Which chinese dialect should i learn

Only when you finally set foot on Chinese soil, you were surrounded by what seemed like a completely different language! Fact: There are more than individual Chinese languages , and of them are indigenous. While every Chinese person is taught Mandarin, however, not everyone speaks it at home in their local city.

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. Unlike Mandarin and Cantonese, it can be painstakingly hard to learn less common Chinese dialects. From finding high-quality resources to getting a grasp of basic pronunciation, it can be challenging to create a roadmap that will take you from wannabe-speaker to progressing learner.

Luckily, we have a few tips to share when it comes to leveraging the internet for quality language learning, even for minority dialects. Here are four tips to kickstart your journey. Booking an online language tutor is beneficial for two reasons. A great place to start is a website like italki. There, you can browse hundreds of online tutors at different prices.

Book as many lessons as you want, and choose a study schedule that is convenient for you. While this might sound impossible for a rare Chinese dialect, there are a few cards you can play to use YouTube to your advantage.

I personally used and created this method while trying to find authentic videos in Indonesian, Tagalog and Cebuano a dialect in the Philippines. Learn how to talk about your daily routine in Hokkien, and practice your listening skills with this fun YouTube video by Felicia Zoe. In this fun video by YouTuber twirlingpages, you can relax and enjoy a cool shopping haul in the Wu Shanghainese dialect.

FluentU takes real-world videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language learning lessons. You can use the interactive captions to click on any word to find out more about it and see it used in example sentences and additional videos. You can also easily add vocabulary words to customized lists and flashcard sets and then test your knowledge with fun quizzes!

Sign up for a free trial to access the extensive video library. Luckily it has a romanized version, Pinyin, which is a great help when you are learning the language or trying to type something up on your computer. Educated people in China know around characters, but you only need to learn 2— to read the local papers. Mandarin is a tonal language with 4 tones. This means that one given syllable can be pronounced with 4 different intonations and these can radically change the meaning of the word.

Learning Mandarin can be a good way to start learning one dialect of Chinese language. Mandarin is one of the fastest growing languages in the world. In the United States, Chinese is one of the most emerging foreign languages after Spanish and one of the official languages of UN.

It is spoken by about million people in the southern provinces Guangdong and Guangxi, Hong Kong, Macao. Due to the immigration of Cantonese speakers the dialect is also spoken in Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore Malaysia, some cities in Canada and in the United States. Cantonese compare to Mandarin is mainly an oral language. Cantonese speakers use standard mandarin Chinese when they read and write.

In the mainland, this mainly means simplified Chinese characters, while in Hongkong and Macau traditional characters are used. Just like Mandarin, the Cantonese language is also a tonal language. Historically 9 different tones are distinguished in Cantonese but in practice, it is more like 6. This video shows the way how these two dialects sound:. Shanghainese is a dialect of Wu spoken by about 14 million people in Shanghai and by many Shanghainese speakers in Hong Kong.

There is no written form of it, just a spoken version, but it is not used in education and occasionally on local radio stations. Older people still think of times when they could use Shanghainese until junior middle school.

Then, things started to change and even though teachers were also from Shanghai, they required them to speak Mandarin Chinese. Generation after generation speaks worse Shanghainese and according to Wu Language Preservation, Shanghainese dialect will die out within 50 years. It can help you form stronger ties with local people in Shanghai. It is also a dialect that preserves the most original features of ancient Chinese language, but written Cantonese does not equal traditional characters. Actually only people in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macao are used to write traditional characters; mainland citizens who speak Cantonese usually write simplified Chinese.

You can search Chinese programs in China here. Unsubscribe anytime. Download your free guide and information. Please complete the form below so we can best support you. Programs Universities Articles. Dialects and Mandarin: There are many different dialects of the Chinese language. Author Recent Posts. Richard Coward. Preparing for HSK 6. Hope we can help more talented international students have the same amazing experiences and opportunities that I have had. Latest posts by Richard Coward see all.

Our Services Our Story Testimonials. Request Information This will only take a minute. Select English Chinese.