Learn Chinese Online
Learning Chinese is not that difficult as many people think. If you spend some time on it, you can absolutely master the Chinese language. the following are some tips on how to learn Chinese.
The very first thing you should do is to spend at least a month just mastering the basic phonetics of this language. There are only about 60 in total and the entire language is based on those finite sounds. I don’t think this can be over emphasized enough how important these early stages of pronunciation practice are. Because once you develop a bad pronunciation habit it will be very hard to break. You will be very glad you spent the time you did practicing the basic sounds of Mandarin.
Decide whether you wish to learn how to read/write Chinese. Chinese characters are not based on phonetics (sounds), so learning how to write does not help you learn how to speak. For travel purposes, learning a handful of Chinese characters will help you to read signs and menus in Chinese, but there is no reason to get too serious about writing if travel is your only objective. Most of the sign/menu characters can be extracted from a simple guidebook.
Many people enjoy learning how to write Chinese characters (calligraphy) solely as a beautiful art form. If you do want to learn Chinese characters, choose the appropriate system. Simplified Chinese characters are used in China and Singapore. Traditional characters are used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and will also be seen on most Chinese menus and newspapers found overseas (US, UK, Australia, Canada, etc).
There are many online resources for the beginner to learn Chinese, the Learn Chinese Online site has many free online class and free resources