Top 12 Best Practices for learning with Cpod

哈哈，精彩

Actually, listening with Pimsleur all those months made me notice the "r" and the "c" and the "zh" among other things. But overall, I'd say we're in violent agreement.

Hi Chris,

Nice to hear from you too.

It's a subtle point and doesn't interfere with understanding, but it does seem to be one of the most noticeable elements of many advanced learner accents. Actually, this is kind of what's behind the taibei taipei spelling weirdness.

Your tutor may or not be adept at looking for this (people seem to vary in their talent for discerning and offering fine corrections, ie most will know one sounds a little off but few can readily identify the source). If it helps, the term for voiced is 浊音, and for voiceless is 清音. When I first started I trained myself not to voice by holding my hand on my throat and first saying the consenent followed by the vowel...it took a while but it seems to work. The key is to make sure the vibration in the throat waits for the vowel to start.

One way to understand it is in pairs, and how they get distinguished in Chinese vs english. p to b, t to d, k to g. In english the one on the left is aspirated moderately (medium puff of air from mouth), the one on right is voiced with no aspiration. In Chinese the left one is strongly aspirated (should feel a much stronger puff of air), and the one on the right is simply nonaspirated, but remains unvoiced. I guess the stronger aspiration is accounted for by the lack of voicing as an additional distinguishing factor.

Anyway, I started from pinyin at the begining and then some 6 months in had to do a whole one hand on the throat one in front of the mouth thing to rework and correct the voicing and level of aspiration...I'm just speculating I could have avoided some of that had I not drawn so many associations from the beginning. But perhaps it is something that has to be specifically practiced anyway, as its somewhat alien to us to not aspirate and not voice at the same time (except for some odd places in english - I seem to remember something like the p in spy is unaspirated and so is like the chinese b, though its been awhile). At any rate, I still hear the voicing in very advanced learners, so I don't think it goes away naturally, or maybe just not for most people.

Good to hear from you tingyun - I must say I've missed your informative posts, although I well understand the pressures of work.

On your example of the "b" sound above, I can honestly say that I've never thought of it any different from the english "b" sound (and the "d", "t", "k" for that matter although I am conscious of the "c" difference). You've got me worried now that I'm missing a fundamental pronunciation point. I've recently started using a tutor in addition to the CPOD resource and will make a point of asking her about this.

The long term result might be better if some exposure to the sounds happens before pinyin - for example, "b" in Chinese is substantially different from in english, and probably seeing the pinyin along with the sounds right from the start causes people to reinterpret what they are hearing into what they expect to hear, and inculcate bad habits that could have been avoided if they had a more open mind to the sounds from the start.

These sort of subtle differences are probably hard to train in later, and at least in my experience it seems that this sort of improper voicing of consents that should remain clean (b, d, g, z, etc) imported from english is what gives many learners of chinese such a harsh and unpleasant accent...of course similar things could be said about not aspirating strongly enough consents like p, t, k, c, or doing funny things with vowels, like how most Americans say the ao sound as if it were 'cow', smiling wide and creating a very odd sound.

It seems getting some good solid sound exposure before trying to identify them down into hard concepts of specific letters associated with one's native tongue would be helpful in this regard, though ultimately would probably still need a teacher with a talented ear to help completely master. But it probably means sacrificing speed at the beginning....

Anyway, just doing my every couple of months nostalgia satisfying stop by chinesepod - still practicing Chinese some 30-40 hrs a week but the demands of work have left little time for forum browsing. Nice to see so many familiar users still here!

I definitely agree with you on the usefulness of a teacher. Also, I agree with you about the link to the mother tongue. The danger I see is that people can, and do, use pinyin as a guide without tapes, teachers or anything, and then think their pronunciation is ok. I've heard the resulting mess.

I also agree with you about the flexibility around not wanting to learn characters at first. I didn't focus on characters at first either, so pinyin proved pretty handy as a continuing suggestion on how to pronounce new characters. But that was after I had a decent grounding in pronouncing the approximately 200 1st tone characters. I didn't learn to pronounce without guidance. I also had a teacher many moons ago, then used Pimsleur over and over again before I came to cpod.

