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Beginning To Speak Chinese: Consider Rocket Chinese
Learning to speak Chinese is no easy undertaking, but it is extremely interesting to study such a different tongue. There is a range of Chinese language software programs, you could find a class, or even travel to China to study!
Of course, there are a lot of benefits to speaking Mandarin even if it is at a rudimentary level:
You get respect by simply having a try at speaking Mandarin, even if you mispronounce words and get the tones wrong. As few Westerners even try, you get noticed.
There are scores of jobs, in international business and other fields, where knowing how to speak the Chinese language is necessary. For some jobs, being able to read may be obligatory. Reading Chinese is more challenging than speaking it, but surely far more employment is available if you can do both. By the way, there are two sorts of written Chinese: characters and pinyin, which uses the characters of our alphabet.
There are also many forms of the Chinese language. Most known and most widely spoken is Mandarin, while Cantonese is next in popularity. Over a billion people speak some form of the Chinese language, and the majority of them speak Mandarin.
Most Westerners study Mandarin. I once decided to study Mandarin but by mistake I really had private lessons in Cantonese for a while. This was before the internet. I don't think this slip-up would happen now. Here is how it came about: one year I was in Paris, studying French as a college student. My father, who spoke Mandarin, had business that would take him to Hong Kong. He informed me that I could meet up with him there, and that he would pay for me to begin learning to speak Mandarin while I was still in France.
I thought that sounded pretty enjoyable so I went to one of the main language schools in Paris. The people there introduced me to an elderly Chinese gentleman, and I studied with him for several weeks. I had a hard time with the tones in particular.
But when I arrived in Hong Kong and was met by my father, I greeted him in what I thought was good Mandarin. My father didn't understand me. So I began counting to ten, guessing that would prove I was speaking Mandarin. "That is Cantonese," my father said. It turned out that everything I had learned was Cantonese.
But things worked out fine. It turned out that the process of learning tones did assist me to speak Mandarin better.
Now, with the internet, you have so many resources for learning Chinese. I am picking up the study of Mandarin again, using a program called Rocket Chinese. However you choose to learn Chinese, you won't learn Chinese fast in the sense of becoming fluent astonishingly quickly, but you can learn enough to have a lot of fun, or maybe even get a better job.
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