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Can anyone who learned Chinese comment on the timeframe it takes to even get a basic understanding of what the subtitles say? I used to learn English this way

Can anyone who learned Chinese comment on the timeframe it takes to even get a basic understanding of what the subtitles say? I used to learn English this way (watching US TV shows in English with English subs and very limited vocabulary). Eventually disabled the subs. Now watching everything in English. Love it. edit: any tips on getting started with Chinese very welcome as well (apart from the standard stuff I find myself through Google or language courses)

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
justinhj 9y ago
I use an app called Memrise and a website called chinesepod. There's a really good dictionary app called Pieco. Going beyond the standard stuff I'd recommend a professional teacher since you really need to learn Chinese from multiple angles: learning to recognize and write the characters, reading pinyin, understanding spoken Mandarin and being able to speak.
RandomBookmarks 9y ago
>it takes to even get a basic understanding of what the subtitles say? The main challenge with Chinese is that - unlike any Western language - you can not guess the characters you do not know. You either know it or you don't. Only the context might offer some clues. Getting started with Chinese: Depends on your talent. For me (untalented) taken a "real" class was essential for a good start. Self-learning for languages does not work for me.
- unityByFreedom 9y ago
  > you can not guess the characters you do not know That's not completely true. Chinese characters are composed of parts, some of which are referred to as radicals. If you know the part/block, you can sometimes guess its meaning or sound. Also, new Chinese words are made of existing characters, so you can often guess multi-character words by knowing the individual characters. For example, the word for computer is "electric brain". You might be able to guess that if you knew that 電means electric and 腦 means brain I recommend the site called http://hackingchinese.com http://hackingchinese.com He has a lot of good tips for how to learn Chinese as a foreign adult
  - lacampbell 9y ago
    For example, the word for computer is "electric brain". You might be able to guess that if you knew that 電means electric and 腦 means brain Or you could be like me, idly sitting in a Malaysian restaurant, reading "馬來" and trying to figure what "Horses Arriving" has to to do with curry.
    - unityByFreedom 9y ago
      Haha, well, I feel that one's easy too if you know that sometimes characters are used as phonetics for words in other languages. Just like English! Although you might not expect that at first from a non-phonetically written language. Every language has exceptions to "rules". In fact, there are few hard and fast rules for any language, since every language is a mix of another. But, once you get comfortable with a language, you can appreciate the differences and make interesting guesses about the exceptions' origins. It can be fun. I like http://www.hanzicraft.com/ http://www.hanzicraft.com/ because it breaks down the characters into parts you can click on to get their definitions or origins. Hacking chinese also has a cool resources section here [1], categorized, so you can browse through dictionaries, listening tools, practice tests, browser add-ons, etc. etc. [1] http://challenges.hackingchinese.com/resources/Beginner http://challenges.hackingchinese.com/resources/Beginner
      - peterburkimsher 9y ago
        If you want to type characters from parts, decomposing and recomposing from radicals, I made http://pingtype.github.io http://pingtype.github.io
      - lacampbell 9y ago
        Hanzicraft looks cool, though I feel like I should learn to speak Mandarin a lot better before worrying about reading it. Infact I'd be fairly happy to be a fluent speaker and illiterate.
    - darklajid 9y ago
      Okay, people replying to you so far seem to understand what's going on. For those that don't get it: Why are these characters used in your particular case?
KerrickStaley 9y ago
To be honest, learning Chinese has been a long and somewhat painful process. I'm about 6.5 years in at this point (2.5 years of school + 4 years of self study) and am starting to be able to pick up a newspaper or watch a show and get the gist of what it's about. I don't have a natural knack for languages and I was never devoting 100% of my time to it (I did software in school and now for work), so your experience may differ. Also I never had a chance for immersion—people I know that have spent 6 months in Taiwan or China are often above my level even though they've been studying for less total time, so immersion is really helpful. I've found that SRS apps like Anki or Memrise and podcasts like Popup Chinese or ChinesePod have been really helpful. I'm also developing an approach where I extract vocabulary words from videos and newspaper articles and pre-study them before watching/reading—I'm hoping to blog about this at some point.
ximeng 9y ago
After around 3000 hours of mostly self study I can understand 95+% of subtitles for TV shows and for a movie can follow enough dialog just through subtitles to understand what's going on at full speed. Study success scales pretty linearly with time spent as far as I can tell, assuming you have a fairly sensible study method. For 1000 hours study I'd imagine you'd get the basics of a lot of subtitles but probably not quickly enough to follow along at full speed. Teachers can be helpful to point out some mistakes you'll miss through self study but unless you have a fair amount of cash to throw at the problem self study will likely be a better approach. For full fluency you probably want to target around 20k vocab, so it's a bit of a numbers game in terms of finding a quick way to improve your vocabulary. I use Skritter but I guess any SRS software should help a lot here. Not entirely convinced by immersion as being necessary, I learned plenty of Chinese without it. Probably good for day to day vocab and motivation but unless your level is good you will still struggle to get into conversations where you use it, depending on how outgoing you are.
imron 9y ago
> Can anyone who learned Chinese comment on the timeframe it takes to even get a basic understanding of what the subtitles say? 3-5 years depending on how much you study. > any tips on getting started with Chinese very welcome as well The best tip you'll ever get is to study every day. For more concrete examples of what/how to study, here is an excellent post that contains a lot of advice for independent Chinese learners: https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/43939-independent-chinese-study-review/ https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/43939-independen...
andai 9y ago
I can highly recommend All Japanese All The Time http://ajatt.com/ http://ajatt.com/ The author Khatzumoto taught himself Japanese in 18 months "by having fun", and then got a job in Japan (at Sony iirc). He then went on to use the same method to learn Chinese. If you can get through the website's navigation, and scroll through the occasional incoherent rambling, there is solid gold advice throughout :) Good luck! ps. While the site focuses on Japanese, the advice translates to learning any language. Plus there is advice and resources specifically for Chinese :)

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

justinhj 9y ago

I use an app called Memrise and a website called chinesepod. There's a really good dictionary app called Pieco. Going beyond the standard stuff I'd recommend a professional teacher since you really need to learn Chinese from multiple angles: learning to recognize and write the characters, reading pinyin, understanding spoken Mandarin and being able to speak.

