Learning chinese

@x65943

Best of luck! However, something I've learned is that Duolingo is incredibly flawed in teaching Asian languages in particular. What it promotes as "spaced repetition study" is actually more just jamming your head full of canned phrases. I understand that Duolingo is appealing because of its gamification of the learning process, but if you're really passionate about learning the language I recommend finding textbooks, hanzi memorization resources -- I suggest Remembering the Hanzi by Heisig -- and vocabulary resources -- try only decks for the Anki app.

To the best of my understanding -- and please, anyone correct me if I'm wrong -- there's some major overlap between studying Chinese and Japanese. Similar to Japanese where the three components of learning are

>Kanji - being able to identify the core meanings of kanji, the complex characters borrowed from Chinese's hanzi, so that learning how they construct words is easier when you do study vocabulary

>Vocabulary - being able to read vocabulary constructions of one or more kanji, hiragana and/or katakana

>Grammar - how words are arranged and modified to convey certain ideas

you want to study hanzi and learn to visually identify them and their core meanings separate from vocabulary. This helps you with learning radicals (kanji/hanzi that join together to make up bigger kanji/kanzi) and by learning radicals you can break down complex symbols into just being the sum of their parts. To reinforce this, Remembering the Hanzi offers mnemonics that allow you to make vivid stories that imaginatively supplement recognizing radicals and thus help reinforce key meanings of hanzi. This two-step process to learning words is helpful in Japanese, and I'm almost certain it'll help you in learning Chinese as well.

Best of luck and happy studying!

Duolingo is not a main course. Its a supplemental course, but not a main one. You will probably feel frustrated for not making much progress with this alone. You use it in a addition to a main course as practice. It's more fun oriented because it treats it like a game where you get points but its not as effective alone.

Try Pimsleur. It's a main course. You start off with a conversational sentences, then by the end of the audio you'll learn to understand the meaning of sentences and how to put the words together to form your own sentence. Its very dry and boring but these are usually the most effective courses for learning.

Assimil is another great main course. Living Language too. Michael Thomas language courses also.

All these courses along with Pimsluer are structured orginized courses. They can take you from beginner to intermediate without you getting lost. Instead of learning a list of a bunch of words that are a mix of advance and low level, and you end up getting lost and confused on how to use them, this is what a non structured course will do.

Pimsluer is probably the best beginner course then from there you can move on to Assimil. If you treat supplemental courses as main courses you probably won't make much progress.

I'll also recommend lingo deer as a supplemental course over duolingo. Its much better for Asian languages and the voices they use sounds more natural and human which can help with pronunciation. The voices in duolingo sound robotic.

The best resource is the one you will stick with and use every day - everyone is different and to many Duolingo is appropriate

I have learned a lot from it already and can pick up on things at a pretty good rate - I studied duo about 3-4 hours a day for a month and practiced each character by writing it out as the app presented it

@x65943 You can pick up on things in only a month? When you watch something in Chinese like a movie or show you can pick up on it already? Dang thats the fastest progress I've seen anyone do. I wish I can learn that fast in that short period of time.

Duolingo voices sounds like its on speed. It's really robotic and I don't like it. I didn't make much progress with it, after putting more then a month in it of everyday practice with just that app alone.

I made some progress like learning letters and easy sentences which were easy to pick up on but then reached a point where grammer became difficult. And it didn't explain how to use them in different scenarios.

To be clear I pick up on certain things, but I by no means understand the flow of most sentences unless I watch it at 0.3 speed

The grammar I found to be really intuitive

imo, grammar is the easiest thing to pick up with any language. it's the vocabulary that's a killer. I managed to test out of two levels of Japanese by learning on my own, and at OU, I was taking advanced Japanese II, Beginning Chinese II, and Intermediary Chinese I at the same time.

I pick up words too, while its progress I didn't find it good enough. That's why I recommend a main course with it. Duolingo just gives you sentences and you pick a right answer. But there's no explanation good enough on grammar and sentence structure. It's a very basic explanation.

I also pick up the sentences in the duolingo app easily. But beyond the app it was hard to form sentences and when to use them. Especially with an Asian language like Japanese when there's informal and formal type endings. The thing I didn't like about duolingo was that it gave the most formal version but its something most people don't use in everyday speech.

Also I like Chinese because the meaning changes with tone of voice. Its really cool.

I heard Chinese sentence structure is easier compared to Japanese.

Well I did the following which helped:
1. practice in real life too
2. I used the desktop version and typed all my answers

The grammar is so easy, like I cannot imagine an easier language grammar wise. It's an analytic language which helps - Japanese is synthetic

yeah, word order in Chinese is much more similar to English while Japanese is kinda backwards.

grammar in Chinese usually lasts about two years in length while Japanese you're still picking things up in the fourth year.

Real life conversations I think is where you made the most progress with. Because that's the best learning experience you can get with instant feed back. But the app alone is a much more difficult process.

It was 99% app with real life convos helping my common errors

unfortunately, classes don't really teach you normal conversation. it's a very formalized way of teaching, so it's hard to understand everyday conversations. I know Japanese likes to use a lot of puns which mean nothing to an English speaker.

@x65943 If you had real life convos, I think those probably accounted for most of the progress -- just subtly so it was harder to notice

Japanese are also indirect language wise, so you have to be keen on picking up what they actually mean with indirect use of words. Compared to English speakers where we straight up tell you exactly what we feel.