/cult/ - culture and media

Personally I like Chinese Reading Practice
http://chinesereadingpractice.com/

Has easy to read stories for beginners so you can read the characters and then if there's one you forgot, you can mouse over to see what it means.

Anyone have any experiences with applications and language learning programs like duolingo, memrise, etc?
>>1638
This is going to be incredibly useful, thanks. Although I'm not proficient enough to start reading even at the beginner level yet, but this looks like a great tool to get some practice.

>>1640
I have experience with both and a few more similar tools but not for Chinese languages.

>>1641
Went through duolingo a little bit, and off the bat one mistake of multilingual learning applications such as duolingo is that they didn't really go through pronunciation all that much. They dropped you in learning basic words and numbers without teaching you how pronounce and tones. If you had to use an app, I wouldn't make it my only source of learning and use a repeatable application that only deals with Chinese.

Someone post chinese metallurgy pasta, I've lost mine.

Anyone taking Chinese in college, I would like it the pace of it and how much material we'll go through for an introduction class.

>>1642
Duolingo makes me angry. No other Mandarin teaching service use the same phrasing as them and they don't stress learning tones. Which is a long time process to get down, and context helps a lot. But is something everyone should be aware of.

Been using duolinguo. I had already learned some basic mandarin with the new practical chinese reader. It's been a slow and steady slope, and I am starting to see some progress, such as that I can now memorize characters and their phonemes and meaning much faster than I've used to. As for pronunciation I always imitate it and mind the tones when I speak. I slur a lot but learning chinese phonemes is kinda hard.
I've been making good progress with the application I mentioned, it's a great mnemonic aid. Though often it lets some topics lay by the wayside and I just forget most about them. Language is about repetition, moreso when it comes to chinese characters. And having the visual and auditive aid is nice reinforcement. I've also kinda got the hang of phrase structure.
I ought to go through a grammar though, because duolingo doesn't ever explain much (or nothing if all you have is a fone).
Anyway I'm digressing but yeah, keep it up lads! It gets pleasantly easier soon. But it's a huge language, I'm really still at a very small percentage of chinese literacy.
Oh also duolingo uses plebby simplified characters.

>>1677
I took it in college. First year is a bit of a meat grinder in my experience. If you're good at rote memorization you'll do well.

I can't remember exactly how many characters we did first year but I want to say more than 100 less than 500.

If you want to get a feel for it ahead of time, try doing daily drills to memorize like 20 or 30 of the most common radicals for a week. If you do that and it feels easy, then the class won't be particularly hard for you.

anybody have some alright Chinese music worth listening to?

Minimal keyboard for linux?