Laowai Chinese:  Tips and Strategies to Learn Chinese

Laowai Chinese covers various different topics related to learning Chinese — vocabulary, resources, and even pronunciation to name a few topics.  The blog is well written and maintained by Albert Wolfe.   Albert started teaching himself Chinese in July of 2005 and rather than have people learn the lessons he did as he learned he decided to post what he learned on Laowai Chinese.  He’s currently working on a book Chinese 24/7 which is a textbook to help students study Chinese without a formal classroom environment.

2 posts worth checking out:

• Master the Tones:  Tips to help students learn and improve their Chinese tone pronunciation
• What Foreigners Like to Eat:  A list of food that foreigners like to eat and how to order it in Chinese

Beijing Sounds: Beijing sounds, mostly language, through foreign ears.

Beijing Sounds is a Chinese learning blog focused on listening and pronunciation skills related to the Beijing Chinese accent.  They have been around for a few years and what’s unique about Beijing Sounds is how they have audio clips of authentic Chinese speakers accompanying many of their posts.  They also include pinyin with any Chinese written so beginners won’t be clueless as to what is being said.   The blog is authored and edited by the mysterious SYZ.

2 posts worth checking out:

• Does the Beijing-R Mean Anything?:  A discussion on the Beijing habit of adding “-er” or “-r” at the end of Chinese words
• Where Not to Look for Beginner Mandarin Lessons:  Spouse, babysitter… a few places not to go looking for a Chinese language education

Pinyin News: the blog of Pinyin.Info

Pinyin News is the official blog of Pinyin.Info (a guide to the writing of Mandarin Chinese in romanization).  If you can’t guess by the name the blog and website are all about pinyin.  The blog covers issues on the technical details of writing pinyin, sightings of pinyin in real life, and issues related to Chinese learning.  For a beginner pinyin is a great place to start to get familiar with the pronunciation mechanics of Mandarin Chinese.  The blog is authored and maintained by Mark Swofford who is located in Banqiao, Taiwan.

2 posts worth checking out:

• San Francisco Chinatown Signage:  Chinese signs in San Francisco and their pinyin and cantonese pronunciations
• Online texts in Hanyu Pinyin:  List of Chinese language content that has accompanying pinyin

Mandarin Student: An English person learning Mandarin from the Internet

Mandarin Student is the Mandarin language learning blog of Chris.  Chris is from Bath in the United Kingdom and has decided to undertake learning Chinese online.   On his blog you can find Chinese language learning resources he has accumulated and other tips and tricks to help other students.  This is a great blog to read for beginners of Chinese or those looking for the latest online tools to supplement their own learning.

2 posts worth checking out:

• Mandarin Chinese Learning Resources:  A list of some web 2.0 online tools that have helped him learn Chinese
• The Best Thing I Did in Starting to Learn Mandarin:  Title says it all…

Learning Chinese Blog: Experiences in Learning Chinese

The Learning Chinese Blog is Philip Perry’s blog that documents his experiences as he learns Chinese.  This is a newer blog compared to the other blogs mentioned, but it is another great blog for beginners since the Philip himself recently started learning Chinese.

2 posts worth checking out:

• Learning Hanzi: Philip’s strategies for remembering Chinese characters
• Useful Websites:  A list and description of various online tools and resources for learning Chinese

–BONUS BLOG– Lost Laowai “Learning Chinese” Blog Posts

Lost Laowai is technically an expat blog where many different authors contribute blog posts about their experiences living in China.  However, they do have a “Learning Chinese” category for their posts that is worth checking out.  Since there are many different contributors to the blog you get many different perspectives on learning Chinese.

2 posts worth checking out:

• Fallacies in Learning Chinese:  Some great pitfalls to avoid when learning Chinese
• Good Character, Bad Character:  Background on the interesting manner in which countries are named in Chinese

There you have it.  That’s the list so far.  If you have any other additions you think should be added to the list don’t hesitate to post a comment or contact us.  Happy studying!

