learn it. It is not true. It is possible to learn Chinese, but it is really much more difficult than English. And a lot depends on the goal.
If you want to work professionally with the Chinese language, it is better to immediately find a teacher or sign up for courses. But the level of “survival” is quite achievable with independent studies. In this case, you should concentrate on colloquial phrases – writing will not be so useful. But in order to conduct business correspondence with business partners, the skill of speech perception, on the contrary, is not so important. Below we give tips on how to fully master the language. First of all, a few basic rules:
Get busy every day. This is critical. Without daily practice, knowledge will leak out of your head like water through a sieve. Therefore, 20 minutes every day is better than a five-hour marathon on Sunday.
Make a class schedule. In the absence of a teacher, it is difficult to control oneself. When difficulties begin (and they will), you will want to postpone the lesson for the evening, for tomorrow, for the next week – for later. Unfortunately, “later” may never come. To avoid this, box yourself in. Make a schedule and stick to it. It will help you separate your studies from the rest of your life and make classes a special ritual.
Don’t be afraid of difficulties. When you first start learning Chinese, you have to learn a lot of new information: unusual sounds, tones, characters, keys. But then the core of knowledge will grow faster and faster – like a snowball rolling down a mountain. It will become easier for you to memorize new characters when you understand what they consist of. And with the perception of speech there will be no problems when you master the tones and vocabulary. So the efforts at the initial stage will pay off handsomely.
Love Chinese. The best motivation for learning a language is sincere interest. With it, you do not have to force yourself to study, and you will learn new words and hieroglyphs not only from textbooks, but from a variety of sources. So if you started learning Chinese not out of love for the language or culture itself, but for practical reasons, try watching TV shows, listening to Chinese music, reading literature. In general, find something that will hook you.
And the last. Unfortunately, there are very few good materials on Chinese in Russian. Without knowledge of English, it will be much more difficult to master Mandarin, especially on your own. So if Chinese is your first foreign language, you should consider starting with something easier and more practical.