You don't need to know how to hand write all your Hanzi, but you should definitely learn to recognize them. Like there are so many words that I only really know half the characters in, but that's enough to remember the whole word from context. Computers make writing using pinyin very easy, but you still need to know which characters to pick (I type "jiao" and get a big list to pick from. Did I want 叫 or 角?)
My main source of learning other than HelloChinese has been talking with Chinese people on HelloTalk. HelloChinese provides the grammar and some vocabulary to work with, HelloTalk lets me practice and expand on it. I'll take a lesson I learned recently, make a post using those grammar structures and maybe some words I have to look up on google translate, and native speakers correct me. You kind of need to start at a baseline with that though, since it's more of a practice tool than lessons.
I also like to listen to music, but most of the bands I like are from Taiwan and traditional characters are still way hard for me.
I tried Clozemaster again here a month or two ago and it's really boosted my character recognition and general "how does this word fit within a sentence". I also started with HelloChinese (still use it) but also some Anki and HelloTalk/HiNative. There were more than 0 people on HelloTalk that seemed interested in romantic interactions though which kinda put me off it.
My first HelloTalk chat was with a drunk PLA soldier, 2am after the dragon boat festival, who kept trying to convince me to move to Malaysia with him.
Really? Usually the ratios are significantly in the favour of English speakers learning Chinese, since there are more Chinese speakers who want to practice English.
Every time I open the app it's like my first week on Grindr - everyone is hitting me up for help with their English.
Definitely one of my fav Chinese provinces. Hoping to visit, maybe next summer.
Oh no, you should learn your characters at the same time you learn to speak. It's fuckin' hard, but it will hurt your progress pretty severely if you rely on pinyin - you'll hit a point where your spoken Chinese severely outpaces your ability to read and write, so you'll have to either backtrack and relearn the same words or just end up more or less illiterate, like me.
I went with a delayed approach and it seems to be working alright. Probably waited too long to learn 汉字 though. I got the idea from that hacking Chinese website.
Just a far warning about HelloChinese since I felt burned: I was really cruising with HelloChinese and feeling like I was getting a solid base and then they unceremoniously put up a paywall after one of the intermediate practices.
So, I turned to a saved comment from a comrade here pointing to this blog as just an all around resource, and used b-ok to download two of the textbooks from this page. I miss the gamification and it sucks to basically start all over, but I'll be building an Anki flashcard set to replace that.
I pay for it and don't regret it. The Teacher Talk episodes stop about half way after the HSK-1 bookmark (Spare Time being the last one), but I found them all super helpful for reviewing the lesson and adding some cultural notes that could otherwise be missed. I really like the speaking and writing exercises as well, so I still pay.
I think there have been SLA studies for Japanese specifically where delaying kanji until rather later in the course resulted in significantly better outcomes
I've never studied Chinese or Japanese but I think if the writing system proves to be too discouraging (which I think is the case for most people who start to learn) you should focus on learning to like actually say words and stuff, writing is important but it's not as important as the actual language
Also I've heard good things about lingodeer but I've never really been an app guy
yeah i think words before symbols would've helped me a lot. couldn't even memorize hiragana because my brain is broken.
Install the Zhongwen popup dictionary in your browser so you can see stuff when your browsing. I spent a lot of time working on properly pronouncing the pinyin and tones too. This is fun to play with for that.
My Chinese neighbour to me to ignore pinyin entirely. There aren't any native Chinese speakers that learn/use it or really even know what it is. For English speakers you'd think that it would help, but when you try to sound out what you would think the pinyin word sounds like it's entirely incorrect.
I could see that being somewhat more applicable to Chinese but it's possible he might just have no idea what he's talking about- people who don't teach language can really have no idea what it's like to learn their own language.
I took Japanese for many years and lemme tell ya, the writing system seriously got in the way of actually learning to say anything . And Japanese uses a cross between the Chinese writing system and a homegrown system that's similar to an alphabet, making it slightly easier to write than Chinese but similar in many ways. Simplified Chinese makes it slightly easier but it's probably still harder than Japanese based on the sheer character count. It took me 6 or 7 years of classes to hit the level of proficiency you could reach in 1 year of latin-alphabet based language classes. Part of that is the related words, but still. Writing was a fuck.
I would get a second opinion from someone who learned it to a high degree of fluency, as a second language.
I don't know if this is really helpful but you can watch Chinese state television online for free and most of the streams and videos have Chinese subtitles. So you can listen to the Chinese spoken and read it at the same time.
https://tv.cctv.com/live/
go to china and take classes. or take online classes from a native speaker
Pinyin is what I went with when I learned traditional Chinese. Are you learning that or Simplified?
Simplified is what the overwhelming majority of Chinese speakers use, Traditional is used only in Taiwan and Hong Kong and is also much more difficult to write.
I'm a language baby, is Duolingo any good at all for Chinese or is it a total waste of time?
I started on Duolingo and strongly do not recommend it. The character recognition exercises are way worse than HelloChinese, and the focus on having different cartoon characters teach you means they have a couple really-incomprehensible audio sometimes. Like I don't need to learn Chinese through simulated baby talk, and it's worse than with most languages because it messes with the tones.
Most exercises are either in hanzi or pinyin, with no option for both side by side (imo the best way to learn - reading the characters with a convenient pronunciation guide). They've also gamified it to a degree that I was chasing leaderboards rather than focusing on learning.
Maybe Duolingo is good for other languages, but I had a very negative experience using it for Chinese, doing it daily for 3 months. HelloChinese is better even if you only use the free features.