I reread what I wrote for #8, and I probably should have said that "First time learners: DO NOT USE PINYIN AT FIRST or STANDALONE!" The cpod pinyin guide has pronunciations along with it on the website, but not all guides have pronunciations that can be listened to.

But at the same time, I don't get it. Mrnickjacobs, you seemed to do what partly I was suggesting anyway, if I read your post right: your teacher was guiding you. You didn't throw away the pinyin guide, but you could have. In fact, I don't have any data that supports this, and I would love to see some hard data rather than play dueling anecdotes, but I'm thinking you might have made faster progress learning the tones and basic pronunciation by focusing on the sounds, rather than looking at the guide. But I suppose it works both ways. For example, the difference between xiang4 and shang4 is really subtle (or at least for me it was), but maybe the pinyin guide anchored your intuition faster about the sound differences.

I guess this would have been one of the concrete differences between us foreigners and Chinese; there's no such thing as learning pinyin without characters.

'pinyin would mean a easy way to collect vocab, write stories about yourself, jot down new words to ask your teacher about'

Pinyin on its own is not very useful, and that is being kind. I guess it can lead to interesting guessing games. It is only useful as a pronunciation guide and for input on electronic devices.

No major embarrassment at all! I had to think hard about what overreaching means. I wondered like chris whether you meant over-arching but didn't think of far-reaching. 'Far-reaching' is a good description ... :)

So I apologise, I did not interpret your meaning accurately. Pinyin is everyday useful (phone and computer input etc.) I just find it annoying when adjacent to something I'm trying to read.

They could have bypassed it, but with pinyin being something that could really be nailed in just a few months, wouldnt it first be better to have that visual link from your mother tongue to the alien new language that is Chinese? The benefits are numerous and its a much more welcoming start to a new language.

What about if you didnt want to get into the world of writing characters? Without wanting to bring up the discussion of whether it is worth learning to write or not, if you were one of the many that wanted to just be able to speak, having pinyin would mean a easy way to collect vocab, write stories about yourself, jot down new words to ask your teacher about or whatever method you were doing that needed a moment of pencil to paper.

I also think mp3 or language tape tools are a good support, but a teacher is essential. The number of times I thought I was saying it right when I wasn't were numerous, and without someone there to correct me I would have become fixed in bad habits.

On the subject of before pinyin, if I'm correct, pinyin was officially introduced in the 80's as a way to standardize the nation's wide range of different pronunciation for the different characters, as an aid for children learning Chinese and to make learning Chinese more accessible for foreigners. This also coincides with when radio and TV started to became more widespread, and therefore the need for 'standarization' came about.

This leans to the idea that before an officially adopted system like pinyin, characters were taught only by sound and therefore could have had a whole range of permutations on pronunciation based on the area being taught.

Oh, no, I wanted to say "far-reaching". Major embarrassment!

oops, I'd completely misread her post and thought she'd meant "over-arching"!

'The benefits are overreaching'

I'm not absolutely sure what Jenny means by 'overreaching' but I will hazard a guess, and if anyone thinks I have it wrong please come in.

Overreaching (I think) usually means somehow being defeated by, for example, 'biting off more than you can chew'. So 'benefits' can't really be overreaching as such. The learner may be overreaching by relying too much on pinyin?

I think Jenny is saying that the benefits are modest once you pass the beginner stage - you need to expand your learning and not depend too much on pinyin.

I agree that it is better to listen to the sound, and learn by repetition. But I might die before I learn to my satisfaction relying only on this method. So I still resort to pinyin in certain circumstances. You should drop it in reading as soon as you can in my opinion.

Actually, for discussion's sake, I totally disagree. Anyone using a fluent speaking Chinese teacher for weeks and months (hopefully years) could have totally bypassed pinyin, and gone straight to learning character pronunciation.

I would love to hear how Chinese learned pronunciation all these many centuries. I remember asking my Chinese teacher at TLI if the process us foreigners were using to learn to read characters was the same process Chinese used to learn to read characters. She said it was completely not the same. But maybe that means that Chinese learn lots of pinyin nowadays (she's 21).

What I should have probably said in point#8, is that without a teacher to correct them on their pronunciation, or without some tool like mp3s or language tapes to listen to the actual pronunciation and get feedback, probably have bad pronunciation.

