Echo on March 2, 2010 | reply

@appapp,

Hi, welcome to the site!

You can start from our Absolute Beginner lessons. Listen to the podcasts, and then try to read the transcripts by yourself. We have tons of lessons that you can practice.

And if you have any questions or problems, you can always write to us. We are looking forward to hearing from you.

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com

trevelyan on March 2, 2010 | reply

@appapp,

Maybe others can chime in with their experiences here, but what we see that tends to work is when people focus first on listening and then move on to speaking and eventually reading and writing. This preference is very consciously incorporated in our site design. We don't place a huge emphasis on teaching the tones from day one because we find that people pick it up intuitively when they listen to *real* spoken Chinese (i.e. the natural inflective speech in our recordings, not the sort of thing you find in many beginner textbooks).

In contrast, the people who make the slowest progress seem to be those who focus on building an intellectual framework for understanding Chinese first, but don't put much time into listening to the actual language or trying to speak it. This is why we start teaching grammar at the Elementary level and focus primarily on simple vocabulary and high-frequency phrases at the Absolute Beginner level. It's important to learn Chinese grammar, but we don't think it should distract people from the communicative aspects of the language at the very beginning.

So, like Echo, I'd suggest starting with the Absolute Beginner podcasts here on Popup Chinese. Make sure you have the podcasts and dialogues loaded on your MP3 player, and listen to them repeatedly when you have the chance. Listen to the ones that you like repeatedly - they're meant to be fun and dramatic. Before you know it, the phrases and sentences should start feeling intuitive (you'll hear the first word, and want to complete the sentence). Practice speaking with our generative audio fix and when you're ready to move on to reading and writing start working with the transcripts and character writing worksheets.

ckw4y on March 2, 2010 | reply

I'm not an expert language learner by any means, but I can give you a few tips that have worked for me and may help you augment your learning process. As David mentioned, it's important to listen to real speech so you can tune your ears into the natural rhythm of the language. I've found a couple of reliable sources of audio and video online that I can use for listening practice. For video, I just put 小孩子动画片 (children's animation) into the search bar on youku, and I can generally find something with easy children's vocabulary, and the visual stimulus helps everything sink in more. For just plain audio, I try and listen to an hour of Radio Canada International's Mandarin station. I can only make out about 20% of what they're saying at any given time, but it helps me improve the speed of my word recognition while getting me used to the speed and rhythm of the language. This in itself doesn't constitute a course of study, but I think it goes a long way to augment something like the Popup Chinese course material.

dhinz23 on March 9, 2010 | reply

@ckw4y,

I'm glad I'm not the only one who uses international radio to practice listening to Chinese. I've been listening to the German broadcaster, Deutsche Welle's Chinese service (德国之声国际广播电台) for a while now. I listen to 30 minutes every day, and likewise, can only understand about 20% of it, but it definitely helps. Even when they're talking full speed, I can still pick out most of the words I know. The list of political words I've learned to recognize instantly is probably much higher than it should be (欧盟, 奥巴马, 伊朗, etc.) though. :)

Gail天堂的声音 on March 10, 2010 | reply

@dhinz23,

wow, I'm a bit surprised. I also used Deutsche Welle to practice my German for a while. But I didn't reallise it has Chinese service before you mentioned it. You can also listen to CRI, it's pretty useful too. However, the CRI website is not as beautifulas DW.

rsalc1 on March 12, 2010 | reply

@echo and david,

Thanks for your suggestions. In January I started learning Chinese using CD's, books, and some online videos, but I wasn't really learning.

I started the Absolute Beginner at Pop Up Chinese and finally I AM learning!

I listen to the podcasts, review the pdf, listen again and then listen some more and repeat as I listen. So, I am slowly developing listening and some speaking abilities :)

As far as reading hanzi, I try to learn all the hanzi in each lesson, and I also try to learn a few from the HSK list, but it is often difficult for me to remember the hanzi. Also sometimes I get 2 hanzi confused: to me "wo3 我" and "qian2 钱" look alike (lol).

Any suggestions on how to develop reading comprehension (character recognition)? BTW, your Firefox dictionary pop up is AWESOME!

Thanks!多谢!

Eric.Haupt on March 27, 2010 | reply

@ rsalc: I found that understanding the radicals helps me "figure out" the characters and recognize new ones. Can anyone recommend a good reference for learning the radicals, 头‘s, etc for those of us who want to improve our reading and writing?