RandomBookmarks 9y ago

>it takes to even get a basic understanding of what the subtitles say? The main challenge with Chinese is that - unlike any Western language - you can not guess the characters you do not know. You either know it or you don't. Only the context might offer some clues. Getting started with Chinese: Depends on your talent. For me (untalented) taken a "real" class was essential for a good start. Self-learning for languages does not work for me.

unityByFreedom 9y ago
> you can not guess the characters you do not know That's not completely true. Chinese characters are composed of parts, some of which are referred to as radicals. If you know the part/block, you can sometimes guess its meaning or sound. Also, new Chinese words are made of existing characters, so you can often guess multi-character words by knowing the individual characters. For example, the word for computer is "electric brain". You might be able to guess that if you knew that 電means electric and 腦 means brain I recommend the site called http://hackingchinese.com http://hackingchinese.com He has a lot of good tips for how to learn Chinese as a foreign adult
- lacampbell 9y ago
  For example, the word for computer is "electric brain". You might be able to guess that if you knew that 電means electric and 腦 means brain Or you could be like me, idly sitting in a Malaysian restaurant, reading "馬來" and trying to figure what "Horses Arriving" has to to do with curry.
  - unityByFreedom 9y ago
    Haha, well, I feel that one's easy too if you know that sometimes characters are used as phonetics for words in other languages. Just like English! Although you might not expect that at first from a non-phonetically written language. Every language has exceptions to "rules". In fact, there are few hard and fast rules for any language, since every language is a mix of another. But, once you get comfortable with a language, you can appreciate the differences and make interesting guesses about the exceptions' origins. It can be fun. I like http://www.hanzicraft.com/ http://www.hanzicraft.com/ because it breaks down the characters into parts you can click on to get their definitions or origins. Hacking chinese also has a cool resources section here [1], categorized, so you can browse through dictionaries, listening tools, practice tests, browser add-ons, etc. etc. [1] http://challenges.hackingchinese.com/resources/Beginner http://challenges.hackingchinese.com/resources/Beginner
    - peterburkimsher 9y ago
      If you want to type characters from parts, decomposing and recomposing from radicals, I made http://pingtype.github.io http://pingtype.github.io
    - lacampbell 9y ago
      Hanzicraft looks cool, though I feel like I should learn to speak Mandarin a lot better before worrying about reading it. Infact I'd be fairly happy to be a fluent speaker and illiterate.
  - darklajid 9y ago
    Okay, people replying to you so far seem to understand what's going on. For those that don't get it: Why are these characters used in your particular case?

KerrickStaley 9y ago

To be honest, learning Chinese has been a long and somewhat painful process. I'm about 6.5 years in at this point (2.5 years of school + 4 years of self study) and am starting to be able to pick up a newspaper or watch a show and get the gist of what it's about. I don't have a natural knack for languages and I was never devoting 100% of my time to it (I did software in school and now for work), so your experience may differ. Also I never had a chance for immersion—people I know that have spent 6 months in Taiwan or China are often above my level even though they've been studying for less total time, so immersion is really helpful. I've found that SRS apps like Anki or Memrise and podcasts like Popup Chinese or ChinesePod have been really helpful. I'm also developing an approach where I extract vocabulary words from videos and newspaper articles and pre-study them before watching/reading—I'm hoping to blog about this at some point.

ximeng 9y ago

After around 3000 hours of mostly self study I can understand 95+% of subtitles for TV shows and for a movie can follow enough dialog just through subtitles to understand what's going on at full speed. Study success scales pretty linearly with time spent as far as I can tell, assuming you have a fairly sensible study method. For 1000 hours study I'd imagine you'd get the basics of a lot of subtitles but probably not quickly enough to follow along at full speed. Teachers can be helpful to point out some mistakes you'll miss through self study but unless you have a fair amount of cash to throw at the problem self study will likely be a better approach. For full fluency you probably want to target around 20k vocab, so it's a bit of a numbers game in terms of finding a quick way to improve your vocabulary. I use Skritter but I guess any SRS software should help a lot here. Not entirely convinced by immersion as being necessary, I learned plenty of Chinese without it. Probably good for day to day vocab and motivation but unless your level is good you will still struggle to get into conversations where you use it, depending on how outgoing you are.

imron 9y ago

> Can anyone who learned Chinese comment on the timeframe it takes to even get a basic understanding of what the subtitles say? 3-5 years depending on how much you study. > any tips on getting started with Chinese very welcome as well The best tip you'll ever get is to study every day. For more concrete examples of what/how to study, here is an excellent post that contains a lot of advice for independent Chinese learners: https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/43939-independent-chinese-study-review/ https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/43939-independen...

andai 9y ago

I can highly recommend All Japanese All The Time http://ajatt.com/ http://ajatt.com/ The author Khatzumoto taught himself Japanese in 18 months "by having fun", and then got a job in Japan (at Sony iirc). He then went on to use the same method to learn Chinese. If you can get through the website's navigation, and scroll through the occasional incoherent rambling, there is solid gold advice throughout :) Good luck! ps. While the site focuses on Japanese, the advice translates to learning any language. Plus there is advice and resources specifically for Chinese :)