Learningchinese@blogspot.com

  I attended the Wellness conference at SICC from the 7 th to the 9 th June and have been away from social media. I learned many valuable facts from the convention including breathing exercises. Meanwhile, I have been following an excellent YouTube channel to learn to speak Mandarin fluently. Each of the lessons has a portion for shadowing. 

  The following is what I mentioned in my second post.  LINK   Many of the Cantonese and Hakka folks will say 'fu' instead of 'hu'.  Also pay attention to the incorrect pronunciations of other words. Shi Huangdi (literally meaning first emperor) tried to unify the Chinese with one language to no avail. The Chinese Government introduced Pinyin to ensure the Chinese speak Mandarin correctly like the Americans who learned it using romanisation. The Malaysian Government introduced Pinyin in the 70s for the same reason.  Today, many Americans in China speak better Mandarin than a majority of Chinese living in Malaysia. Here is a video of a teacher teaching her mom to read correctly. LINK    

  This is a continuation of part 1. This blog is for foreigners who intend to learn Chinese.  In part 1, I stated the following: Briefly: i.           There are many characters with different tones which can easily be represented by the tone marks on top of romanised letters. ii.          Many characters carry neutral tones when combined with other characters and they carry different meanings. iii.         The same character can represent a completely different tone and mean a completely different thing. iv.         The same character can represent a completely different sound. v.          I believe there may be more reasons but the above should suffice to show why Pinyin (romanisation) is a must to learn good Mandarin.