Comment by popularonion | Hacker News Reader

Comment by popularonion | Hacker News Reader

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After a month or so on Pimsleur Mandarin as a total beginner, I was feeling pretty good about myself so I posted some voice recordings to get feedback. The feedback I got was along the lines of “uhh yeah we can’t really understand you bud”.

That forced me to actually go learn Pinyin and learn about the j/q/x consonants. It took me about 2 months of obsessive practice to fix all the wrong pronunciations I taught myself from 1 month of Pimsleur.

I think for any non Western European language, it’s much better to learn the basics the old fashioned way, especially the writing system and all the phonetic aspects of the language that don’t exist in English.

The flip side is many people learn bad pronunciation habits because of reading. Things like Chinese tones for native English speakers or L/R for native Japanese speakers are always going to be hard and no single textbook, tape or app will fix that.

I should be clear that I was watching YouTube videos as much as reading over those two months. And I was aware from my experience taking Spanish classes that a letter in English probably sounds different from the same letter in $LANGUAGE2.

To be honest it’s hard for me to understand the “Pinyin teaches you wrong pronunciation” line of thinking. It so commonly repeated by so many people that there must be something to it, but not for me.

This is a good place for an early intervention. I had u and the consonants explained to me around lesson 2-3, and I did fine. I practiced them every time, comparing myself to the speaker.

I got railroaded on the difference between i and e. My chi and my che sound basically the same. This is little enough that people seem to understand well enough, but it's sometimes a bit awkward.

Yeah. I would’ve saved a lot of time if I got feedback after the very first lesson instead of waiting a month. I might have been productive continuing to use Pimsleur in that case.

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