Week 2, starting group classes.

April 30, 2024

Starting week 2 intensive Mandarin. Although I am still plowing away at memorizing words and characters, I am becoming more familiar with more complex words, they are starting to roll off the tongue. Like Bianlishandian - which is convenience store. Today is Tuesday and I did my second group class. I have decided to go back to group classes when week, although it is a lot more intensive, I think this makes sense until I can get to a more conversational level.

There are loads of apps, write now I am working with Pleco (an amazing dictionary), Skritter, a great about for learning characters, Chinese Class 101 - a good course to supplement my in classroom learning. I also did my first language exchange from someone I met in one of the language exchange events.

Most days there are opportunities to practice Mandarin but with limited words. When learning Mandarin, most people outside of Taiwan will learn Pinyin, it uses the English alphabet to guide pronunciation, and then will have tones on top.

So it would look something like jīn tīan, the line on the top would indicate that this is 1st tone. However, I think when trying to advance from beginner to intermediate, it pays to learn characters. In Taiwan they use "traditional characters". These are more complicated characters (more strokes). China uses "simplified" characters which was sorted out in 1950 to try and improve literacy (trying to read and write so many very complicated characters was so hard).

There are several sounds in Chinese that do not exist in English and the struggle is reel. Luckily, youtube has countless of videos to try and help with this! I did my first recording of someone asking me questions in Mandarin and seeing my responses, I plan to do this weekly to hopefully see improvement.