Tips for Learning Chinese
 

I am using my 10-year-old daughter's Chinese tutor (from past postings some of you know she speaks perfect Chinese but doesn't want to) to learn Mandarin Chinese and will see the tutor 2 or 3 times a weeks for at least an hour each time. Don't have much of an opportunity to speak Chinese at home because of my daughter's attitude. Does anyone have any suggestions for the most effective way to learn Chinese. By far my biggest interest is speaking Chinese as opposed to also learning how to write it. (There is only so much time in a day) Any suggestions would be appreciated.

The real question is, how much time and effort are you going to put into this outside your tutoring sessions. I'd say an hour a day is the minimum, with two hours of course better. The point is, that unless you dive into this at the beginning, your progress will be so slow that you'll almost certainly lose interest. When studying languages, I've always found that positive feedback -- getting a sense that week by week my skills are improving -- is important to create the incentive to keep at it.

Two or three hours a week with a tutor isn't that much, and as for texts you'll need something with good and extensive tapes. Myself, I found he DeFrancis series as thorough and complete as possibly could be, but the dialogues are quite dated and that puts many people off.

Watch lots of movies (movie dialogue is almost always simple)
Practice singing Chinese songs; this will help you nail the tones

I also encourage you to learn how to read; literacy is extremely valuable.

Because of the tones, you need to speak it with Chinese people. Studying more will not be productive at an early stage. You think that what you are saying is right but people have no clue what you are saying.
There are some website like italki.com where you can find a language partner online. not as good as real life situation but better than nothing.

"Studying more will not be productive at an early stage . . ."

Of course you need to study and prepare for your time with your tutor, and the more time you spend in preparation, the more you'll get out of the time you spend with the tutor. Big mistake to think that tutoring alone will do the trick.

Disagree. Anyone who is able to speak in complete sentences can get his/her point across, even if all words are first tone.

For example:

a. 请送我去城市宾馆。
b. 我以为你是诚实的人。

I'd say a lot of tutoring and actual usage, in addition to (re)memorizing what you've learned, otherwise you won't learn/remember. The pretty-much rote memorization isn't easy but a necessity. I suffered through elementary school because I never spoke it (mandarin) at home and it never stuck in my head.

Truth is, as always, somewhere inbetween. It'll take time and a few iterations, as long as the context makes sense.

From personal experience, my paternal aunt and my father learnt Cantonese from immersion in H.K. but spoke with a flat tone (though Chinese, parents didn't speak the same dialect and Cantonese wasn't one of them anyway). It took his children/her nieces/nephew some time to figure out what they were trying to say.

^

The East is Red with pinyin.

Thanks for all of the helpful replies. So far the most difficult issue for me has been the first tone. Sometimes, I just can't hear it. With my tutor by me, I can eventually nail the rest of the tones. Occasionally, I can get the first tone, by speaking the word as part of a phrase. (Don't know why this works)

Also, I have 2 goals in learning Mandarin. First, I want to learn 300 or 400 words so that I would be comfortable taking a bus by myself in a large city like Wuhan. Second, I am hoping that I will be able to have serious talks with my children's aunts and uncles who sometimes don't understand the dynamic of what I am doing to ensure that my daughter doesn't forget her Chinese and that when I spend money for my children to have fun in China it is for the benefit of the aunts and uncles to ensure that my children have fun in China. (My children's relatives are very frugal and quite often would prefer that the children do nothing in the apartment rather than me spending $10 so that the children would enjoy themselves. If my children don't enjoy their visits to China, there is ultimately no way to force them to visit, which their aunts and uncles don't understand.)

Finally, I realize that 2 or 3 hours per week is not nearly enough to learn Chinese. My tutoring sessions are designed for me to learn pronunciation and later practice what I have learned. I record the sessions on my tablet, so I can listen the pronunciation on my tablet.

You tutor is used to your (bad) mandarin. He/she will correct you if it is a good teacher. But he knows what you vocabulary is, and can figure it out. Once you go out in the real world, it's a different story. My girlfriend understands me very well. Her parents have no clue what I am saying most of the time.

I think it's useful to take common pairs as reference points for tones; place names serve this purpose well.

So listen to Xi'an, Beijing and Zhongguo. It really shouldn't be hard to pick out the first tones. Then, as a test, pronounce Beijing with the same tones as Xi'an, and vice versa. If that sounds awful to your ear, then you're on the right track.

Please see my point in post #3 about singing.

月亮代表我的心 is an excellent song for novices because the words are easy, and you can feel the tones.

Great choice!

Circa 1995, I went through her greatest hits album in its entirety. The process only entailed 6 hours of my time. The immediate tangible benefit was that I was able to hold my own during KTV meetings. A secondary, and more important, benefit was that I learned how speak Chinese like a non-peasant.

I formally studied Chinese at the one of America's top universities, and I won't dispute the fact that the 5000 characters imparted upon me there haven't helped me, but simply listening to music got me one third of the way.

Maybe that's how Teresa Teng learned english...singing songs.