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New to Mandarin, where should I start?

Follow-up question. If I pursue a characters course, obviously the focus is to learn what the characters mean but how much should one emphasize also learning the pronunciation while doing this (or the pinyin spelling for that matter)?

Excellent question - and I think that the Pimsleur course is an excellent way to start with learning spoken Chinese as well. The key thing at the beginning of your studies is to keep on making progress and for that reason I think that the "Mandarin reading survival" would be the best method for you at the moment. That will teach you to be able to read things like menus in Chinese restaurants, which is fun and keeps you motivated.

Are you in China at the moment? If you aren't, then I would suggest that pushing on with learning lots of characters and their pinyin on one hand, and with the Pimsleur course on the other would be a very good system to prepare you for coming to China. A lot of the spoken language really needs you to have native speakers all around you to practice with. But the more characters you can pick up before you go to China, the faster you will progress once you get here.

As for how much attention you should pay to the pinyin, I would start out by going with the default settings: they introduce the character and its meaning to you first, and then after a delay they start testing you on the pinyin. But you might find that after a while the pinyin is slowing down your progress too much. In that case feel free to press that "skip pronunciation" button to stop being tested on pinyin for a while. Push forward in the areas that you are making progress most easily.

Does that make sense? Good luck, and please do let me know if you have any more questions,

Best wishes

Ben

Ben, what a great answer, thank you. I didn't realize that the system would begin to test me on pinyin, sounds perfect.

I'm not in China at the moment. I'm near fluency in Spanish and, while I make that leap, I'm looking ahead to my next language to break up the monotony a bit. So my goal with Mandarin is just to spend 30 mins/day or so slowly laying some foundation in anticipation of taking classes and spending some time over there later on.

I've started on the reading survival. The memes are great and the characters are really interesting. I was tempted to sit here all night and start learning the whole first 250, but I managed to refrain.

Great - well in that case I think that you are doing the right thing. If you can pick up a good grounding in a few hundred characters (which should be pretty enjoyable and easy to do), then you will find it much, much easier when you start classes, and so will make much faster progress.

Pimsleur is really good for your pronunciation etc, and I would keep going with that as well - but people do tend to find it very hard to stick with. I got through all three levels of it (it took me 5 months, not the intended 3), but I only know one other person who has managed to. But it is worth doing if you can.

Thanks,

Ben

http://www.memrise.com/set/10001516/integrated-chinese-level-1-part-1-vocabulary/

My plan was to buy a common textbook, and use one of the word lists that matches the vocabulary. I can't say that its entirely successful. The Integrated Chinese books use phrases as vocabulary items which don't fit that well into Memrise. On the other hand, by simply memorizing lots of words off of the word-frequency lists means that to some extent I just know random words. After three months of adding words everyday, I can't speak any Chinese. If you do want to speak Mandarin, I would highly recommend taking a class of some kind.

My experience having studied Spanish in middle school is that Spanish is much easier to learn. It has a phonetic alphabet, relatively consistent spelling and verb forms, as well as English cognates.

http://voxy.com/blog/index.php/2011/03/hardest-languages-infographic/

@carl_a I'm sorry that you don't find that you can speak any Chinese yet; given the grounding that you now have in characters though, I think that you will now find it very much faster going if you do start taking classes. For learning spoken Chinese I think that using Pimsleur alongside Memrise is a very good plan, and as you progress through Pimsleur, gradually switch over to listening more to podcasts like popupchinese.com.

Best wishes

Ben

Re: Carl A - I am also using Memrise together with a good textbook (and tutor) and often enter in entire phrases into my vocabulary list to reinforce something I learned or correct an error someone pointed out. Works pretty well for me.

Do agree if one is a true beginner then there is really no way to learn how to start speaking Chinese from solo studying Chinese characters.

As we discussed before, I still believe trying to learn pinyin without being taught (and corrected repeatedly) by a native is pretty much a waste of time. A native English speaker will inevitably interpret the romanization through similarities to English pronunciation, which unfortunately just won't work since the basic sounds of the two languages are quite far apart.

In addition, a typical beginner will not have the listening skills to correctly mimic the sounds of natives from just listening to recordings. What sounds close to us will sound incomprehensible to someone in Taipei or Chengdu.

However, from my experience your approach of starting with a good textbook series that includes a range of activities will allow you to gain exposure to many different ways on how to use your growing vocabulary and pay dividends in the long run. In hindsight, I wished I had started there versus focusing primarily on conversational skills and listening to dialogues.

Take a four skills approach, spend about the same minutes every day on speaking, listening, reading, and writing.

These four skills will advance and plateau independently, but keeping all four growing in this way is the best for learning and they will all help each other a great deal.

Memrise right now is going to help you get rolling with your reading with some very introductory skills related to the other three skills.

Pimsleur would be your speaking and perhaps listening, for now. As I understand it, it really requires 30 minutes daily right there. So I guess you're looking at 30 minutes of Memrise a day. Commit to looking at writing (or, if not interested, then typing!) Chinese ea. day as well.

Oh yeah, and ofc "reading" may begin with pre-reading skills like vocabulary but ultimately, find some dialogues to work through from textbooks. Or other options.

Maybe vocabulary is a "5th" skill.

大家好！Thank you all for the wonderful discussion which reflects most of the questions I had concerning this topic during the last months. After a while I luckily found a very good teacher whom I meet once a week. We are going through the textbook "301 句" which contains about 250 characters (there's a course for this book on Memrise). What I realized is what follows: (a) learning is much easier on the basis of some hundred memrise-learned characters (HSK 1 & 2); (b) learning the vocabulary of a textbook via memrise is much more effective and way more fun than the usual methods (flashcards etc.); and (c) you (at least: I) cannot do without a teacher.

PS: If you want to concentrate on learning characters and their pinyin transcription you cannot go wrong with the HSK courses.