Totally agree. Pinyin is almost a boot camp for newbies. You will need to endure for a while, but usually a relatively short period of time. The benefits are overreaching. Tones in comparison are a mid and even long term effort. The more you listen and speak, the more they will click in.

couldn't agree more mate. I can relate to absolutely everything you said in this post. Whilst my character recognition and writing has developed in leaps and bounds the past couple of years, pinyin is still absolutely pivotal to my learning process.

Of course there is no such thing as free education - it is all about where the burden of cost lies. Where university fees are partly or fully subsidised by the taxpayer there is a gross inequity because the 'battlers' who pay tax like everyone else are forking out for the future doctors and lawyers (and engineers) who grow fat on the taxpayers' largesse. A fairer system by far is one that charges full cost for university courses, and provides free education for those who are assessed as unable to pay or suffer some other discrimination in society that means they are under-represented in higher education.

Higher education in China is subsidised by the taxpayer to a higher degree than most Western countries. They haven't yet seen the beauty of my argument above. :) The system of subsidies in universities perpetuates a deep inequality - farmers and others with little hope of a university education supporting those that can afford it. Although collectivism works to correct this imbalance - even disadvantaged families will put in to get their kids a decent education.

Then you will appreciate Sweden even more when I tell you that in the US, we PAY an arm and a leg, and 5% of our future earnings! :)

One thing in China that made me appreciate Sweden is that in China you have to PAY to go to university, rather than the government paying you for going. Isn't that crazy? Talk about promoting inequality! :)

...apparently I'm too old to go to College.

As an aside, I think that's one of things about China that made me appreciate the US. You can always go back to school no matter how old you are, but in China, it seems that once you are out of the school/university treadmill, you are done permanently.

LOL

Yes, Chinese is also very unforgiving of wrong sentence patterns. Also, expectations have a lot to do with it. They asked me why I was going back to the States, and I know I said shàng dàxué correctly, but seemed to have a hard time understanding me. Then when I asked him what about that did he not understand, he just said that he thought he misheard, because apparently I'm too old to go to College. I guess that's true for any language, but especially so in a non-individualistic society.

I should have said, "I'm starting to think that Number 13 should have been: ....."

OH NO! If they take away our standard Mandarin tones, what do we have left?!! They leave us with nothing!

Yah, pretty unfair. Especially since I feel a bit 不好意思 when I can't understand what they're saying. It's often painfully obvious it's because of their accent.

Now, the Cantonese can do the tones pretty well, but I've heard some speakers from other parts of the country who mess up the tones, too! I suspect it's more common in Hong Kong people to mess up their Mandarin tones, since Guangzhou Cantonese has two falling tones, two rising and two level, whereas HK Cantonese has four level tones and two rising ones. So in HK Cantonese, tone is mostly measured by pitch, whereas in Mandarin, pitch is pretty unimportant; it's all in the contour.

Oh, so then it's also not just me!

It's all about the tones, man!

But isn't it not fair that they can understand you, but you not them? Such is life in Southern China.

Having been in the South, there have been many times where I had to think to myself, "He must've meant. . . "

i.e. after drinking water with lemon, "hen3 shuan1" he must've meant suan1

"xiao3yin1" while carrying an overflowing cup of juice, he must've meant "xiao3xin1"

"hen3du1" must have meant "hen2duo1" in any context

yu2 (like English "you", which there is no pinyin for) tiao2=you2tiao2, because I don't think there is such a thing as yu2(fish)tiao2, which I thought he was trying to say

ben4gong1si4=ban4gong1shi4

in Shenzhen, when the woman working at the airport asked for my "fu4zhao4" she must've meant "hu4zhao4"

finally, the man from Taiwan who asked the stewardess for a "ka1hui1" must have been none other than . . . drum roll. . . "ka1 FEI1"!

Of course if you don't know the language very well, then you might not know that some words do not exist, so it must be something else, and then convert it to standard putonghua in your head. Needless to say, I was very confused at first, just a LITTLE less confused now, but it helped me reach my conclusion that tones go longer in understanding this language than actual pronunciation.

yeah, I agree with you there. I was riding the bus once, and the dude that takes the tickets asked me which stop I was heading toward. I said, "An1 jia1 lou3", and then he said (I thought), "bu2 da4", which to me made no sense, and I thought it was a new word I didn't know. It turns out that after the bus turned up the 4th ring road, and went far away from my bus stop, I had to take a taxi to get to my appointment. After being 10 minutes late for my appointment, I met with the person I was having a chinese lesson with, and told her why I was late; that it was because the bus I was riding took an unexpected turn. I mentioned that the serviceperson said "bu2da4", but then she replied, "no, he probably said, "bu2 dao4". Lesson learned.

