I know, because I’ve tried before. My name is Chris and I’m a Chinese-American who didn’t really get interested in learning Chinese until I graduated from college. I took some classes at a local community college for a year and I learned quite a bit. I also developed this piece of software called ZDT to help me with my studies. The program has a small following and I worked on it for a few of years. However, when I moved out on my own, it was no longer convenient for me to take classes anymore, so I had to start learning Chinese on my own. As you may have figured out, learning another language by yourself requires quite a bit of discipline, which I didn’t have at the time. So over the last couple of years, life started to intervene, and I slowly stopped studying my Mandarin.
Fast forward to the present day. I’m not quite sure why I want to start up learning again. I think I felt bad because I have been very slow to respond to requests by people emailing me about ZDT related things. I didn’t really have a desire to add new features or fix bugs in ZDT while I wasn’t using the program myself.
So I’ve decided to start up this blog to help people learn Mandarin. I know there are a ton of great new online chinese learning resources out there now that should make learning chinese a lot easier. There’s also a lot of not so good resources as well, so I would like to start trying all these things out and sharing my experiences with them. By doing so, I hope to get myself motivated again to start studying again. Once I do that, I’ll probably start working on finishing the next version of ZDT. My goal is to become fluent in Mandarin in one years time. I hope I can help you guys on the way as well.
April 27th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Hey Chris
Don’t give up buddy. I have been living in Taiwan for 3 years now and have not got very far. I have been touched by a new spirit and energy and am now determined to master mandarin Chinese.
Not too sure about ZDT yet…just downloaded 0.7.0 and not quite sure where to get started. However, I have found some other exciting sites and together I am sure I’ll be able to achieve my goal.
Love and peace
April 28th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Cool site. I will download the software and try it out. I hope to see more from you on the blog soon. There’s a real need for this kind of help out there…
April 29th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Check out this site if you are keen to learn how to write and understand Chinese characters:
http://www.usc.edu/dept/ealc/chinese/character/alpha/index.htm
and this one if you want to learn how to listen to and say the sounds correctly using the 4 tones:
http://www.quickmandarin.com/chinesepinyintable/pinyintable_vertical.php
Let me know how it goes and if you have any ideas.
Am I correct in understanding that you put the ZDT software together. If you did, I’d like to ask you a few questions.
Love and peace
December 28th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
I would agree that the biggest challenge when learning any language is discipline.
As for the characters, there are many fancy applications out there to help, but all you really need is pen and paper. Learn the proper stroke order of 50-100 characters and you’re pretty much good to go for self-study.
Go through textbooks, articles, or books – depending on your level – and go at a pace of 10-20 new words (not new characters) per day. Make index cards or a list of these words. Each day, cover the English or Chinese side of the list and review. Mark words you couldn’t remember. Review those words again, then review marked words everyday until you know them. Each word should take only a couple seconds to review, so in 10 minutes, you should be able to review several days’ worth of words.
Next, keep a separate list for the new words that contain new characters. When reviewing, cover the English or Pinyin side and write each word out once from memory. (Yes! Just once!) Mark the words you don’t remember and write them out three times.
You may find that you cannot remember every word/character perfectly after one day of study. After several days, though, you will remember – and without writing each character +10 times and forgetting it after 3 days.
If you use a similar procedure for any language, you can One) in three years (at 10 words per day) develop a vocabulary of comperable size to that of a native speaker, and Two) retain this vocabulary due to the intense level of review.
The whole program takes about 30 minutes per day. This is, of course, fairly intense and can be cut down depending on your needs. If you do not need to develop such a large vocabulary in such a short period, then learn five new words per day.
Also, you will find that you will learn enough characters by concentrating on learning vocabulary. After all, knowledge of the two characters that make up a word do not always mean you know what the word means. It is more meaningful to learn the actual word.
Lastly, you may decide to take some time off and go to China to study Chinese. You will progress much faster and in one year, you will achieve a proficient level.
April 10th, 2011 at 6:01 pm
Hi Chris,
I want to take an online course for Chinease. Here’s the thing, I’m starting high school next year, I live in Florida, and my parents don’t think I can do it. So, I have no use. But I REALLY want to. I hear it’s hard, yet I don’t care. I want to learn it. So I’m going to read your blog and pray I will be aloud to try it.