I've loved Go since I first learned about it. And at times, I have a strong desire to learn a foreign language for a change (which I've never done). In some ways, it's almost like my love of Go is a "gateway drug" into these other cultures. I love Japanese culture. But Chinese would obviously be a good choice as well. And with China's increasing role in the global economy (and being a tech guy for a living), Chinese certainly seems like a good long term choice.

Have any other English speakers here learned a foreign language as different as Chinese/Japanese before? Any recommendations on apps or software to help learn?

It is entirely reasonable to learn languages like Japanese or Chinese and doing so will greatly expand your enjoyment of Go (Weiqi) and the culture of the country. There are many online and other options. Two that I have had experience with are JapanesePod: http://www.japanesepod101.com/

and ChinesePod: http://chinesepod.com/

I started with Chinese a few years back and can only recommend to focus on reading and writing Hanzi. All of China uses the simplified Hanzi (even TV shows are mostly subtitled) but there are dozens of dialects which makes speaking and listening quite hard.
If you start with Hanzi, don't bother with Pinyin (phonetic transcription). You might learn how to read Hanzi out loud but for that to work you need to learn another language (Pinyin) yet again, which is in itself completely useless because no chinese will understand it.

I heard "Remembering Simplified Hanzi" by James W. Heisig is quite good and offers a "new" approach. You'll learn Hanzi by memorizing short stories which tell you about the shape of the pictogram and its meaning (translation).

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My "guide" to become stronger in Go

go terms in chinese are incredibly hard, and from what i've heard, they are quite difficult in japanese as well
this is probably because go has been in their "language" more than in english, so there are casual terms that aren't easily explained in english

the easiest example is the endgame sequence on the edge of the board where there is a hane, then the opponent blocks, and you connect
in chinese they just say "ban zhan"

doing a live translation of this is hard cause they say "banzhan" and then keep moving to the next thing
i've had to rush and say "this sequence happens" although now i'm tempted to say "hane block connect" in hopes that people get it quickly

not to completley discourage you from learning and using it though
definitley as you learn more terms in chinese/japanese it can become more nuanced and it's helped me learn and retain concepts easier

... how would you learn the language without the phonetics?

the phonetics is a crutch that actually will slow your learning and leads to bad pronunciation (in my opinion). I agree with SoDesuNe. I did much better with Japanese when I forced myself to learn kana instead of romaji.

but then again, learning the kana really helped with the phonetics of learning the kanji

I am learning Chinese, basically for the fun of it, and one thing that I can recommend is Anki, which is a flashcard program. You can get an add-on to it called Chinese Support which will provide your flashcards with the meaning of the words, the pinyin, audio files and more. I've tried a few apps, but the only one I use halfway regularly is a dictionary (Hanping Chinese Lite) by embermitre.

Chinese is challenging to learn for two reasons. First, the tonal aspect of spoken Chinese takes a while to internalize, and second the written characters offer very little information as to their pronunciation.

I agree in principle with SoDesuNe that it's probably good at least initially to restrict your studies in one way or another. I decided to focus first on speaking, not lastly because spoken language makes it easier to get in contact with local Chinese speaking people.

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Patience, grasshopper.

IMO, learning kana can't be considered learning "without the phonetics". I would relate learning "without the phonetics" to maybe studying only an English-translated meaning of various Chinese characters. I don't personally think this approach is great for long-term learning, but it might be OK to do if you just want to understand some billboards here and there.

Something like, "Ooh, I remember that funny symbol. That means student. No idea how to say student in this language, but this is probably an ad for students.."

Still, "learning" the language, to me, includes learning the sounds, characters, and even culture of the speakers of the language you're studying.

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be immersed

To the OP, I would recommend studying the language that interests you the most. There will be times when it seems less exciting to study than others, and you will have greater chance of success if you have genuine interest in what you're studying.

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be immersed

You don't learn the "language" ; )
You learn to read and write Hanzi because - in my opinion - you will have a much easier time embracing Chinese with this. You can browse chinese websites, read newspapers, blogs, books and even watch a lot of chinese television because it's subtitled.
If you start with phonetics, you will learn putonghua - the "official chinese" (which is in my opinion harder to learn [correctly] because of the tones than Hanzi). But like in every culture the people do not speak the official version, e.g. in China every big city has its own dialect. Add to that that you will most likely speak with a accent of your own because you are not Chinese.

I don't say you should never learn to speak, I'm just recommending to start with reading and writing because it is far easier to train on your own and because you will have access to almost everything Chinese while you progress.

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My "guide" to become stronger in Go

We have to look at what's important for the student:
If read and writing, but not verbal skills, is important to the student, then you're correct, focus on the characters.
But if listening and speaking skills are important to the student, then learning putonghua and pinyin is a must, IMO.

And if reading, writing, and verbal skills are all important, then, you need to study it all.