Yeah, pretty much 100% of my communication problems with locals have been me not understanding them, rather than them not understanding me. The problem for us is that when someone says "zìzào", a Chinese person hearing it will know there's no such word, and thus interpret it as "zhìzào". Us foreigners, however, don't know that there's no such word. We'll interpret it as a word we haven't heard before and then we won't understand. This is a big problem for me when trying to understand locals. And the locals, of course, aren't aware of the problem because in their mind there's no difference between 'zh' and 'z', as in Cantonese they're interpreted as the same sound. Thus, they often believe that the pronunciation of '自' and '制' is the same, and since nobody knows pinyin here, they don't understand the difficulty I'm having in understanding such a commonly used word.

It's worth noting that the majority of Chinese talk Mandarin with an accent, since it's not their native language, either. This has not hindered Mandarin from being aggressively promoted as the unifying language of the State, and it seems to rarely be a big problem in communication. I've seen lots of northerners talk Mandarin with locals here and the locals have the most horrible accents (I sometimes have difficulty understanding them, myself) and I've never seen any problems in communication, except when resulting from the southerners simply not being able to speak Mandarin. Most Chinese will be used to hearing a plethora of weird accents, distorted both in tones and phonemes.

Of course, this makes them even more impressed when your accent is "standard" (since the modern Chinese state is obsessed with standardization), but that's a cultural thing and not that related to understanding. Add to this the fact that the tones are completely missing from Mandarin music, which can usually be readily understood anyway.

When people don't understand you when you're saying unexpected things, it's because you can't really say unexpected things in Mandarin. This has to do with the huge number of homophones and the language's addiction to context. No matter how perfect your pronunciation is, if you recite a Tang dynasty poem that your audience doesn't already know, they won't understand a word, despite being able to understand it perfectly if they read it on the page. This is the curse of a language with an ideographic writing system.

So unless your accent is completely botched, people misunderstanding you is likely because you're saying the wrong things, not because you're saying the things wrong.

Tingyun, no problem! I knew you weren't disagreeing with what I wrote. If anything, i was think about how it might have been better to take a different approach to the overall Chinese language learning process. But since I don't have the polyglot experience, I don't know what approaches work or don't work best for me. Your points are well taken.

Absolutely - to be clear, I wasn't trying to disagree with you in some kind of veiled manner. I completely agree with your recommendations for almost all learners.

Really, my way of doing things made sense because I could study full time, and I was already fanatically committed to learning Chinese at the beginning. Also, no need for practical results fast. I imagine only a small percentage of Chinese learners fall into this category, but as its likely a few other Cpod members are also this way, I thought I'd mention it.

It all depends on the level of ability you're aiming at, time available, and how important getting the accent right is to you. I do think its easier, say, to eliminate the voicing from d and b at the beginning (a significant difference from English consents) than it is to do so later, once you've reinforced the habits. But I wouldn't argue with a person who said that wasn't that important to them, and it wasn't worth the time. A less cosmetic example would be some kind of consistent mistake in tone pronunciation - but even there, for alot of purposes, it may not be worth the time to fix.

So not disagreeing, just putting out a qualification to what I consider to be an excellent advice list. Anyway, this was my one Cpod visit for the month (hooked on Chinese TV at the moment, mostly doing what you term 'shadowing', which I believe is an excelent tactic), just stopped by for nostalgia. Thanks for putting out such great advice for everyone,

Compared to english, Chinese also seems to be a rigid language with many regional differences.

In every situation, there are some kind of pattern and some precise words to use that you can only acquire with a lot of listening and reading. 标准 rules.

Even with the perfect pronunciation and the correct tones, if you don't use the usual words and the right pattern you often won't be understood.

But if you use the usual words and the right pattern, small mistakes in tones or pronunciation won't be a problem.

