What is the best way to learn mandarin?
Hello! Right now I’m living in China. I’m an American learning Mandarin at a Chinese University. There are some misconceptions, so hopefully I can help a bit. First of all, you won’t need to learn to write characters necessarily. It really depends on the class that you take (if you go that route.) Most likely, you don’t need to worry about writing characters unless you have a specific reason. These days, you can type characters out via computers or cell phones using pinyin. You will only need to know how to speak and read it properly. If you decide to learn how to write characters, you need to learn stroke order, and there are over 75,000 characters in their language. If you want to just learn to read them, (which is a good idea, and is a much different process.) to read the newspaper you need to know about 2,500. I recommend Rosetta Stone: Mandarin, and going to a university. I don’t recommend trying to learn by watching TV shows and movies because you simply will not learn the small
