Polyglot's Page

Let's be honest here, who hasn't struggled with tones and pronunciation? Chinese has sounds that English and other languages don't, like "r" which sounds like "rjrjh" and there's the sh, x, c, and s sounds which sound pretty similar.  Pronunciation is one of my strong suits in Chinese. How exactly did that happen? Keep reading to find out my number one way to master Chinese pronunciation and tones.  Right from when I started learning Chinese, I really focused on sounding identical to the audio (with recordings of people on the app Hello Chinese, NOT with the robot translating voice.). However, if you haven't done so since you started learning start now! This is a method that anyone at any learning stage can start to improve their speaking.  The method is (drumroll...) IMITATION and REPETITION! What do I mean by that?  1)Find any source of audio whether it be a youtube video, a podcast, or a tv show where you can rewind 2) Listen to a phrase, try

 Learning Mandarin Chinese is not an easy task. Nowadays with all the modern technology used to learn languages, we often forget about a very useful resource: books! Whether it be real paper books or ebooks, reading is often overlooked by online activities such as watching Youtube videos or watching TV in your target language.  After reaching an intermediate level in Chinese, here are the best reading resources I've used: #1 - Chinese practical reader "Zhang Ming's Story" (张明的故事) You may be familiar with YoyoChinese if you've starting learning Chinese. They've made a short series of Chinese comics targeted for HSK 3-4 learners. For each book there is a comic, a language breakdown of each page's lines, and a vocab index. I found them super helpful, I highly recommend! Click here for Zhang Ming's Story part 1 Click here for Zhang Ming's Story part 2 #2 - Lingo Mastery: Intermediate Chinese short stories This book contains quite a few short stories ta