Hi Tingyun, I know from some of the stuff i've written that one gets the idea that I have a pretty casual attitude toward tones. I do think you have a point, i'm already doing plenty of bad habit correcting, and plenty of winging it. I think to your point, I was told that I was going to have to move to China within a few months, so i'd better start thinking about getting myself around in a foreign country and a foreign language, and that's what I did, quick and dirty. Hopefully, I'll have enough time in China and Chinese to get rid of some of the tone challenges.

Many of us will notice they can pronounce a phrase or a sentence correctly after hearing it, but once they're asked about individual tones they're lost. One reason is that some tones get glossed over during normal speech, plus some tones convert into other tones. Another reason is more neurological: the wiring in the brain responsible for pronouncing the tone is different from the wiring responsible for labeling it.

haha. Violent Agreement. I like that term.

No worries then. I think we are on the same page.

I agree too that it would be nice to be able to speak in Chinese here to get a sense for our actual pronunciation level. But I guess some of us live in China (I think you mentioned you do as well?) so I suppose we have a slight leg up on getting feedback.

Best of luck in your studies! :-) 加油！

Have you tried Rosetta Stone or AI Chinese? I made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to become an AI Chinese customer. (Web site too confusing and I just gave up.) I was struck by the comment (old, from 2010) about different parts of the brain's wiring being used for generating tones as opposed to labeling them. I have found that I can mimic tones a lot better than I can analyze them (which is not saying much.) In other words, if I heard a native speaker I might be able to reproduce a spoken sentence somewhat accurately, but if you ask me what the tones were on each syllable I get easily lost. Maybe CPod 2020 will incorporate some kind of web based tone practice exercises where you can hear yourself.

As for pinyin, I don't think new students should be introduced to it on day 1, because it can only create interference in hearing and generating the sounds. Probably best to get some exposure to some or all of the sounds of Mandarin and then see how they are represented in pinyin. However, I would think it should be introduced early on, say within the first couple of weeks of an intensive class. I can't imagine how I would use a dictionary without pinyin.

I probably seem defensive about this. I had no problem with your comment, so I should be the one offering the apology. I think we're in violent agreement, actually.

And at the end of the day, I reread what I wrote in #8, and I still think it stated my thoughts clearly enough with enough of a nod toward pinyin use in certain circumstances. The bad thing about learning Chinese through a website is that we students don't verbally interact with each other in spoken Chinese, so we don't actually get feedback about what any of us sound like speaking Chinese (unless we subscribe to Cpod's guided subscriptions, then the teacher knows).

Sorry if it seemed I was attacking you or something. That wasn't my intent. I just had an interesting thought that I wanted to share.

Actually, I also came through the Pimsleur route, and I don't really favor using pinyin myself. And, like you, my wife also learned Chinese through conversation and not through pinyin study. But it occurred to me that it might work for a beginner as long as their focus was on the pronunciation aspects of pinyin and not on using it as a crutch for reading.

In fact, it would probably work best if they only used audio tools to learn pinyin to learn the sounds and never came across the romanized way of writing it. That way their focus is on the correct pronunciation of Chinese and not on writing it in romanized letters.

I suppose that having come through the Pimsleur route, and also having a Chinese class where pinyin wasn't a focus, and having a wife that learned Chinese without pinyin at first, and hearing a person pronouncing Chinese using pinyin has given me a bias. If you think it would help, by all means, use pinyin.

I had a thought that perhaps learning pinyin as a written form is bad, but I think that if a beginning learner spent time listening to the pinyin tables being spoken over and over their ear and speaking would improve through repetition and input of the basic sounds of Chinese.

Yeah, it would be boring to listen to b,p,m,f,d,t,m,l over and over again, but I think that would help a lot. It would probably also allow you to graduate to using pinyin sooner rather than later, since you would already be familiar with the specific sounds that make it up.

Maybe this is a good compromise between not using pinyin and at all and using it as a way to read for beginners. I agree that listening is the first skill to develop so why not develop listening for pinyin?

Just a thought that crept in to my head. Of course, this conversation is 2 years old so who knows if anyone will actually read this ...

wow. I hadn't seen that price for the Anki application. I like using Anki on my desktop but I think I'll pass on the $25.

well, having a Mac is a deal breaker.