Yeah, what Kirby said: kana are the phonetic input system for Japanese. It's even how Chinese schoolchildren learn how to pronounce characters. (In China. I hear in Taiwan they still use mopobofo, which is similar to kana.) And unlike learning Hepburn, pinyin isn't a crutch that will distract you from how natives think about the phonology (as represented by kana) - it's more equivalent to Kunreisiki.

Trying to learn Chinese without pinyin is, if anything, crazier than trying to learn Japanese without kana (or romaji). As you say, Sodesune, the tones are hard to learn, but they are integral to the meaning of the word. T ld b lk trng t lrn nglsh tht th vwls; - cn prbbl gss t m trng t s f r flnt lrd, bt cn - mgn trng t lrn ths w? There are also consonant sounds that English speakers need to practice. I have no idea what might be going through your head when you read 大學之道，在明明德，在親民，在止於至善 or something similar. Do you see a sentence in German? In English? Certainly if you don't know how to pronounce the characters, it can't be Chinese.

As for the large variety of languages in China - this is sort of like saying, "Well, I've decided not to learn English because most countries in Europe speak a different language." Naturally. The solution is to learn the language that is spoken in the region you want to visit - or conversely, to visit the region whose language you learned.

jts: You can't really compare a language which is based on a small alphabet (so that a lot of words are unique in their writing) to Chinese, which is based on thousands of pictograms, which sound almost exactly the same a lot of the times.

To counter your jibberish example:


Pinyin is not really saving you the day here.

James W. Heisig, the author of the book mentioned above, talks a bit about his approach to neglect the pronounciation for the time being. He has a chapter for it. It's called "Uprooting Biases About Character Learning". You can read it completely with Amazon's Look-Inside-feature.


post scriptum: Ha ha ha, I retract my "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den"-jibberish. I just stumpled accros the wikipedia article and it seems this pronounciation refers only to an older version of written chinese. The modern version (differenct characters) is readable in Pinyin. "Uprooting Biases About Character Learning" should still be an interesting read =)

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My "guide" to become stronger in Go

Seriously, if you're white and in China and are practically tone-deaf practically the only thing anyone wants to do is teach you tongue twisters. And I've never seen anyone write down the hanzi to explain them.

Given that Heisig's book (if I'm thinking of the right one) is a word-for-word reproduction of "Remembering the Kanji", the claim that it is uniquely suited to the needs of Chinese learners shows noteworthy chutzpah. I will also remind you that the characters are based on the language, rather than vice versa. Can you imagine if you needed to pass someone a written record to explain yourself in day-to-day conversation?

(And no, I could never get the forty-four stone lions correct. I had notable successes with another one, though - I can't remember if it was about a bottle hitting a pan or a pan hitting a bottle.)

Wow!!!! Thanks everybody. Lots of stuff to digest here . Considering I've never learned a second spoken language ever, it seems fairly daunting to know where to begin.

My first primary goal was to be able to read Chinese. I would _love_ to get to the point of being able to read the Chinese Weiqi Association website in native Chinese. I had originally thought about Japanese because of my fascination with Japanese culture, but I can't see myself using it at all outside of Go. I can see many ways for me to use Chinese in the future.

So while I would eventually like to learn to speak it, it's a lower priority to me.

Anybody have experience with Rosetta Stone software? I have a coworker that has an unopened Rosetta Stone package for Chinese that they are willing to let me borrow. I also grabbed a couple of apps for the iPad, not sure how good they are but they had pretty good ratings.

I would like to stress that learning Chinese will likely be much more difficult than learning Japanese, which should definitely considred in your cost/benefit analysis. Depending on the amount of time you will be able to devote, it may be more fruitful to study Japanese.

That being said, as a native Chinese speaker, I am pleased about your decision. It is for sure a language worth learning - if not for the applicability in your life, then for the myriad pieces of poetry, literature, and other pieces of writing that defy faithful translation.

Some personal thoughts:

Pinyin is likely crucial: I personally did not really use it (I was an avid reader and so knew most of characters before learning them in class). However, being able to associate characters with sounds will greatly facilitate your progress (not to mention it is much more efficient as it also improves your listening and speaking abilities). Since you will likely not have the chance to be immersed in a Chinese-speaking environment, I suspect pinyin is your best way to achieve the association.

Watch a lot of TV/movies (with subtitles and translations): Again, this will help with linking characters to sounds. Furthermore, it will help you develop a feel for grammar. There might be a danger in relying too much on translation. One idea might be to watch movies that you watched originally in English and dubbed in Chinese with Chinese subtitles after you develop a basic proficiency.

Read what interests you: Reading is crucial as well (both to develop feeling for grammar and to expand your vocabulary). Unfortunately, reading is a very painful process at the beginning. This is further excerbated by the fact that at the beginning what you could try to read would likely be boring. In fact, I suspect that one of the key reasons why children learn languages faster is that even introductory text is exciting for them. I don't know if there is a way around it - you may have to just work at it until you achieve basic proficiency. One fortunate thing is that introductory text may provide you with interesting facts about China, which may make it a bit less painful. After basic proficiency (perhaps grade 1-2 vocalbulary) is achieved, though, it would definitely be very helpful if you can find genres of literature that interests you.

