I started my daily Chinese last December 21. I started with 3 months on Duolingo before I realized it's a terrible app for Chinese (no writing exercises, cartoony voices that make tones impossible to distinguish, no pinyin) so now I'm using HelloChinese and having a much better experience.
Learning hànzi has been daunting. I'm at the point where I'll sometimes see some characters I know so I'll try reading, but then there will be a couple that I don't know, and I don't even have any way to sound out at least with German I could read the word without understanding.
I live in my city's Chinatown (which btw isn't the place called "Chinatown") and like to try to read the shop signs as I walk around town, but most of them use traditional characters or cursive or both, which is a whole nother level of difficult for me.
I also took German back in college and still remember a bunch and am considering learning more, but that was 10 years ago and I think I want to focus on one language at a time. Chinese has caught my attention better because hànzi are fun to learn.
Cursive chinese sounds fucking nightmarish to figure out lol. Didn't China almost phase that out completely, because everyone under 50 thinks of it as a waste of time to learn, to the point where the government had to implement a few different cultural programs to save it, since it's a lot of history to lose if no one can read the older texts.
Studying Chinese showed me how pointless and arbitrary all those articles and conjugations in romance languages are.
I wonder if Chinese speakers learning romance languages feel the same way when they get to drop tones/measure words/homonyms, and idiomatic phrases that read like the end of a 3000 year old games of telephone.
I started my daily Chinese last December 21. I started with 3 months on Duolingo before I realized it's a terrible app for Chinese (no writing exercises, cartoony voices that make tones impossible to distinguish, no pinyin) so now I'm using HelloChinese and having a much better experience.
Learning hànzi has been daunting. I'm at the point where I'll sometimes see some characters I know so I'll try reading, but then there will be a couple that I don't know, and I don't even have any way to sound out at least with German I could read the word without understanding.
I live in my city's Chinatown (which btw isn't the place called "Chinatown") and like to try to read the shop signs as I walk around town, but most of them use traditional characters or cursive or both, which is a whole nother level of difficult for me.
I also took German back in college and still remember a bunch and am considering learning more, but that was 10 years ago and I think I want to focus on one language at a time. Chinese has caught my attention better because hànzi are fun to learn.
每天我学一点儿汉语。
deleted by creator
你好同学们，我也学习中文。我觉得有点长，可是我每天十二十分钟复习。
我也用HelloChinese。它比Duolingo很好。
我总是做错，可是我永远试试看。
你应该看看HelloTalk。你可以跟学英语的中国人聊天。
deleted by creator
我不试试看了Tandem。它怎么了？
因为中国人从小学习英语，所以他们的英语比我们的汉语好。
deleted by creator
Cursive chinese sounds fucking nightmarish to figure out lol. Didn't China almost phase that out completely, because everyone under 50 thinks of it as a waste of time to learn, to the point where the government had to implement a few different cultural programs to save it, since it's a lot of history to lose if no one can read the older texts.
Studying Chinese showed me how pointless and arbitrary all those articles and conjugations in romance languages are.
I wonder if Chinese speakers learning romance languages feel the same way when they get to drop tones/measure words/homonyms, and idiomatic phrases that read like the end of a 3000 year old games of telephone.