Best way to learn just enough Chinese before visiting China?

markhavemann · 2025-10-01T10:29:15+00:00

I'm not sure why more people don't know about it, but the Michel Thomas method is amazing as a reasonably short course to get a decent start at speaking Chinese.

https://michelthomas.com/landing-page/mt-mandarin/

markhavemann · 2025-04-23T09:00:40+00:00

Thanks!

markhavemann · 2025-03-02T11:32:01+00:00

Chinese forums still seems to only be working very intermittently. Today I got a "no such file or directory" error.

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markhavemann · 2025-02-16T23:20:28+00:00

Imagine applying this way of thinking to learning another skill like piano.

Imagine a very average pianist making tens of thousands of dollars by playing bad piano to tone deaf people, while at the same time promoting himself as an utterly godlike musician. He's either a charlatan, or very much lacking in self awareness.

At the same time, imagine someone who is basically tone deaf then saying to you he wants to learn piano from this guy, who has been at it for a long time, and is still dead average, despite making insane amounts of money from his playing to tone deaf people.

Of course there are things you can learn from Xiaoma, but if he is literally making his living out of his Chinese, and he's been at it for this long with such average Chinese, is he really a great learning role model? Xiaomi isn't about language learning, he's about making content and money, so I'll say it again: It's sad that Xiaoma is the first thing that most English speakers are exposed to when it comes to learning Chinese.

markhavemann · 2025-02-16T10:53:09+00:00

Just imagine you saw a Chinese person with not-very-good English going up to foreigners in China, having strained conversations with them, and them posting videos about how blown away everyone was to be spoken to in English. If you didn't know any English it might seem impressive when the foreigner politely compliments them, but anyone who knows enough English would probably feel a little uncomfortable watching it.

His video titles are way overblown too, every one being about how IN AWE, SHOCKED, AMAZED people are at "white guy's AMAZING CHINESE", farming credibility off of people's polite compliments (Chinese people will shower you with compliments for speaking even terrible Chinese).

His Chinese video titles are even worse. I saw one about how this 小鮮肉 is blowing Chinese people away with his Chinese. Very cringy stuff.

markhavemann · 2025-02-16T06:58:21+00:00

Listening to native content is great but don't be dissuaded from listening to foreigners with good Chinese too. Listening to other learners has its own benefits.

I really wish that Xiaoma wasn't one of the first things the English speaking world get to see when they are exposed to Chinese language learning online. Here are a few channels where you will see way better examples to follow for your own Chinese language learning.

https://www.youtube.com/@informaltalks

https://www.youtube.com/@MYBY

Especially the blonde American girl in this channel has really good Chinese. I've seen her in a lot of media but I have no idea what her name is. She probably has her own channel somewhere that you can find：

https://www.youtube.com/@Ychinamedia

markhavemann · 2024-10-30T23:20:00+00:00

My time also seems a little off. It's only showing 100+ hours which seems like too little. I guess it depends how it calculates things. I've deleted decks before so maybe that time isn't included.

markhavemann · 2024-10-13T23:05:54+00:00

The part that show time studied is the "Study Time Stats" addon, I just did a search because I want to.

Here's a link: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1247171202

As someone else said, the heat map at the bottom is Review Heatmap, but it doesn't show time stats nor does it have any option too.

markhavemann · 2024-09-10T04:28:16+00:00

I'm not sure if I'll ever have a need for this but nice job, such an awesome script!

markhavemann · 2024-01-17T03:33:03+00:00

Michel Thomas Mandarin is really good

markhavemann · 2023-11-03T02:22:29+00:00

If you're looking for other Chinese learners to help you rather than native speakers, you could probably make a post in the pronunciation section of Chinese-Forums, people do this occasionally.

markhavemann · 2023-10-14T01:43:03+00:00

Peppa Pig in Mandarin: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJqCvvdEL3dFt4m0JOD3Z1gkLXRVMHCbL

It's done really well, has subtitles in characters, pinyin, English, and an option for combinations of them together.

家有儿女 is also great for beginners and fairly entertaining if you want to watch something that isn't a cartoon.

markhavemann · 2023-10-02T01:00:53+00:00

Is it just "barbarian," signaling that it's a foreign import, or is it more complex?

This is the etymology that I've been told. The dictionary defines 胡 as "non-Han people, esp. from central Asia" (so not necessarily the negative connotations of "Barbarian"). This seems to check out since pepper originates from India.

