草榴短视频

Chinese seems difficult only at first glance. In fact, you can reach a fluent conversational level in as little as six months - if you are willing and take a responsible approach to learning.

Wei Puzan, a teacher at the Chinese Language Learning and Testing Centre, explained what mistakes slow down beginners, how to understand characters and where to start learning Chinese.

How do students overcome difficulties in learning Chinese?

Chinese is very different from Russian and English. And it is certainly difficult for everyone at first. To learn Chinese it is important to understand the structure of characters, for example, the parsing of keys, i.e. radicals, and phonetics.

That's why the teachers at the centre try to make it easier to learn and read the characters. We use Latin transcription, correct mistakes, explain the logic of the language and motivate.

What are the most common mistakes your students make?

Word order. There is almost no single correct order in Russian. English does, but its logic is also different from Chinese.

For example, how do we say ‘Yesterday I had breakfast’. In Chinese, the subject comes first, then the tense, then the verb - ‘I had breakfast yesterday’ (我昨天吃了早饭).

There are also some particles and constructions that are not in Russian. They are needed to put the verb in different tenses. For example, 了 (le) - completeness of action or 过 (guo) - past experience. They are often confused with either.

What techniques do you use in teaching?

I teach students with a beginner's level of language. I try to immerse them in the language environment. We introduce simple colloquial phrases such as 你好 - ‘nǐ hǎo’ (hello) or 再见 - ‘zàijiàn’ (goodbye). It is important to create an atmosphere where the kids are not afraid to speak in a new language.

What is the best way to memorise characters?

The main thing is to analyse the components. For example, we have a character made up of different radicals.

好 - ‘hǎo’ (good) consists of two radicals: 女 (nǚ) is a semantic radical meaning ‘woman’ and 子 (zi) is a key radical with a semantic function (because we associate mother and child to express something good). If you memorise such a construction, it will be easier to memorise the characters.

What words and phrases should you learn first?

In my opinion, all basic phrases when learning foreign languages are similar. For example, when I started learning Russian, I learnt ‘Hello’, ‘Goodbye’, etc.

The first phrases also depend on the purpose of learning. For example, if you want to pass some exam, then what is written in textbooks is important. And if you just want to live or travel in China, then spoken Chinese is of course more important.

Watching Chinese TV series can help you learn spoken Chinese. At first it is better to watch them with subtitles.

What do you wish for the students?

I believe that they will succeed. They are smart and will cope with everything. They are not shy to ask questions, they are interested and eager to learn new things.

They understand why they study, so they try to do their homework and prepare responsibly for the next classes. Some students dream of moving to China or going to a Chinese university. And some of them want to find their soul mate in this country. As teachers, we are only too happy to help them achieve their goals.