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Considering my parent’s are immigrants from Taiwan and I’ve been studying Chinese since I was a kid you would think I would be pretty good at Mandarin.  However, I suck.  While it doesn’t take much to find someone who speaks better Mandarin Chinese than me here are 10 non-native Chinese speakers who rock the language. I was inspired by the Peking Order’s blog post Laowise – China’s top 5 famous foreigners. For anyone who thinks that Chinese is impossible to learn let these guys serve as your inspiration.

10.  Hong Lao Wai (Real name unknown)

Hong Lao Wai is an American supposedly self taught Chinese speaker who protects his identity and has a penchant for singing Chinese national pride songs.  As you can imagine he’s popular with the Chinese people.

9.  Uwechue Emmanuel (aka Hao Ge)

Hao Ge is from Liberia, Africa who is now a celebrity in China who sings songs in Chinese.  He reminds me of an African R-Kelly… who sings songs in Chinese.  Interesting tidbit “Before getting his career off the ground in China, he was a country music singer and astro-physicist by profession.”

8.  Tom Haze (Real name unknown)

I found this guy on youtube under the username tomhaze.  His profile says his location is Canada so I’ll assume he’s Canadian.  According to his comments he spent 4 years studying Chinese to get to that level.  Pretty impressive.

7.  Kevin Rudd

Kevin Rudd is the current prime minister of Australia.  He used to be ambassador to China work for the Australian Embassy for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade so he spent many years living in China and as you can imagine he’s pretty fluent.  Other interesting tidbit is that all his children are studying Chinese…

6.  Jeff Locker (aka Jiefu)

Jeff Locker is an American author, radio host, and actor.   He’s famous not in the United States, but in Taiwan where he writes Chinese books, hosts Chinese radio programs, and acts in Chinese speaking films.

5.  Steve Kaufmann (aka “The Linguist”)

Steve speaks 9 languages fluently and because of his skills now runs a language learning blog called thelinguist.com and a language learning company called linq.com.  Interestingly enough his first business was a wood company.

4.  Jonathan Kos-Read (aka Cao-Cao)

Jonathan is an American actor who’s been acting in many Chinese movies and shows.  He’s famous in China and describes the characters he plays as  “nerdy computer guy, evil British soldier, ruthless executive, kindly diplomat, friendly guy, etc…”

3.  Risteard O Deorian (aka 董漠涵)

Risteard is Irish and living in China as a radio and tv show host.  Along with him and the gentleman below in this list they host a TV program that’s all about China through the eyes of a foreigner.  The girl in the video is pretty good at Chinese as well…

2.  Julien Gaudfroy (aka 朱力安)

Julien is French and before becoming a celebrity in China was actually a professional cellist.  After a career ending injury he decided to learn Chinese.  He studied Chinese and “could not rest until he attained the level of a native speaker.”

1.  Mark Henry Rowswell (aka Da Shan)

Mark or Da Shan (literally “Big Mountain” in Chinese) is a Canadian living in China who is the guy many foreigners want to aspire to become.  He’s hugely popular in China and as many will note speaks better Chinese than Chinese people do.

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For better or for worse , I’ve started to notice a trend in foreign language education.  Apparently, pandas are the most qualified to teach children foreign languages.   Of all of nature’s animals–monkeys, giraffes, sharks, owls, etc … — pandas are the one animal who’s language ability surpasses all the other animals and is the animal that children will listen to while learning languages.  Don’t believe me?  Just take a look at some of the products out there which feature pandas as the teacher.