Alas, If I were in the states, then i'd have a real choice on my hands: a Blackberry or a Droid or an iPod. I could be like most geeks and get all three I suppose...

The biggest advantage of Mental Case is that you can export the cards if you'd want to switch programs later on (for example to Anki). Also StudyArcade seems to no longer be developed. Though you need a Mac to sync Mental Case to your computer and thus export the cards to a file. Also note that if you sync with your computer, the SRS functionality doesn't work (not a big deal for me since I only use the iPhone anyway) and cards only have two sides (so no pinyin automatically being on the answer side if you use the cards both ways). Both of these issues are fixed in the next version of Mental Case, but that hasn't been released yet.

Anki cost's money on the iphone? Wow, It's free on Android and you can now sync all decks with the online servers if you take the dev build. It works very well for me.

by the way, thanks for this Anki comment. I was strongly leaning toward buying it, until I saw the $24.99 price tag. I guess i'll stick with Study Arcade, and look atMental Case.

I'd like to recommend people to take a look at Mental Case, too. I paid a huge sum for Anki for iPhone only to find it didn't support creating new cards. That has been fixed now, but I still prefer Mental Case. Largely because it looks stunning, whereas Anki looks like someone threw up in my iPhone. And you still can't create new decks in Anki for iPhone.

6) get a Chinese girlfriend: I've casually heard that the teacher/student relationship heads south as your Chinese girlfriend moves up the ladder to become your Chinese spouse. :) But of course, everyone is different, your mileage may vary.

Boy, I can't disagree more on the "learning pinyin" before anything else, but it would really be interesting to hear from people who learned pinyin first along with their Chinese pronunciation, then had to correct significant errors once they landed in China.

对了，SRS is also key... I'd suggest Anki to anyone who seriously wants to study Chinese characters.... best program I've found after using multiple programs.

Thanks for the link. I do recall your original shadowing post of some months ago, and think I saw this polyglot forum around that time.

What I guess at this point I was hoping for was more peer-reviewed research around methods that are verified to be more effective than other methods. So far as I can tell, you're right, linguists don't seem to be interested in the effectiveness search. There doesn't seem to be much research around effectiveness, or i'm using the wrong search terms to find that. Even though I posted this "Best Practices" thread, I would love to see some evidence verified. Certainly, polyglot experiences should, and do count for plenty, but I am also thinking that there's a lot of chaff in this wheat somewhere.

Honestly, when looking for practical advice on second language acquisition, linguists aren't really the people to ask. The correct thing to do is to go to Polyglot Forums and check out what people there are saying. There are a plethora of methods there. You'll find both delay-speaking methods and early-output methods and both sides have their adherents. Accomplished polyglot Moses McCormick (not sure of the spelling on his last name) uses a method with very early output.

I had a professor once who said stuff like, "Economists has Physics envy. In Physics, 3 laws describe 99% of what you see. In economics, 99 laws describe 3% of what you see". It was probably because his undergrad major was Physics, then he became an economist. I'm starting to think linguists belong in the economist category.

I remember Ken talking more about "lexical density" than anything else, but it was your reference to the portion around the cpod site that led me to Stephen Krashen. I casually looked at Stephen Krashen's research, and I guess I have more unanswered questions around language acquisition in general. But I understand linguists have plenty of unanswered questions and hypotheses as well.

Well, here's the theory behind it: The brain controls the speech organs based on the sound they are to produce, not based on which muscles are used. That means that the brain must first form an accurate image of what a sound is supposed to sound like before it can decide on how to use the speech organs to form that sound. This requires a lot of listening. Think of how much listening a child does before starting to speak.

Early speaking will, because of this, be inaccurate. Your own speaking quickly becomes habit, though, and the brain will tell the speech organs to make those inaccurate sounds it's gotten used to using. This is why you get immigrants who've been living in a country for 20 years and have a great command of it, but terrible pronunciation.

This theory is far from uncontroversial and might well be wrong. As far as I know, there are no comprehensive studies made in this area. If someone can point me to one, I might well change my mind.

