Learn to read chinese

Unlikely

but I’ve been thinking about taking a basic course focused on speaking over the summer, while choir is on a break. I checked out the usual suspects (Westminster, SOAS) whose courses are I’m sure great but also deathly expensive and seem pretty hardcore, but I did find this one at 44 Portland Place:
http://www.44portlandplace.org.uk/c-languages.html

which is also on a Tuesday, like choir, is short, cheap, and finishes early which would be great. I think this could be an ideal taster.

There’s also a 5-week beginners’ course at International House: http://www.ihlondon.com/courses/cnsureve1.asp which would also be good – although not as close to work.

I would Love to do this. I’m hoping a program will open up somewhere close to where I live so I can take advantage of it. The closest as of now is 75 miles away.

I am still searching for a podcast that is (a) decent (b) easy© free and (d) has good accompanying PDFs. I’m going to try out the chinesepod freebies this week but they guy is a tad annoying – it seems a good pace though so if it works it might be worth signing up.

There is so much other stuff out there. I have found the BBC course, and also this page which has a whole bundle of links.

The best pick for me though is definitely this one which has short news stories in Chinese, and the pinyin and meanings jump out at you. Also updated many times a day by the looks of things. Just what I was looking for!!

I got tired of listening to the same songs over and over today and turned on the radio – sadly as I don’t have it set up right, I can only get AM stations. So I was flicking through and lo and behold: Chinese Radio, live to South Croydon!

They have simple Chinese lessons too, so now that I know I’ll tune in! The dialogues are on this page, here

Whaddya know?

Finally found this site, which has a number of manageable-length dialogues that I can use for reading practice. I’m not worried about the speaking itself yet, just getting to the point where I can understand simple written Chinese, and get to grips with sentence structure a bit.

These should keep me going for a while!

Having finished the character posters I’m trying to get to grips with some sentences – 2 hour session yesterday to make up my target time for the week – had no internet at home but went through the phrases in the back of the dictionary and some others on a sheet I had from the class I went to about 3 years ago! I was just going through, picking out the meanings of some of the main characters and getting used to their use and positioning in sentences. Learnt to tell the time too :P

It’s funny how quickly the well-used characters embed themselves in your mind – the readings and even the accents, which is a surprise. It is delightful that there’s only one reading for most of the characters, and in that sense it really is simpler than Japanese.

I have been really enjoying doing the daily characters as well, it’s a good way to incorporate the characters one by one into my vocabulary and to relate them to daily happenings – makes it more personal. :D

after a 3 and a half hour MEGA session this afternoon (I was just in one of those let’s-get-sucked-in moods!) I finally finished my six posters of characters-I-don’t-yet-know. I think it’s done a lot for my familiarity with the unfamiliar shapes and so on and will be a good reference for when I start reading soon.

Yay. Onwards!

OK so I finished poster 3 this week (did a little bit each over about three nights)... am up to “li” in the dictionary, hoping that means I’m roughly halfway cos I only have 3 more sheets of special poster paper (dragged home specially from Japan!) and I HATE IT when things don’t match up with my stationery resources!!

I’m going to keep working on it this week and then set myself a time to finish them by. Then I should be able to gradually start reading things and learning vocab.

to find “scatterbrain” (马大哈）on my list of vocab for today!! All I need to do now is find the Chinese for “ditz” !!!!!

Has also been interesting to see that a lot of non-Chinese words are incorporated into chinese characters, as occasionally happens with Japanese – things like 马赛克 – masaike – which means mosaic, and 马拉松 – malasong – which is marathon! How cool?!

Also glad to find the text support on my PC working… woohoo!