Taiwaned

In light of the great suggestions to learn Japanese on the Japan forum, any suggestions to learn to read Chinese painlessly?

So far, it has been a very PAINFUL experience. Any suggestions will be appreciated.

moondog

-find a girl(boy)friend that speaks no english
-recoginise that you might learn more out of the classroom than in it

i have a friend from england who showed up in china 2.5 months ago knowing no chinese at all. by employing the two strategies above, he ran through the entire blcu language track in 8 weeks and now possesses near native level fluency, in spite of a (very) poor attendence record. in fact, when he speaks, he sounds an awful lot like a beijing taxi driver.

while not everyone has such a good ear and/or capacity to memorize and use new vocab, having witnessed his studies from day 1, i dare say he's onto something.

mosburger

As moondog mentioned, motivation is the key along with a humble attitude. And enduring a little pain is good for you anyway.

- Take the bus and subway instead of the company car or taxi. Learn what your stops characters stand for

- Practice your reading and conversation skills by going to eat at Chinese-only places. Starvation has always been a great teacher ^

- Newspapers and books are mostly over the top but cheap tabloids employ fewer characters and simple language

- Go looking for shops and services alone, only armed with a ( paper or electronic ) dictionary

etc.

slickalick

I think the best way to learn is to fully immerse yourself in the environment and forget your own launguage.

If you just want to get by whilst travelling or doing business, many of my clients buy a very cheap audiobook from eBay when they come to China. Covers all the basis. I searched on ebay and found the item number - 170028266225.

Have a look, i think its well worth it.

Failing that, you can do what many expats do in China - find a girlfriend/boyfriend and take it from there...

Peter N-H

Increasing vocabulary is a question of repetition and constant attention. I still use a Palm with the PlecoDict Chinese dictionary software (http://www.plecodict.com -- also works on other handheld platforms) and compile checklists of new characters and expressions I come across as I go. I'm rarely on a bus, train, or plane without whipping this out and using the flashcard function to test myself and get these new expressions firmly in my memory.

There's a fairly good Chinese-friendly shareware flashcard program for Mac called iFlash, which allows for three-sided cards, putting the characters, pinying, and translation on three different sides. Tone-marked pinyin, including the u + umlaut + tone can be entered using the U.S. Extended keyboard, and the program will even print flashcards for you. http://www.loopware.com/

Of course, doing as I did when I was starting and keeping a pack of paper flashcards in your pocket for use at spare moments is nearly as good as the higher-tech versions.

Similarly I download various audio language lessons into my iPod, and although these are often pretty dire, they still provide fresh vocabulary and stimulation. There are lots of free lessons at different levels at http://www.chinesepod.com, and you just have to put up with the oh-we're-so-cool and we've-left-our-brains-at-home MTV VJ style. But they are free after all, and overall better than dealing with Chinese-made materials that have China's relentless economic growth, the happy singing-and-dancing ethnic minorities, or other propaganda as their subjects, rather than dating, going clubbing, etc. And just going back to have a look at one before posting this, they now seem to have a slightly less irritating new male presenter.

Another useful trick in my early days was to write the character for bookcase, light switch, etc. on Post-It notes and stick them to the relevant items, with the tone-marked pinyin on the back. As interior decor it leaves something to be desired, and friends had a habit of swapping them round to see if I noticed. But if you want to get wall, door, bookcase, etc. in your head fairly quickly, this is an effective method.

Peter N-H

dtsm

From your profile, wild guess you're with state dept and doing crash language training before officially on board at AIT.

Everyone's suggestions are on the mark - 'patience and hard work' is needed. Learning to speak and understand relatively simple, the reading/writing is incredibly tough but doable.

Give it some time.

Good luck

Taiwaned

Thanks for all your suggestions.

It looks like nothing replaces hard work, humility and patience.

Skyman65

Tawianed, according to your profile, you are located in my favorite big city in Taiwan. My wife is from Tainan, so I've spent a lot of time there. They've got some of the best food on the island, IMO. They also have--by far--the best "Bing" shop (shaved ice with fruit) in Taiwan. It is the JiaNan Bing Guo Dian on NanMen Rd. I went there almost daily when I lived there in the 80s. And I make a point to go there at least once every time I visit Tainan.

Now to your question, the "painless" part of the equation requires a passion for learning Chinese. Without it, there will be some unavoidable pain. How do you get this passion? As some people suggested, finding a romantic interest certainly helps. But there are other ways.

For me, I first went to Taiwan as a Mormon missionary, so finding a romantic interest was strictly verboten. But I did quickly gain a passion for learning Chinese. I think that this came after I was successful in first gaining a basic understanding of simple conversation. This came from just talking with the locals a lot. As a missionary, this wasn't a problem. It's what I did 12-15 hours a day, everyday. There was a lot of trial and error, but I kept working on it. I was comfortably conversational after a couple months.

With a little success in my pocket, I was eager to learn more. And when I started studying the characters, my interest really piqued. And as I learned more and more characters, my conversational skills greatly increased. I think that you need to first get a basic knowledge of conversational Chinese before you can really start learning the Characters. But without learning the characters, your conversational Chinese will be limited.

So to start out, just talk in Chinese as much as you can. It takes some courage to try and fail, but keep doing it--a lot. Then, when you start to feel somewhat comfortable in conversation, hit the flash cards and start learning characters. Learn to write them too, if you can. It will help you memorize them. Get a local to teach you the basic stroke order rules for writing characters.

Since you are in Taiwan, learn the ZhuYin FuHao phonetic system (BoPoMoFo), and get some children's books with ZhuYin on the sides of the characters. For me, learning ZhuYin helped with my pronunciation more than any of the romanization systems.

This seems juvenile, but get a pen pal. Ask a local friend if they wouldn't mind swapping letters with you. And make sure the letters you write are hand-written, not on a computer. If your pen pal also writes hand-written letters, it will help you learn to read better than if you just read computer-generated type.

That's how I did it. Oh, and after my two-year mission service was up, I later returned to Taiwan, found a romantic interest and married her.

Jamoldo

Just do your best and try to practice on a daily basis. Speaking, I have found helps reading quite a bit. THere are plenty of things I know how to say in Chinese (after 3 months of study), but can't read. As I learn more characters, I see where they fit in with words I speak and can recognize certain characters and put them together with characters that I can't recognize just by sight, but by having spoken them. Involves a fair bit of guessing. If that makes any sense at all.

While I agree that Moondog's friend may be onto something, I know there is probably no way I would be that good in 2.5 months in the same scenario. Some people are just gifted.