Here's a quote from renowned linguist Stephen Krashen:

"The best methods are therefore those that supply 'comprehensible input' in low anxiety situations, containing messages that students really want to hear. These methods do not force early production in the second language, but allow students to produce when they are 'ready', recognizing that improvement comes from supplying communicative and comprehensible input, and not from forcing and correcting production." Stephen Krashen

For those present in the very early days of CPod, you might recognize the "comprehensible input" mantra used by Ken in every other podcast. I suspect Ken was heavily influenced by Krashen when he created ChinesePod.

Number 4: simon, not sure why you'd want to wait even one day to start attempting speaking based on what you've heard. But I suppose I don't have data either way that supports speaking based on listening right off the bat. I certainly didn't say start speaking Chinese right as soon as you've downloaded the first cpod lesson. It would be an interesting experiment to see if accurate language acquisition is verifiably acquired faster than delaying speaking.

I plan to, as soon as I can get my computer to record!

Do you include yourself in this "everybody", pretzellogic? I hope we'll get to hear your Chinese, too!

I think one of the more interesting aspects of the cpod 5-year anniversary celebration is the opportunity to hear cpod students use their developing Chinese. We can hear everybody's Chinese for better or worse, and see how these tones are coming along!

I agree with ouyangjun116. It seems if my tones are wrong, people often can't understand or misunderstand.

For me, I've basically gone back to Newbie to learn my tones properly- I'm Intermediate now, but not having learned basic tones for things like 习惯 or 喜欢 makes me feel a bit silly as people correct my tone.

My experience with tones has been much different. I live in China and find tones extremely important. The more you venture away from your comfort level and begin to interact with Chinese people who speak no English (ones from the countryside or small towns) you will find that mixing up your tones will cause confusion. I think that speaking with Chinese people who are fluent in English is very easy, because they "know" what we want to say and are used to foreigners with their bad tones and grammar. But once you start to talk to ones who don't speak English and don't interact with foreigners, you will see tones are very important, and without them you may not be understood (or people won't want to talk to you because you are too difficult to understand).

As for the characters, I'm very happy I started early on as well. It is such an interesting part of the language, and without an understanding of the characters you miss out on a lot of the nuances and understanding of the language. I don't believe characters are critical to speaking, but I think it adds another layer to the language.

I am very glad I started learning characters early. It is a long road, itself, so, taking the first steps early is not a bad idea, and I agree with Henning that they are very much a part of the language.

I regret that I didn't pay more attention to tones earlier. That part still gives me trouble. I am certainly in no danger of speaking Chinese better than Chinese people, on that account and many others, mostly that I started studying relatively late in life.

You may be right if you want to speak chinese better than chinese people, but if you want to communicate and be able to understand them, it´s going to be much easier and faster if you forget about characters at first. I was able to speak chinese fluently (not perfectly) two years after I started learning because I got rid of characters AND tones very soon. I write using the same software they do and I am barely wrong and I use web browsers extensions to automatically get pinyin from characters so I can read it. Knowing enough vocabulary, understanding grammar and being able to build your own sentences is hard enough, but possible. Trying to learn to write characteres, stroke by stroke, pinyin words, tone by tone, meaning by meaning, usage by usage, and then grammar, and pronuntiation, and exceptions, and.... all at the same time is the best way to quit learning chinese. If you mimic a sentence pretty well they will understand you, even if you don´t know what tones did you actually pronounce. I couldn´t agree more with the post.

Here I am, three years into my decades : )

I wrote: "Don't WORRY about the tones", that does not imply that you don't pay attention to them! I also wrote: "try to imitate"!

I don't agree. Tones are the reason people don't understand you and that you don't understand them.

replacement for No. 10. Learn reading characters early. They are the key to understanding this language and of utmost importance when it comes to deal with the abundance of homonyms.

No. 13. Be aware that it does takes years if not decades - especially if you are a part time learner outside of China.

On the tone thing; In practice, I agree with you 100%. I've been told by Chinese teachers that "they know what I mean" when I casually throw tones around. But my reply to them has been, "you get in the taxi cab with some dude who just wants to know where to drive you, and then you forget what to say, and you will know tones go right out the window"

Maybe add a sentence along the lines of "10 words per day, to 25-50 words per week"? In practice, very few people are able to maintain 70 words/week for more than a couple of weeks. Or at least no one on this site reported that many, although a couple of people were on track to do so. Plus, I suspect learning Chinese is your full time job at that rate.