The simple Japanese pronunciation would be TouKou.
But this particular case, it is Tonkou to better represent the Chinese nature of the 2 characters.
I stand corrected. You can read it either way.
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The simple Japanese pronunciation would be TouKou.
But this particular case, it is Tonkou to better represent the Chinese nature of the 2 characters.
I stand corrected. You can read it either way.
What apps/translators would you recommend? I've been hearing good things about Pleco. Money is not a problem. I am willing to buy anything if it is worth it.
Also I highly recommend the android app Pleco which is a Chinese dictionary and has many useful features like a quiz and flashcards for various HSK levels
I will second this pleco is an awesome app, it also has character recognitions..
You do need to pay a bit to get space repetition module. I can also recommend anki app you can create your own flash cards.
One tip for anki character only cards got me through hsk 1 & 2, but it was not enough for me to get through hsk 3 I had to put them more into context and have a couple of sentences on the anki flash cards.
HSK courses isn't that bad it just starts really slow like hsk 1 and 2 are 150 characters. So you need to reserve like 2 or 3 years before you have enough chinese character recognition and grammar knowledge to understand some basic text.
If money is not an issue I can recommend hello chinese app as a more gamified way of learning and for writing and recognising character I would say skritter is probably the best. It has some cool character decks like frequency, heisig and hsk decks etc.
There is also Duolingo which offer Chinese lessons
I found Duolingo to be too slow paced, and not effective enough if you are serious about learning a language.
The way Duolingo is structured, it will take a week or two to just get completely past the "Hello, how are you, my name is X" phase
Go to China.
You will never self-learn here, unless you are hyper-motivated.
When I was younger, I could either struggle with a dictionary to read 公公‘s 世界曰報 so I could get my dose of 國民黨 propaganda, or I could just read a regular English newspaper… guess which one always won?
(Note: I am using traditional characters because I am old and that's what I grew up with. I am not Taiwanese despite the KMT newspaper. In fact the newspaper should be a huge tip off about being old... not boomer-old, but quite a bit older than you, hahaha)
If you are immersed, you will have no choice but to learn. You want to eat? You Learn! You want to go places? You Learn!
Eh, Duolingo is alright if you are learning a language ab initio, and the linguistic distance between the source language and target language is not too far.
Full disclosure: I do not recall having tried en↔zh courses. And in fact, I have not used Duolingo for a long time, so your mileage may vary. And for the one language (en→nl) that I was seriously(?) using it for, I never got around to finish it.
Duolingo is really slow-paced precisely because the course writer had to assume that the learner knows absolutely nothing about the target language. This is probably why the first few rounds are rehash of the same handful of words: to hopefully hammer down a solid foundation that the rest of the course can build upon.
Duolingo is unfortunately really light on grammar, even at times when it would be very helpful. Without helpful people in the comment section, one is stuck with the impression that the language is completely arbitrary (… which I guess it is? But still). At least the comment section can usually help people look up proper explaination, which is something, I guess.
Now, as I've said, I do not remember having tried en ↔zh courses. However, I have tried en↔ja courses (in both direction), having learned at least basic Japanese elsewhere, and I was…
less than impressed. Duolingo model of mapping vocabulary and grammar from source language and target language and vice versa and throw arbitrary sentences at people really falls apart here. Without prior knowledge, one could walk away from the first few lessons thinking that grammatical particles are somehow verbs. It would probably be very difficult to unlearn. This sort of thing may or may not happen with Chinese courses, but given the linguistic distance between en and zh aren't that close, I am not really confident about Duolingo's model of language learning in this case. But then again, en and zh are both SVO, unlike ja, which is SOV, so I guess it shouldn't be too much of a problem.
So yeah, it's probably okay for very beginning, but I would not recommend, at least not as a first resort.
曰? You sure that's what it's called? XD
Sounds like your Chinese level is better than majority who is just picking up the language. Aside from the suggestion already made I would also advise immersing in the language everyday by speaking reading listening to Chinese. Conversing Chinese daily with your social circle is also sure fire way to improve dramatically if you already know the basics.