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So far I've been using the Rosetta Stone software as my main learning tool. However, I thought I'd look into other ways to help me practice.ChinesePod provides free beginner level podcasts in Mandarin Chinese! It's also one of the most popular podcasts in the world. As I've been quite impressed with the content, I've added a real time feed of their most recent podcasts to my …
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daviddcawley 
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Welcome to my Blog! I'm an Irish guy moving to Singapore in October 2008 and I thought I'd share my experience on this blog. You can read a little more about me here.Singapore has four official languages - English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil. Although I could be lazy and get away with just speaking English, I thought I should at least try and learn one! I picked Mandarin as …
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daviddcawley
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Although I made a short Welcome post, I realized I didn't say too much about myself. One common question I've been asked is if I'm Chinese Irish? It makes sense to wonder that as I'm learning Mandarin. As you can probably tell from my photo I'm Irish Irish and I'm 28 years old. I grew up in Castlebar, Co. Mayo and lived in Dublin for several years while going to University to …
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It's only been a week since I've started learning Mandarin Chinese and so far my least favorite part is the use of measure words. As the name suggests, they are used to identify the quanti …
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As I'm learning Mandarin Chinese, I regularly need to to look up Chinese Characters. It's quite painful to deal with opening a translation website in a different tab and changing back and …
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I've been trying to learn Mandarin for a few days now. I've been finding it difficult but thought I'd try looking on the bright side of learning the language. Here's some good news if you plan to learn Mandarin!Many languages have complicated grammar rules when it comes to conjugation, tenses, gender and sentence structures. Fortunately, learning Chinese isn't quite as …
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As I have a US keyboard, it wasn't immediately obvious how I would go about typing Chinese Characters. Eventually, I discovered an excellent application called OpenVanilla which allows you to type in Pinyin and it converts it to Chinese characters.Unfortunately, the documentation on the website was entirely in Chinese! I was ready to give up when I found this video tutorial …
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I recently discussed the use of Pinyin to help learn Mandarin. I gave the example of the word 人 which is written as rén in pinyin. The use of the accented é indicates the tone should be …
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As a westerner I've been finding Chinese characters a little overwhelming - they're difficult to remember and don't give any clue to the pronunciation. This is where Pinyin comes to the re …
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I mentioned the Rosetta Stone course in my previous post. One of the great features of the software is it's Speech Recognition. It prompts you to pronounce a word or sentence and gives an indication of how close your pronunciation actually is.Here's a screen shot looking at the speech recognition screen. The top graph is the recorded native speakers voice and the bottom graph …
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