Re: Mandarin Starter Kit
Posted: Sun Jun 30, 2019 6:41 am
If I can just share my personal experience, I wish I had started with (almost) FSI. I wouldn't underrate it as (almost) your first main resource.
1) Like DeFrancis and unlike most resources, it explicitly marks tone changes as they come up in the audio. Most resources don't do this and it can be very confusing when you are trying to learn the tones. There are several obligatory tone changes that are nearly always (bu, yi, 3-3 --> 2-3, etc) or quite often (third to half third before any other tone) explained in courses; what beginners might not realise is that there are a bunch of other tone changes happening (especially full tones becoming neutral tones in certain words or when in unstressed words in a sentences and second tones often becoming first tones in certain 3-tone sequences).
Presumably the logic of not teaching these tone changes in most resources is that they aren't obligatory and not all native speakers will do it for a given word. The problem with that for me is that I found it stressful and confusing trying to make my pronunciation match both the audio and what I thought the tones were. I had a lot of "aha" moments when I finally got round to seriously doing FSI. I strongly regret not doing it earlier.
2) The audio pace. Your ability to mimic fast audio may be better than mine, but FWIW my experience with resources were either that that they were easy to mimic but unnaturally slow (e.g. Pimsleur, Assimil, Intensive Spoken Chinese, etc, etc, etc) or natural but too fast for me to accurately imitate, especially because fast, natural speech will tend to include those tone changes I mentioned above (examples include Glossika and DeFrancis). FSI is the only resource I know of for Mandarin that is both just fast and natural enough to be a decent model and slow and careful enough to be imitable by a relative beginner.
FWIW:
What I actually did:
Gabriel Wyner's minimal pair deck** and FSI Phonology section --> Pimsleur 1-5, Assimil, Intensive Spoken Chinese, and Michel Thomas* (with an aborted, failed attempt at Glossika) and then finally FSI and comprehensible input. I'm taking a break from Chinese, but when I stopped a couple of months ago, I was working through DeFrancis.
What I wish I had done (and you can take this as being what I would recommend for the spoken language, based on my mistakes).
FSI phonology (but more thoroughly and adding the drills to Anki- I did eventually add some much later)
---> then Pimsleur 1 and 2 only (I gave them a good review at the time and I stand by that)
---> next the first 5 or so FSI modules and tons of comprehensible input (as of current date, you can PM me if you want some advice on finding the latter, because it's not actually easy)
---> De Francis or Glossika and start to learn to read
* I'm a big fan of Michel Thomas, but this course does not successfully follow his method and is also full of errors. I hate to say it, because Harold Goodman seems a lovely guy, but I hated this course and personally thought it was awful. If you like the Michel Thomas method of teaching, the nearest current equivalent is Paul Nobel (I prefer Michel Thomas's method, but that is not available for Mandarin and actually Noble's course was not half bad- kind of like Michel Thomas and Pimsluer had a love child). Mihalis of languagetransfer had plans to release a Mandarin course that I'm sure will be pretty epic if he does it; but that could be years away if at all.
** This was a really good idea, but there aren't enough examples and some of the examples contain audio with different tones from what is marked in the pinyin (as I confirmed by asking natives what they heard), due to dialect and some of the tone changes I mentioned above. If you know someone who speaks Standard Chinese and can help you fix it, it's a good resource and reasonably priced.
1) Like DeFrancis and unlike most resources, it explicitly marks tone changes as they come up in the audio. Most resources don't do this and it can be very confusing when you are trying to learn the tones. There are several obligatory tone changes that are nearly always (bu, yi, 3-3 --> 2-3, etc) or quite often (third to half third before any other tone) explained in courses; what beginners might not realise is that there are a bunch of other tone changes happening (especially full tones becoming neutral tones in certain words or when in unstressed words in a sentences and second tones often becoming first tones in certain 3-tone sequences).
Presumably the logic of not teaching these tone changes in most resources is that they aren't obligatory and not all native speakers will do it for a given word. The problem with that for me is that I found it stressful and confusing trying to make my pronunciation match both the audio and what I thought the tones were. I had a lot of "aha" moments when I finally got round to seriously doing FSI. I strongly regret not doing it earlier.
2) The audio pace. Your ability to mimic fast audio may be better than mine, but FWIW my experience with resources were either that that they were easy to mimic but unnaturally slow (e.g. Pimsleur, Assimil, Intensive Spoken Chinese, etc, etc, etc) or natural but too fast for me to accurately imitate, especially because fast, natural speech will tend to include those tone changes I mentioned above (examples include Glossika and DeFrancis). FSI is the only resource I know of for Mandarin that is both just fast and natural enough to be a decent model and slow and careful enough to be imitable by a relative beginner.
FWIW:
What I actually did:
Gabriel Wyner's minimal pair deck** and FSI Phonology section --> Pimsleur 1-5, Assimil, Intensive Spoken Chinese, and Michel Thomas* (with an aborted, failed attempt at Glossika) and then finally FSI and comprehensible input. I'm taking a break from Chinese, but when I stopped a couple of months ago, I was working through DeFrancis.
What I wish I had done (and you can take this as being what I would recommend for the spoken language, based on my mistakes).
FSI phonology (but more thoroughly and adding the drills to Anki- I did eventually add some much later)
---> then Pimsleur 1 and 2 only (I gave them a good review at the time and I stand by that)
---> next the first 5 or so FSI modules and tons of comprehensible input (as of current date, you can PM me if you want some advice on finding the latter, because it's not actually easy)
---> De Francis or Glossika and start to learn to read
* I'm a big fan of Michel Thomas, but this course does not successfully follow his method and is also full of errors. I hate to say it, because Harold Goodman seems a lovely guy, but I hated this course and personally thought it was awful. If you like the Michel Thomas method of teaching, the nearest current equivalent is Paul Nobel (I prefer Michel Thomas's method, but that is not available for Mandarin and actually Noble's course was not half bad- kind of like Michel Thomas and Pimsluer had a love child). Mihalis of languagetransfer had plans to release a Mandarin course that I'm sure will be pretty epic if he does it; but that could be years away if at all.
** This was a really good idea, but there aren't enough examples and some of the examples contain audio with different tones from what is marked in the pinyin (as I confirmed by asking natives what they heard), due to dialect and some of the tone changes I mentioned above. If you know someone who speaks Standard Chinese and can help you fix it, it's a good resource and reasonably priced.