Many of my close friends know that I don't do much besides work on my start-up right now, however, there are a few things that I try to make some personal time for, and one of them is learning Chinese.Over the past little while, I've been quite ambitious to learn both Mandarin and Cantonese for a few reasons:
1. My beautiful girlfriend is Chinese and everyone in her family converse in predominantly Cantonese. It would be great to know what they're saying, at least, half of the time.
2. My girlfriend's mother can only speak Chinese and I would love to be able to interact with her more. One of my personal goals is to be able to have a 3-5 minute conversation with her over the phone, specifically, all in Cantonese.
3. While knowing Cantonese will undoubtedly help me with my interactions with my girlfriend's family, Mandarin apparently, is the language I should be learning, as it's much more prevalent.
My girlfriend has been telling me to focus on Mandarin for awhile now, but, I didn't really listen. (I just thought she didn't want me to understand what her family was talking about. That's part of it, but, not the whole story). I recently got further confirmation that Mandarin is what I should be learning from a very prominent person in China, my business partner's mentor, a former CEO of Hang Seng Bank. He mentioned that the wealth coming out of China now, versus Hong Kong, many years ago, is all the more reason why you should know Mandarin if you ever plan to potentially do business over there. So, needless to say, I'm trying to learn Mandarin as well.
4. I've always wanted to learn another language. I think being able to speak multiple languages is important and a great skill set to have.
At the end of the day, learning both languages at the same time is quite ambitious, however, I'm pretty determined that I'll be able to do it over a long period of time.
I've been trying to find online resources that will help me learn both Mandarin and Cantonese, but have been unsuccessful, until now.
I have recently started using www.learnchineseEZ.com and I find it very useful for a number of reasons:
- great simple interface that breaks down your learning into 4 parts: (1) English; (2) Chinese (a) the English pronunciation; (b) the audio recording so you can hear what the phrase sounds like, without being sent to a new page and having to go back and forth, etc. It all happens on the same page; (3) the literal meaning; and (4) a short explanation of what you're saying with some background knowledge.
- help you differentiate similar sounding words that have completely different meanings.
- ability to download a audio transcript so you can listen on the go.
- a significant amount of FREE lessons that provide you with some solid basics that you can use... and more importantly, show how great the service is.
- cheap -- one time $10 membership fee that gives you access to both Mandarin and Cantonese materials.
Let me know if you end up checking it out.
Cheers,
Andre
http://abuddingentrepreneur.blogspot.com
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