Week 1 of Learning Chinese

What I Learned This Week - November 29, 2019

This week, I finished 3 lessons on Duolingo - Greeting 1, Numbers, and Name. I am almost done with Greeting 2, and I’ve started Food 1. I’m hoping I can pick up the pace a little bit, and my future updates should be more detailed as I start to take more thorough notes on them.

Things to Accompany Duolingo Chinese on Week 1:

As I mentioned before, Duolingo’s pronunciation is pretty terrible. I have to go to Forvo to make sure I’m saying words and phrases correctly, and this is extra necessary because I can’t hear the tones in Duolingo’s pronunciation. Here are some pronunciations that will be useful for these lessons.

• Hello - nǐ hǎo - 你好
• Goodbye - zài jiàn - 再见
• What’s your name - Nǐ jiào shénme? - 你叫什么？

This podcast was really helpful to hear the tones and to get a breakdown of the sentence “What’s your name.”

Other Helpful Materials

Check out Chineasy’s deck of Tinycards as well as their iPhone app. Their illustrated characters are actually quite useful!

There is a set of 7 consonants that are hard for me to pronounce. This video was helpful for learning how to pronounce them (though I would skip through it as a lot of it isn’t useful). Here are the quick takeaways:

Setting Up Your Keyboard to Type Chinese

You want to be able to type in Chinese (obviously). Here is how to set up your Mac’s keyboard to use pinyin.

Go to Settings > Keyboard > Input Sources and add this option: