Why Mandarin

I have been practicing martial arts since 1992, starting with North American Freestyle Karate. I used the art to build confidence, reduce stress and manage anger. Through meditation, I learned in those early years of study how to focus my mind to accomplish goals through a cloud of trials. Since that time, I’ve had an opportunity to study Kung Fu and now more recently Tae Kwon Do. I have been fascinated with Chinese culture. I’ve worked professionally with many people from the Asia region and continue to do business there as well. So why Mandarin in particular? Well I’m interested in the majority language spoken in mainland China which represents 92% of the people in the country. There are many other languages spoken that make up the macrolanguage of ‘Chinese’ such as: Cantonese, Wu, Hakka, Jinyu, Xiang, Gan, Tibetan, Miao-Yao, Mongolian and more.

Resources

There are a variety of resources that I have used to begin my journey in learning Mandarin - Chinese Simplified. My physical devices such as my iPhone, iPad and MacBook Pro have become critical tools allowing me to use these resources. I started with using Rosetta Stone, but quickly realized that it has not helped me much with learning Mandarin. I’ve pivoted to these resources and I’m off to a great start.

• iTalki - 汤 洁请

• Mandarin Blueprint | MBP Complete Resource Guide

• Memrise App

• Outlier Linguistics

• LTL School

• Pleco Chinese Dictionary App

• Google Translate / Microsoft Translator

• YoYo Chinese

• Hanzi5

• Confucius Institute at Western Michigan University

• Chinesetest.cn

• HSK Online

• Beelingua App

• HelloTalk

• How to Write Pinyin Tones on Mac

• Chinesefor.lk

• HackChinese

• Kong Long Mandarin

Fun

Here are a few of the more fun or engaging items that I’m looking forward to trying over the course of this journey.

• Writing an article in Mandarin

• Chatting with language learning partners (done)

• Creating my own name in Mandarin (done 戴燚）

• Watching several of my favorite movies in Chinese or with Chinese sub-titles

• Study Mandarin in China for a least a week (coming soon)

• Speaking only Mandarin for a whole day

• Learning with my family; a few of them are also interested in Mandarin (working on it)