Yes, it’s true that learning how to speak Chinese very well takes time and patience and much practice, but learning Chinese language onversationally for your trip is not that hard. It is available. And it’s fun to learn.

You’ll want to learn Standard Mandarin Chinese if you’re going anywhere on Mainland China or Taiwan. In Hong Kong, though, they speak Cantonese, although Mandarin is also spoken in Hong Kong.

I was surprised to find something very easy that I came to China. For one thing, numbers were fairly easy: ling, yi, er, san, si, wu, liu, qi, ba, jiu, shi – that’s zero through ten in Chinese. Then, the Numbers of teenagers, it’s shiyi, shier, shisan, etc. — so it’s ten plus the other number. That makes more sense than our teen numbers, especially “eleven” and “twelve,” although our thirteen through nineteen roughly follow the rule of adding “teen” to the back of our three-through-nine numbers, more or less.

Also, the days of the week work the same way. A week is “yixingqi.”Then, a week, those who were numbered of them, so it is ” xingqiyi “or on Monday, the first day of the week; and “xingqier” or Tuesday, the second day of the week. Can you see how they use the numbers again to name the days of the week?

I found some Chinese characters are very easy to remember things, because they sound like the things they are describing. For example, “mao” means cat (refers to the sound that a cat makes).

To learn conversational Mandarin Chinese, I got a couple of CDs to listen to and practice with. I also have a manual, called “Chinese in ten minutes a day.” It included lots of stickers that I could cut out and put around my house (and outside) to the Chinese vocabulary label materials. That helped a lot for learning everyday words such as “chair,” “table,” “bathroom,” “car,” “book,” etc.

Originally posted 2009-03-11 12:52:13. Republished by Blog Post Promoter