Panfu: virtual language learning world
	Panfu is an online language learning world for teaching children Spanish.  According to their website their pandas have taught over 4.5 million users.  If you follow their guide you can get a “virtual tour of the world of pandas!“
Click here to view the embedded video.
Little Pim: language learning DVD’s
	Little Pim is a series of French, Chinese, and Spanish language immersion DVD’s for children.  It’s taught by none other than Little Pim, the PANDA!  Interestingly, this series of DVD’s was developed by the daughter of Paul Pimsleur (the famous applied linguist which the Pimsleur series of learning cd’s was named after).
Click here to view the embedded video.
Mandy and Pandy: Chinese learning books
	Mandy and Pandy are a series of Chinese learning books for kids which feature Mandy (a little girl) and her friend Pandy, which if you haven’t guess…is a PANDA!  Together through their adventures they learn Chinese.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Early Start Mandarin:  Chinese learning books and DVD’s
	Eartly Start Mandarin is a series of books and videos for learning Mandarin featuring Bao Bei the PANDA.  I don’t mean any disrespect to the company or what they are doing, but of all the pandas feature, I find this one the most disturbing…Bao Bei scares me.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Pandamanda:  virtual language learning world
	I have to be honest, even I was not immune to the panda language teaching phenomenon.  A few years ago I entered a business plan competiton with a plan to create an online virtual language learning world for children called Pandamanda.   When I saw Panfu (above) it made me think of my own project.  However, in our world you were guided by Agent Pandamanda, a secret agent who was your partner as you solved various cases / mysteries out of the Pandamanda headquarters.  It was around the time where I had been watching a lot of the show 24 and was inspired (so in my case Agent Pandamanda was to be like Agent Jack Baur, minus all the violence of course…).  We never built the world, but we did for ask $4 million dollars to do so.  For some reason no one gave us the money

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If you are wondering why I didn’t include the whole Braveheart “Freedom” speech from the movie it’s because some of the tested tools have word or character limits so I couldn’t fit all the text in.  Either way, it’s pretty fun to see how far the technology has come along.  In the video this is what was demonstrated:

1. Mac OSX Speech Bruce voice
2. Oddcast.com Daniel (UK) Voice
3. Oddcast.com Charles (UK) Voice
4. acapela-group.com Graham (UK) Voice
5. acapela-group.com Peter (UK) Voice

Mac OS X Text to Speech

The first TTS tool you see in the video, the one with just text on the screen, is the built in Mac OSX text to speech tool.  If you didn’t know, all Macs have the ability to convert text to spoken speech.  However, as you can tell the quality is not that good.  Also, as of now the Mac TTS only speaks English, so for people learning languages other than English it’s not really a good tool other than to amuse your friends.

Oddcast Text to Speech

The second TTS tool is from a company called Oddcast.  They are an interesting company that on top of TTS also have different applications that allow you to do various stuff with media (like upload your picture onto a potato and animate it).  What’s unique about Oddcast is that they have an animated avatar (character) that mouths the words as it speaks.  This provides even more amusement than just hearing the text alone.  The speaking on it is much better especially compared with Mac TTS.  It has over 20 languages (Chinese, French, Spanish, German, Japanese, etc…) with over 60 different voices to choose from.   English alone has American, UK, Australian, Irish, and Indian voices.  If try it out you’ll notice that the avatar’s head will follow your mouse around as you move it.  It’s kind of freaky.

Acapela Group TTS

The final demo in the video was Acapela Group’s TTS tool.  Out of all the tools compared here I would say this is the best in terms of quality.  The speaking is pretty realistic and it’s very straightforward to use.  You don’t get the talking heads, as many languages, or the variety of voices, but in terms of sound quality it’s scary how realistic it is.  In terms of languages they cover 25 languages with over 50 voices.  The only drawback is that they don’t do Asian languages, but they do include the other popular languages like French, German, Spanish, etc…

TTS in Foreign Language Learning

The text to speech tools comparison I showed above was using English, but what about speaking other foreign languages?   From my experimenting with French and Spanish using Acapela’s TTS I can say it sounds pretty good as well, however you have to take what I say with a grain of salt since I’m a native English speaker and have very little French and Spanish skills.  The best way is for you to evaluate for yourself:

Bottom line, I definitely would reccommend using either the Oddcast or Acapela TTS tools in your foreign language study program.  First of all it’s FREE.  Second of all, it’s very convenient having a tool that can speak any phrase or words you come across, especially more so if you are a beginner who is still grappling with pronuncation for a new language  It’s like having a native speaker in your pocket that you can pull out and force it to say whatever you want, whenever you want.  Oh yeah, and it’s FREE!

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