Do you want to learn Mandarin? Beyond ordering food and buying souvenirs? So you can actually communicate?
Learn the Characters. It may seem a daunting tasks to learn several thousand characters.( Why don’t they use an alphabet like us? )
But, if you want to progress in the language, you need to be able to read. End of story. Pinyin is a great tool to get you started and to teach you the pronunciation of new words. But the characters contain the essence of the Chinese language. How else can you go on the internet to read Chinese websites or books?
Many systems teach you a few dozen characters. Useless. What if you only knew 8 letters of the Roman alphabet? Useless, right?
So how do we do it? We roll up our sleeves and we get professor James Heisig’s book “Remembering the Hanzi”. We simply follow the wonderful method he outlines and in a few months we have our first 1,500 characters down. Heisig has a fantastically simple and effective way of leading you through the characters. Then you can take a breath. You will be able to read over 95% of Chinese texts you encounter. By then, you will have developed the ability to memorize and remember characters really efficiently. You will want to keep learning the most common characters until you reach 3,000. Heisig’s second volume with the second 1,500 characters is due for publication any time. Meanwhile there are other good books you can use, because you know how to absorb characters efficiently. After that point it is just a matter of beginning to read regularly. You will keep learning new ones automatically.
Chinese children know 2,000 when they graduate from grade school, and 6,000 by the end of High School. Japan (uses Chinese characters) Taiwan and China have incredibly high literacy rates: far higher than ours in the West.
So, we get motivated, and we get through it. After a few months we are literate. Our knowledge of Chinese will now expand exponentially because we can read and write. We have access to the entire culture without any restrictions.
I hope I have inspired you to take the plunge. A few months of solid – and fun – work will establish you in the language forever.