Here are some suggestions about how to learn Chinese for foreigners.
1. Learn some basic vocabulary. When you learn a language, the first thing to do is to memorize some simple and important words and start practicing as much as you can. Although grammar and sentence structure are also important, it is meaningless to learn them before you have mastered a certain vocabulary.
2. Learn some basic phrases. Once you have mastered some vocabulary, you can try to learn basic phrases and sentences, which can help you with your daily conversation.
3. Learn the tones. Chinese is a tonal language, the same words with different tones have a different meaning (even if the spelling and pronunciation are the same). This may be difficult for people who are accustomed to speaking English, but if you want to speak Chinese well, the tone is crucial.
4. Learn pronunciation. By listening to native speakers (or YouTube), you can learn the correct pronunciation, and after you practice it, you need to apply what you have learned to specific words.
After using different tones, the same words can have different meanings. For example, the tones "mā"and" má"are just like "I want cake" and "I want coke", they have totally different connotation.
Therefore, when learning a word, it is not enough to only learn pronunciation, but also to learn the correct tone, otherwise, the words can easily be used in the wrong context, making it difficult for others to understand what you are trying to express.
The best way to learn pronunciation is to speak Chinese with the locals. When you pronounce it correctly, he can give you encouragement; when you are wrong, he can help you learn the correct pronunciation. KCEL provide
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5. Learn grammar and sentence structure. There is a common prejudice that Chinese is a language without grammar. In fact, the Chinese grammar system is very complicated, which is very different from English and other European languages.
Fortunately, in learning Chinese, we can learn without memorizing verbs, consistency, speech, plural, tense, etc., because the analyzability of Chinese makes these things simple and intuitive.
Another advantage is that the sentence structure in Chinese is similar compared with English, that is, the subject-verb-object structure, which makes the translation from English to Chinese and Chinese to English more simple. For example, in English, "he likes cats" is translated into Chinese as "ta(他) xi（喜） huan（欢） mao（猫）".
Of course, Chinese also has a few sentence structures that are different from English, which may make it difficult for native English speakers to master, such as classification, prominence, preference and so on. But before learning basic Chinese, there is no need to worry.
