Learn the Chinese Language

The best way to learn the Chinese language is to begin with most basic words and phrases. This will ensure that you a good foundation and develop an initial confidence while developing your linguistic skills. This is as true with learning Chinese as it is with every other foreign language, like Spanish, Japanese and a host of others.

Here is a list of the initial vocabulary classes you should focus on developing:

• Salutations: The greetings are basically some of the easiest to learn in Chinese. You should first try and study how they greet at every time of the day. For example to say "hello" or "hi" in Mandarin Chinese, you would have to say "Ni Hao" (pronounced as 'nee how'). Once you get the different phrases used for morning, afternoon, evening, and similar ones. To practice, use them when getting some stuff from your local Chinese restaurant, when chatting with your friend online, with your work colleagues, when in Chinatown or when helping out that lost tourist from China find their way. The avenues for practice are virtually limitless.
  



• Common Phrases: Learn to say things like "thank you", "goodbye", "I am John Doe", etc. This will be very easily to learn and remember as you may be using them everyday as they are among the most used words and phrases in any language.
  
  


• Domestic Vocabulary: Learn the names of things and activities that you use and engage in in the Chinese language. This includes names for things in your home, workplace and school. Also learn the Chinese names of such activities as 'sleep', 'read', 'eat', etc. In other words, also learn those words and phrases that you know you will find yourself using and repeating every single day. Also, the name and titles of people around you like 'mother', 'brother', 'manager', etc.
  

When you visit your local Chinese restaurant or store and you want to buy something, how do you go about it? It would be a very good thing if you already know how to communicate basically with them with the basic Chinese words and phrases. But what about the numbers? After all, the price tag on the food is a number, not a word. So, what do you do?

But first, here is a little 'caveat': You won't learn how to pronounce Chinese words and numbers correctly by reading these transcriptions, though these may give you a head-start. When you learn how to speak Chinese you should keep in ind that this language is very tonal. That is, you would have to learn to correctly articulate or pronounce the words by either listening to a fluent native speaker or by using such high quality software and audio programs as produced by Rocket Chinese and Rosetta Stone .

That said, here are the numbers in Chinese:

1-----Yi
2-----Er
3-----San
4-----Si
5-----Wu
6-----Liu
7-----Qi
8-----Ba
9-----Jiu
10----Shi

Well, I would have added more, but it may be better learning these ones first before adding the others to the list.

By the way below is a video of how to pronounce these Chinese numbers. ;)

Chinese belongs to a language class known as the semanto-phonetic writing languages, along with others such as Japanese, Mayan, Ancient Egyptian, etc.

Another guaranteed route to be fluent as quickly as possible is to learn to write Chinese. To learn Chinese writing however, may require a little more patience when compared to other non-character dependent languages, like Arabic, English, French, etc.

There are roughly 5,000-6,000 Chinese characters (known as hànzi) that you will have to learn to be fluent in this language. This is the level of fluency required for you to be able to read technical writings or classical Chinese writings and literature. As for being able to read simple everyday newspaper articles, you will only need to master about 3,000 characters.

There are basically 12 types of strokes that may be used in constructing a character. However, this does not mean that every character will have the whole twelve. Some may have only four, for example. The more complicated the character is, the more strokes will be needed to write it.

Note: The simplest Chinese characters will contain only one stroke, but the complex ones may need up to 64 strokes to write the character.

As a result of the limitations faced by Westerners who are only used to using the Roman script to read and write, p%u012Bny%u012Bn was developed to transcribe Chinese words for easy reading. This helps non-native speakers to learn to speak Chineseas quickly and easily as possible without having to go through the hassle of learning the hànzi.

Learning to write Chinese for the first time may see like a daunting task for most people who are have only learned to read and write using the Roman or Arabic scripts. But this shouldn't be the case; you can learn to read these characters in as a short time as possible.

There are many ways you can use to learn Chinese fast. And one of them is by using language learning software.

Now, while there are many ones in the market, two of them actually trump over all the rest. These are Rocket Chinese and Rosetta Stone. However, if you are looking at price as well as ease of use, then Rocket Chinese may be the best way to go.

Rocket Chinese comes with a lot of features, including:

• More than 14 hours of interactive audio lessons. These range from lessons for the basic greetings, ordering food in a restaurant, asking your way around your local Chinatown or China itself, and many more.
  


• Illustrated lessons and dynamic language software games to make the Chinese language learning process smooth, fast and enjoyable.
  


• MegaVocab: This is an interactive and dynamic Chinese language vocabulary builder. It is already stuffed with over 1000 words and phrases; plus, you have the ability to add more as you progress with the language.
  


• Chinese Learners' Forum: This is a community of Chinese language enthusiasts, including native and professional speakers, intermediate beginners and rookies alike (no offense intended :) )
  

There is a whole lot more in the Rocket Chineselanguage software than most 4-figure-charging language schools will have you fork out for to get.

If you really want to learn to speak Mandarin Chinese, the Rocket Chinese language software package may well be your magic tool to scale the Great Wall of China (or is it its language ;) )

You have the option of either downloading the package or having the hard copies shipped to you (for a few more bucks)

With this, you can learn Chinese on the computer, or burn it into an MP3 format and listen to it in your car, on your DVD player, or your computer. The choice is yours.

You can learn more about this Chinese language learning software by visiting the Rocket Chinese official website.

'Nuff said. (Or so I think. :) )