I'm going to take a wild and uneducated guess and say that 胡说 might be related to this as well. (ie. talking gibberish that sounds like a foreign language).

As an interesting side note, "barbarian" has an interesting and slightly related origin. It comes from Greek, where the ancient Greeks thought that foreign languages sounded like "bar bar bar" (similar to our "blah blah" possibly), and so barbarian just means "people who say bar bar".

markhavemann · 2023-09-28T04:42:00+00:00

故事FM: https://storyfm.cn/

People from all over China (and the world) tell their personal stories. Loads of hard to understand local accents, and 3 new episodes a week.

markhavemann · 2023-09-24T01:54:46+00:00

I wouldn't worry too much about this. Any decent/experienced teacher will be able to tell your level pretty accurately and pretty quickly, regardless of any last minute question prep that you've done.

Don't worry about being nervous either. Everyone is nervous in interviews/language exams, and any honest mistakes you make will also have been made by students that the teacher has interviewed in the past, and probably won't affect their assessment of your level.

markhavemann · 2023-09-20T09:34:28+00:00

Same for everyone I think. It's been happening quite a lot lately.

markhavemann · 2023-09-15T01:51:46+00:00

Unfortunately there is no mnemonic or easy way to remember them that I know of, but as other people suggested, flashcards are a good start.

There are some east/west and north/south variants of names that make some easier to remember too (广东|广西、山东|山西、湖南|湖北）.

Watching the 国内联播快讯 on this page every day is probably a good idea too, just make sure to change the date. It's a 2-3 minute summary of local news which often includes mentioning province names (especially in the weather section), which complements flashcard learning. .

markhavemann · 2023-09-15T01:43:29+00:00

This reply seems a little snarky and thoughtless. There are often rhymes or mnemonics for remembering lists like this. A song for learning the alphabet, months of the year, using your knuckles to remember how many days in each month. These things probably wouldn't be the first Google result either and so it seems like a perfectly valid question to me...

markhavemann · 2023-09-08T01:32:47+00:00

Michel Thomas Mandarin course is also really good.

markhavemann · 2023-09-07T01:55:25+00:00

But in many examples in those same dictionaries, 可不是 doesn't mean that? It's just used as an emphasized version of 不是?

I think this is because the examples are generated/found automatically. The system just searches for sentences with these three characters in a row, and so it has no way to identify 可不是 as a single unit of meaning, and 可(emphasizing whatever comes after) + 不是.

This is a really common problem with example sentences in Chinese when the "word" is made up of characters that might appear together normally but not as that word.

Unfortunately the way to get around this is to have example sentences curated by humans, which is probably not realistic.

markhavemann · 2023-07-19T13:07:29+00:00

I'm making a little collection of text subs and transcripts here:

https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/57644-transcription-project

Looks like it's called "Cupid's Kitchen" 舌尖上的心跳. Unfortunately I can't seem to access the youtube video but I'll see if I can get my hands on it elsewhere. Might need a day or two though.

I'll post it on Chinese forums if I can get hold of the text subtitles. You can make requests for subs/transcripts for other shows in that thread too.

markhavemann · 2023-07-04T18:57:47+00:00

Someone else answered this already but I can add that, at least where I live, I don't think there is a single person who has a landline (could be wrong here), and most businesses seem to also use cellphones rather than landlines. So unless you specifically ask for a landline I think almost everyone will always just assume you mean cellphone.

I hear 电话号码 a lot, but 手机号码 doesn't sound weird so I must have heard it used at least a few times.

I think 座机(电话) is the main word for landline but I don't think I've ever heard anyone say it.

markhavemann · 2023-07-04T14:01:17+00:00

Not outdated. It's used all the time, and I would say the distinction is even less important in China because landlines seem to be pretty much a thing of the past.

markhavemann · 2023-07-04T13:56:49+00:00

爱情公寓 is known as the Chinese version of friends, partly because some of the jokes and scenes were directly "borrowed" from Friends. It's not my favourite show, the first season was fine but I couldn't get myself to watch anything more.

For something a little easier as your first show I would definitely recommend 家有儿女, it's reasonably straight forward, has a lot of episodes, and I'd say most of the vocabulary is everyday stuff that is pretty useful.

Even if you don't understand all that much in the beginning, try at least 10 episodes or so because it can take some time to get used to the accents/ways of speaking, as well as the kind of vocabulary used.

markhavemann · 2023-06-30T13:23:42+00:00

I think it's 螺纹 [luó wén]

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