Tones are not super important for communication, but may be very useful for learning: People will still be able to understand you even if you have not mastered tones. However, the association process will likely be much harder if you can't at least mentally sort out the tones. This means that your actual pronunciation is not as important as being able to mentally keep track of the tones. Furthermore, Chinese poetry loses a lot of their beauty if you aren't proficient with tones.

There seem to be a lot of people talking about Chinese here. I learn Japanese. Here are some of my general thoughts on a few of the things that have been mentioned in this thread, from my own perspective. (I normally wouldn't be arrogant enough to put them in ranty FAQ format - forgive me for that - but tonight I happen to be a little tipsy, and I also happen to get asked this stuff a lot. Also some people disagree with me sometimes. Oh well. They're all wrong. )

1. I want to learn Chinese or Japanese or something!
Great! But decide which. China and Japan are very different countries. Chinese and Japanese are completely unrelated languages. "I want to learn a foreign language" is a fantastic goal, but you'll need more than that to motivate you.

2. Wait, why do I need motivating? Aren't they just inherently really cool?
Yeah, they are. But, well. Anecdotally, most Japanese learners I encounter seem to come to Japanese through anime. They fall in love instantly, and think kanji are awesome, and learning Japanese would be great for their CV, and so on; then most give up within a year. Why? Because Japanese is not all kawaii (and nor is it all ninjas, shamisen, matcha or ataris). You will have slumps, feel like you haven't progressed for weeks, and want to throw up at the thought of drilling yet another kanji only to forget it again. You need something that continually reminds you why you love it, even during the times when you feel like you hate it. It is many years of hard work.

3. How many years, of how much hard work?
How good do you want to get, and how many hours do you put in per week? If you want my honest opinion: if 2 hours or less, give up immediately*. If 5-10 hours, you'll see measurable progress, and it'll be a year or two before you can have a half-decent conversation about something not too complicated. If 20 hours, maybe you'll be near-fluent within 5 years. Really, progress is measured in hours studied, not weeks/months/years passed since you began. It also depends on who you are, how experienced you are, and whether you speak to lots of Japanese people or not + live in Japan or don't.

*People seem to dislike it when I say this, but I've genuinely never met anyone who's learnt a language to any reasonable degree of competence by attending a class once a week. Or, to put it another way, how many very good guitarists practised for two hours a week for a few years? I'm willing to meet counterexamples, though.

Don't get me wrong. Learning Japanese is one of the most rewarding things I do, and I love it. But most people I see who take it up fail because they approach it wrongly.

I don't know anything about Chinese. It may be more annoying in a few respects (tones and the lack of a phonetic script actually used by Chinese people, mainly), but I'm sure it'll be qualitatively much the same.

If you want more specific advice (about Japanese), let me know, but please also be more specific about your goals. (By the way, I hate Rosetta Stone. It's better than nothing, though.)

Thanks for the opinion on Rosetta Stone Billy . Any opinions at this point are _very_ welcomed .

An interesting link I came across tonight that I thought I would share back on this thread... A lady by the name of Shao Lan started "Chineasy" which aims to make it easier for Westerners to understand the Chinese language. Here's her TED talk on the subject:

And her accompanying website: http://chineasy.org/

Don't know how factual it is, but some interesting numbers from the video:
- A chinese scholar knows about 20,000 characters
- Understanding 1,000 characters will give you a basic sense of literacy
- The top 200 characters (most frequently used) will allow you to comprehend 40% of basic literature

As an audio guy/musician, the tonal aspect of spoken Chinese intrigues me quite a bit. As far as incorporating it more into my life, I've thought about using music or reading (novels). There's of course Weiqi as well (would love to be able to read the Chinese Weiqi Association website "natively"). I'm also a tech guy (working at a small company called "Microsoft" on a small product called "Windows" for a living), so there are very interesting things around programming dealing with an English-type of language vs. a pictographic language like Chinese. It would be doubly awesome to be able to "selfhost" (using early internal builds of Windows) in Chinese .

I'm afraid I don't know much about Chinese culture to know what are some fun areas to get into. As billy mentions, Anime and Manga for Japanese is an obvious one. But what for China? Would love any folks more familiar with Chinese culture to throw _any_ ideas out there .

If you are serious about learning Chinese, a good first step would be to look at the language schools in your area. Get ready to invest a lot of money and time in it. After you enroll, start thinking about making some plans to move to China sometime down the road, say, for a year or so. Sadly, it is unlikely you will make the progress you're dreaming about on your own.

Just a quick thought on the Chinese character issue, from a Japanese-learner perspective. (The Japanese and Chinese writing systems overlap a lot - it's about their only common feature!)