Mandarin Chinese is the official language of the People’s Republic of China (China) and the Republic of China (Taiwan). Our course teaches Modern Standard Mandarin (known as 普通话 - Putonghua in Chinese). In this post, I cover how we developed the course, and the features that make it unique and effective. To achieve proficiency, they estimate that it requires 88 weeks (or 2,200 hours) of in-class study – of which the entire second year is spent in China with immersion in the language.ĭon’t let this scare you, though: you can learn the basics (and more) of the language on Duolingo without spending thousands of hours in a classroom or years in China. This launch is an important milestone not only for us but for the millions of people worldwide who will be able to learn the language in a free, fun, and effective way! The challenge of learning ChineseĪccording to the Foreign Service Institute, Chinese is classified as one of the most difficult languages for native English speakers to learn. This is not surprising, as more than one billion people worldwide speak the language. Along with Japanese, Chinese has been one of the most requested language courses in Duolingo’s five-year history. Just had to get it off my chest.Today, Duolingo officially launched its Chinese course for English speakers, now available on iOS, Android, and web. so pointless.įor the record, I do believe HelloChinese is way-WAY better and I occasionally switched between that an Duolingo, but I decided I'm gonna move to HelloChinese now and ignore the green birb. doesn't require any thinking really, it's like they want me to practice warming up my fingers for 2 minutes before I get to the real exercises. It's just a shame I have to go through that "What sound does this make" crap before I get to it. With that said I do believe their other 50% of exercises aren't bad they're often sentences-based, challenging and engaging. When I see them in sentences though and I have the translation, that's when memorization is more useful. Also, offering no translation means no association with something my brain can properly store in the memory section, it's just a bunch of lines. Nope, they're doing it wrong, they make ignoring the Chinese character too easy, it's almost irresistible. Some would say "Ah then you're doing it wrong, you should pay attention to the Chinese character and try to memorize and associate". If the idea is to make us associate the character to the sound, it's a terrible method I use my English knowledge to solve it and don't pay attention to the Chinese character. Here's how it works: they present us with a sound and typically 3 different pinyin options. It will of course help, repetition always helps after all, BUT the fact that about 50% of each lesson is dedicated to "What sound does this make?" I believe is utterly useless and therefore time-wasting. Duolingo, however, I believe is the most time-wasting approach for learning simplified Chinese. So, language-learning gamified apps are a decent way to start and get a leg up IMO. I always a myriad of approaches and each one of them helps and adds another building block for my proficiency. Related CommunitiesĪs a successful language learner it's been my experience that it's never just one app, one course, one approach that will make me become proficient in the language, it's always a mix of things. Please note that this form only applies to our Discord server, which is not run by the same people as the subreddit. See our Software and apps page or Resource list for more! Discord Ban Appealsįor ban appeals from the r/ChineseLanguage Discord server, you can use this form:
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