Chinese Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

On 2002-04-20 21:03, Tongli wrote:

Good job, Dr. Bin Li! I just visited your site and was very impressed with the information you offered in you site. It is a very good idea to offer free, accurate and scholarly advises and information to the Chinese learners.



I have a couple of suggestions. Perhaps you should also setup a Q&A section posting both the questions and answers to certain emails you received from the Chinese learners. Secondly, \"Chinese 101\" is a very good title for the people who went to colleges here in America. I wonder if it still makes the same sense to those people who live in other countries and have never been to America. This is one of those \"regional\" vs. \"mainstream\" dispute in translation.



Good luck with your effort!



Kevin









Thanks, Kevin, for your suggestions. I probably should set up a BBS on my site so that people can ask questions and get answers from other people. I did set up a BBS a few years back before I put up this FAQ page. It did not raise enough interests. So I deleted that. I will try to get it up and running again in the future.



About Chinese 101, I see your point. People without western college experience will have problem to understand it as The Basics of Chinese or 中文初步. I might put a note somewhere so that people from China and other non-western culture can understand this. I meant the page to be some true basic information about Chinese when I got started but have put more info there that probably has gone beyond Chinese 101. These topics are something that every student in China should have learnt in middle school. But the reality is that they do not teach this, at least I did not learn these through my education. I receive quite some comments from Chinese translators who felt the same way.



Thank you again for your suggestions









[ This Message was edited by: on 2002-04-21 09:19 ]

[ This Message was edited by: on 2002-04-22 22:23 ] ▲ Collapse

On 2002-04-22 12:13, David Rockell wrote:

Great job on this, Bin Li. Like Argat, I will tell anyone who asks me these questions to look up your website (not that I don\'t know the answers, of course!!). As for the person thinking of taking up Chinese to whom Bin replied earlier, I have another angle on this: If you are realy serious about it and are the sort of person who might want to learn other dialects, it might make sense to learn a dialect first and then Mandarin. Mandarin is as bad as English in that once it infects your brain, it\'s a bit hard to surpress it when trying to learn other stuff but once Cantonese or Wu is mastered, it is easy enough learning Mandarin and there are heaps of materials available for Mandarin which is not the case for the others (i.e. get the tough ones out of the way first). In fact, this is the way most Chinese people learn \'Chinese\'; dialect first in purely spoken form and then the artifical language of Mandarin in a way not too disimilar from learning a foreign language at school. Cantonese is spoken in Guangdong and Guangxi, Wu in Shanghai and the the Yangtse River Delta and Mandarin both everywhere and nowhere (very Zen, eh). Sorry, got a bit off the track. Hope the sun is shining for you in Arizona, Bin Li.





Thanks, David, for your comments, especially about learning a dialect first, then Mandarin. Now I know why it is so difficult for us Mandarin speakers to pick up Wu and Cantonese. It makes a lot of sense. ▲ Collapse