Learning Chinese

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People often ask me for suggestions about how to learn Chinese. Everyone's different, of course, but I thought I'd share some of my experiences / recommendations. I mostly learned Chinese on my own. I did once take one semester of second-year Chinese at Harvard, but once you learn a language on your own for a while, it's hard to fit well into any classes. E.g. when I took the class, I was great at reading and writing, but horrible and speaking and listening comprehension.

General things applicable to other languages too

One thing I can recommend is, once you've started learning, try to think in Chinese as much as you can. When you're riding the bus, or walking down the street, just continually think about "how would I say this in Chinese, how would I say that in Chinese?" Initially, it will be with simple words or phrases, but later you should be thinking about bigger phrases and sentences. Now when I'm in China, I don't think in English and then translate to Chinese -- for the most part, I just think in Chinese, and speak it directly. It makes a huge difference.

For several years after I started learning, I was often afraid of trying to speak Chinese with others because of fear of making mistakes. Finally at some point I got past that fear. And while traveling in China, I'd try to hang around with people who spoke no English, so I'd have no choice but to use Chinese. And I decided that if I say something stupid and other people laugh, so be it. My Chinese started improving more quickly after that.

For Chinese in particular

Unlike Western languages, learning Chinese has the added effort of learning Chinese characters, assuming you choose to include that in your studies. See information in the "Books" section below for some resources to help with that. But after you get started, it may be a good idea to ask any of your Chinese friends to look at the way you're writing the characters, and offer any suggestions for improvement.

You'll also want to learn how to use a Chinese dictionary to look up written characters you don't know. There are a few different ways you can do this. I don't know of written guides to explain it, so it's best to ask your friends about this too. It takes some practice to get the hang of some of the methods. And now and then, I even stump my Chinese friends when I ask them how I would look up a particularly tricky character, which is always fun to do. :-)

Books

So, how did I learn on my own? I have looked at a lot of Chinese textbooks and related reference books over the years; here are the ones I thought were most worth mentioning.

"Practical Chinese Reader" ( See links below for possible places to buy books). This series of books is very corny, and the 1980's editions I used are very out-of-date, but I still think it's the best series, in part for the following reasons:
- The fact that it's out-of-date means you are actually learning something about recent Chinese history while learning the language, which you'd miss with a more modern book. You can always get caught up on current slang and aspects of life in China, etc. from friends or by visiting. (I realize many people may disagree with me on these points.) Plus, there are new editions of the book being released starting around 2004 or 2005. And sometimes I can get people laughing by deliberately saying culturally out-of-date things I learned from these books (e.g. things about "achieving the four modernizations", etc.).
- In the earlier volumes, they include details about properly writing the Chinese characters, using the correct stroke order. Most textbooks don't include so much about writing. I've seen some Chinese textbooks which are entirely pinyin-based, and don't even use characters! I think if you really want to learn Chinese, you also need to learn the written Characters.
- Even in the first couple of volumes, you start to get some small interesting stories. Of course it's hard to read much interesting stuff when you are just beginning a language, but I think this series does a decent job of including interesting reading when the level has advanced enough.
- They're not very expensive.
- There is a set of tapes (maybe they have CD's now?) which goes with them. I listened to the tapes quite a lot in the early years of learning Chinese; trying to imitate the accents of the native speakers on the tapes helped me improve my pronunciation a lot (the speakers on the tapes I listened to had a northern Chinese accent, generally considered the "standard" accent in China).
"Concise English-Chinese / Chinese-English Dictionary", by Oxford University Press / The Commercial Press (ISBN 7100025583). Also known as the "little red dictionary". Very good for its small size:
- It has simplified and traditional characters
- Includes many short example sentences and phrases
- Has pinyin everywhere it needs to (but not for all the example sentences, to keep it small)
- It's small enough to be very portable. Although note that as of summer 2005 while traveling in China, I could only find much larger versions of this dictionary -- they seemed to make the font larger, which is a shame; the new version is much less portable.
- You can look up Chinese characters either by pronunciation (pinyin), or by written form (using the radicals), and you can do the latter for both simplified and traditional characters. But it takes some experience to learn how to look up characters based on their written form.
The main downside is that its vocabulary is not as large as some other dictionaries. Sometimes if I can't find a word in this one, I have to resort to another dictionary.
"Learn to Write Chinese Characters" by Johan Bjorksten, ISBN 0300057717. The thing I really like about this book is that it has the (Chinese) names of the radicals, so now when I'm telling a Chinese person a written character, I know the correct terms to describe it (e.g. "shu4 xin1 pang2", "vertical heart radical"). I don't think I've ever seen a textbook with this info, although there are some small reference books which do (see next item). But overall this is a good little book if you want to learn written Chinese characters.
Chinese radicals, volume 1 and 2. These are very small books which also have information about writing characters. When I bought them many years ago, they were only $4.95 each.
I actually have a bunch of Chinese/English dictionaries, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. I'll post more info about them sometime later.

Software and other tools

I have a Palm Tungsten E2 PDA, and bought the PlecoDict Chinese/English dictionary software for it from Pleco Software. In fact, the first dictionary they released for PDAs was an electronic version of the small red Oxford dictionary which I'd been using in hardcopy for years; I bought that software from Pleco for my old Handspring Visor PDA in 2002. They've since expanded their offerings. Their PlecoDict is really an excellent electronic dictionary for foreigners learning Chinese, much better than ones you can find in China (see the next paragraph). I've got "PlecoDict Complete", since I wanted to have as much info as I could pack into my PDA. I'm not affiliated with Pleco, just a very satisfied customer. Update, January 2010: Pleco has released a version of their software and Chinese dictionaries for the iPhone and iPod Touch (I have the latter). It is fantastic. They continue working to license very good dictionaries, have many options (some free), and tell you which of the available dictionaries have which strengths and weaknesses. I've been using Pleco's software since summer 2002. They've done a great job developing products really aimed towards those learning Chinese, and they clearly care about their customers. It's honestly one of the best companies I've dealt with, as far as helping their customers upgrade the software to newer platforms for little-to-no expense. And I am still not affiliated with them, other than as a customer (first using their products on a Handspring Visor, then a Palm Tungsten E2, and most recently an iPod Touch).

I've also had a couple of electronic Chinese/English dictionaries which I bought in China over the years. Their advantage is they (can) have much bigger vocabularies. Their disadvantage is that they lack features which would be really useful for foreigners, because they are designed for Chinese people (e.g. I have yet to find one which makes it easy to see the pinyin when looking up the Chinese translation of an English word, although sometimes you can get to the pinyin with a bit of effort). The one I have now is the model TS350 from "wen2 qu1 xing1", i.e. Golden Global View Co, Ltd. but you'll probably prefer to go to their English-language page. But I don't know if you'll find much useful information there (many Chinese companies only have a small subset of their pages in English).

Book Links

Here are links to many of the books mentioned above. Most of these are Amazon links.