We will start with Pinyin

As you can find more detail in Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin), this is the phonetic notation for standard Mandarin. And honestly, that is what we learned in elementary school where we started to get exposed to Mandarin.

There are some other alternative approaches to master Chinese, and I will explain why I choose this way. Mandarin is the official language in Mainland China, the dominant one in Chinese community. Cantonese is used in Hong Kong as the official one, and it has a phonetic nonation based on English instead of Pinyin. That is way you may find the forms of English representation of their Chinese names vary a lot--just because they are under different phonetic system.

Take the famous Hong Kong-borne movie star Chow Yun-fat (This is his original name and if you pronounce following that, you are speaking Cantonese) for example, in Pinyin the name should be Zhōu Rùnfā.

We will talk more about this rule of pronunciation in the following days. It is not hard at all. As long as you grasp these basic skills, you can start to speak Chinese soon. So are you ready?

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Route Map

Due to our experience in studying and teaching English, we believe the most important thing to learn a second language is to blurt out! There might be things like grammar, vocabulary and so on. But we all know that memorizing alone is almost useless on a practical basis, and you can remember it for your lifetime if you use certain word or phrase correctly in some occasion.

So we will start with Pinyin, the way to pronounce Mandarin. Learning this you can lay the foundation to continue studying Chinese characters by any standard dictionary (there are alternatives, of course, and I will explain that later in the next article).

Then we can study (and we hope you can memorize) some useful everyday dialogue and words (nouns), which you can try to use either to you Chinese friends or in China town. Please note that so far there is no special emphasis on Chinese character so far. We think that you will find them interesting in this process and the only thing left is to memorize how it looks like--You already know its pronunciation, meaning, aren't you?

Along the way, we will help you keep accumulating the core elements of (everyday) Chinese and hope that it will build the blocks for you to really master this language.

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Welcome!

Hello, everyone! This is an updated blog to help you gradually learn Chinese with less pain. My wife and I are now teaching Chinese in Texas, and this blog is inspired by our lovely students Aly, Kelly and Parke (Thanks you guys, this is a brilliant idea:). And as the TA of my wife, I am responsible for managing this site. Also, I will try to gather and integrate useful resources online so that you can get used to the most efficient tools to study Chinese. Those resources include:

1. Our lecture contents.

2. Online resource:
a. Introduction of handy software;
b. Videos:
(1) I will try to collect all the videos mentioned in http://lesspainchinese.magnify.net/, but some may still omit, so the best is to check the original article. The shortcut of this site is appeared as a banner under the HEADER.
(2) I will write corresponding 'lecture notes' to some great video resources online (sometimes upon request). I cannot just upload them to the above mentioned site due to the copyright problem.


Besides the seemingly boring grammar (of course, grammar is always seemed to be like that, unfortunetaly), something like the culture, current trend will be introduced so that you won't find you are studying rocket science, and I hope you will find this site, most of the time, user-friendly:).

BTW, we experience the same while we study English and find such an eclectic and integrated (and maybe relatively casual) way would stimulate us from different aspects to keep us awake and fresh, and we hope this works well for you, too!

OK, we are about to get started. There will be more continured...
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