How hard is it to learn to read (not necessarily speak it) Chinese? Are there resources that you would recommend for learning it? And would my slight knowledge of Japanese and Kanji help or hurt me?
Thanks!
How hard is it to learn to read (not necessarily speak it) Chinese? Are there resources that you would recommend for learning it? And would my slight knowledge of Japanese and Kanji help or hurt me?
Thanks!
There are people who claim to learn how to read without speaking, but I'm not sure I really believe that. One of the main reasons I started learning Chinese was because of wuxia, and I can tell you that it is not an easy process, and I believe that the best way is to make it a complete process. I started without the goal of learning to read. I thought I would just need to speak and understand (so that I could watch wuxia movies and TV shows). But I quickly came to find out that understanding the characters really helps in understanding the spoken language.
This is a link to a pretty popular way of learning characters without speaking: http://tinyurl.com/l7w9z9m
My personal opinion is also that it is almost impossible to achieve a level of relatively fluent reading without first understanding and practicing how to write the characters as well. As such, you should consider the super-useful app Skritter.
Here's a few more good sights:
http://chinesehacks.com/
http://carlgene.com/blog/
http://sinosplice.com/
Chineasy was a fun start for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5FNvW19GbA
http://chineasy.org
http://chineasy.org/basics/classes.aspx
Very Detailed on Characters.
https://www.youtube.com/user/thefore...dent/playlists
Great Pinyin chart
http://www.yoyochinese.com/chinese-l...in-chart-table
Lots of helpful videos
https://www.youtube.com/user/learnchinesenow/playlists
https://www.youtube.com/user/sloppycheng/playlists
Mouse Over Popup Dictionary for Chrome Browser
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/d...ebhkkaif?hl=en
(so helpful!)
Last edited by Metazone; 02-15-15 at 12:32 PM. Reason: Added Link to PeraPera