What is the crowd's opinion of ChineseSkill?

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Try looking at ChinesePod which has a lot of videos to help you learn. There’s ChineseSkill which is similar to Duolingo but it’s specific for Chinese and helps to teach you beginner up to intermediate Chinese. Once you get a grasp on how Chinese works a bit, you can download the app Pleco which is a dictionary so you can learn some music terms to use in class.

>Japanese is a syllabary language

Yes, Japanese uses a syllabary. But it also uses characters as well.

Here's a sample illustration of a random part of a sentence:

>使用人口 について 正確 な 統計 はないが、日本国内 の 人口、および 日本国外 に 住 む日本人 や 日系人

Everything in bold is a character (Kanji). This is the normal way (well, it doesn't normally have spaces) of writing Japanese. So even if you know the syllabary symbols, that will not help you in knowing how to read or to input the Kanji.

So the main problem for Japanese and Chinese is teaching learners how to input those languages. We know Duo can handle the scripts since there's already a English for Japanese course.

But since learners don't know how to input the languages, they're basically going to need to display the characters along with Pinyin and Romaji. They'll also probably have to accept those as alternate inputs as well.

Now, it can be done (see the excellent Chinese Skill), but it will pretty much automatically double the work the teams have to do since they will have to input the actual Chinese or Japanese and the romanizations for each sentence.

The Chinese are some of the nicest people on earth. I lived there for about 2 years and had countless wonderful exchanges. Everyone I spoke Chinese with was encouraging and tried their best to understand me and vice versa. I was in one small town and there was a cafe a buddy and I started vising pretty often, the waitresses didn't speak any English, but we'd start trying to use the Chinese we'd learned with them, and if there was something we didn't understand, they'd write it down for us so we could look it up.

Now, I haven't been to Japan outside the airport, but from what I've heard, this video is only barely exaggerated.

Sure, the tones are hard at first and there's tons of characters to learn, but the grammar is straightforward and easy. No conjugations and no cases; it's even more streamlined than English.

Here's a really good app to get you started.

Links for the lazy (or those who don't know, like me)
http://www.hellochinese.cc/
http://www.chinese-skill.com/cs.html

I'd love to learn Mandarin, but not just yet (learning other languages now). Thanks for the tips on these resources!

I haven't had the time to go all out with it, but fluentU could be a good start. There's also an app for iOS and Android call ChineseSkill that's pretty nice as well. I used it for a while.

Some chinese.

I'm going to slightly disagree with the guy above, though. Chinese is beautiful and wonderful and so, so god damn hard. So hard. I can spend hours and not retain anything and then go off and learn french basically on accident. I think it'd be comparable if it were a tonal language OR had the hanzi character system, but both....

When I want to turn my ‘dead time’ into ‘Chinese learning time’ my favorites are:

• ChineseSkill (for improving my foundation in Chinese)
• Hack Chinese (for adding new vocabulary)
• Skritter (for writing practice)

This trio saved me from idleness many times ;)

You want to get Assimil Chinese with Ease. It'll teach you all the basics that you need to know. If that's too difficult for you starting off, then try Pimsleur's Chinese, as it's a slow, easy introduction. You can also use the app ChineseSkill for extra practice.

Try using this program, it's a lot of fun: ChineseSkill.

Also, look for things that you like, but in Chinese, like music, tv shows, movies, comics, books, magazines...