What do you recommend for a person living in the United States and learning Chinese for personal growth and does not expect to ever travel to China or do business with any Chinese companies. Most or all of the conversation would be for pleasure with Chinese Americans or other Chinese language students. Reading would be the local Chinese papers or restaurant menus and any opportunity to speak the language would probably be in Chinese restaurants or in the Chinese markets, culture centers or  China town. I took one semester of Mandarin Chinese and the instructor seemed adamant that we learn both simplified and traditional and at the time didn't seem so overwhelming in a classroom setting. However the class was cancelled after  the one semester and learning both styles on my own has become rather tedious. I am just wondering if I should buckle down and keep learning to read and write both or if it would be a better use of my time and energy to concentrate on one or the other, and if so which would be smartest given my current interest in learning. I noticed that the lessons give .pdf in both simplified and traditional so it is apparent that even after more than 50 years of simplified coming to be that traditional stills seems to have some place in Chinese language. Does anyone have any practical experience as if both are important or should one study just one or the other. And if I were to ever have an opportunity to visit some part of China would I be kicking my self for not studying both or find that I wasted my time studying both? What about school children in China, do they still learn both or is it just simplified? Are there other regions that do not recognize simplified besides Taiwan? 

hi i am Jesslyn B. i am learning Chinese so that i can know at least something if i ever go to china someday. i am very intrested in hereing about anything of china, or there language.

hi i am Jesslyn B. i am learning Chinese so that i can know at least something if i ever go to china someday. i am very intrested in hereing about anything of china, or there language.

Hi everyone,

I'm surfing around the web looking for Chinese language resources and I came across this one.

Looks great and I maybe looking forward to learning more Chinese on Chinese pod.

Is Chinese pod team from Shanghai? the 3 of you? where is the Shanghainese male teachers for Chinese?

I've always thought they were great as I had one in college, is China short on Chinese language male teachers?

大家好。

This is a question that's been bugging me for a while. I've been studying Chinese for a few months now, and I'm now able to speak more quickly and still retain the proper pronunciation and tones.

However, I'm still at an Elementary level, so when I  do speak at a faster pace, my sentences become a bit choppy. Some words will be clustered together and spoken more quickly than others. If I want to maintain the proper rhythm, devoting the same amount of time to each character and spacing them equally, I have to speak painfully slowly.

My fellow poddies, which method do you think is better? Personally, I feel that I should speak as quickly as I am able to while retaining the proper pronunciation and tones. I think that the rhythm will eventually even out as I practice more and listen to native speakers more. I should note that when I do speak at a more rapid pace, I'm still trying to emulate the natural rhythm of native speakers, it's just very difficult at my current level of progression.

Furthermore, if a non-native English speaker was speaking to me, and his pronunciation was acceptable but his rhythm was off (I think English is very tricky in this regard), I would think nothing of it. But if a non-native English speaker was speaking to me and dragging out sentences from here to eternity, I would find it quite odd indeed.

Any insights you guys might have would be greatly appreciated.

谢谢

Yesterday evening my (Chinese) collegue and I discussed what would happen if China in fact abondoned 汉字 and switched to Pinyin only.

We agreed that Pinyin is virtually unreadable - pure pain, due to all the ambiguities and homophones. But would this in fact foster a slow change of the language? At least the written language can be expected to be altered - more multi syllable words, more redundancy, more words with distinct pronounciation.

And would this also feed through into the spoken language? Or vice versa: Does Chinese have so many homophones because of its semantically rich characters? Changye's posts on the development of tones and sounds seem to support this hypothesis (e.g. sounds that fell together over time, tones that vanished - all more widespread in Mandarin than in dialects that are primarily passed down in spoken form).

My collegue made a good point - if this would be true, you should be able to observe similar effects in Japanese, as Japan has already left pure 汉字 behind by introducing hiragana and katagana. Did this have an impact on the language?

Any linguist out there who knows more?

Hello, all

This post is intended as a place where people can exchange their thoughts on translation as it relates to language learning. Please share your own suggestions and experiences in learning Chinese or any other language. Here are a few suggestions for discussion:

• Is it effective to literally translate every word in an article or story as you read? What are the advantages and disadvantages?
  
• How do you choose the appropriate meaning, when a given character has many interpretations?
• What is the role of cultural knowledge in understanding a phrase or story?
  
• How do you preserve tone and clarity? 
• How do we deal with profanity and slang? For example, a recent discussion dealt with the curse word 王八蛋 wángbadàn. Would a literal translation be effective here? How do you store the word in your mind?

This discussion is open to everyone, at all levels of Chinese. I'd be very interested to hear from people whose native language is not English. How did you learn English? How did that process differ from the way in which you are learning Chinese?

I hope that this discussion will shed some light on the ways in which we learn and, ultimately, master, foreign languages. I have my own opinions and methods, but I want to hear and learn from you.

Any thoughts you share will help me and the CPod team to understand your thinking better, with the goal of helping you learn Chinese.

I'm going to China in a couple of weeks and I hope to buy some good Chinese learning materials. Any books you recommend? I'm somewhere between intermediate and advanced.

I thought this NY Times article was interesting.  But maybe only for Americans.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/nyregion/22chinese.html?th&emc=th

First off, if a topic for this exists.. oops?

I think music is a great tool for language learning, it's how I learned emotion words in Thai - and I hope that it will work the same for Mandarin Chinese. However, I've been trying to find some Mandarin Music that differs from the mainstream bubblegumpop boybandy stuff that is around (not that I don't love a good fluffy song once and a while).

Can anyone reccomend any good Mandarin Language Indie bands? I stumbled upon Sodagreen, Crowd Lu and 1976 after some searching - but I can't find much else. Suggestions appreciated!