Learn Chinese With Software

How to Speak Chinese Like a Native

Posted by on May 26th, 2010 | no comments home title

Chinese is referred as one of the toughest language to master. You might learn to hold some basic conversations, identifying some characters or even to write some Chinese. But probably only one of few thousands can speak Chinese like a native. Of course, I’m talking about the non-native speakers. A lot of people think it’s impossible for a non-native speaker speaks like a native. Well, there is definitely no shortcut, but there are some tips can help you to make it easier.

Why Chinese is so hard to master?

Fist, the pronunciation is difficult master. There are some Chinese pronunciations are difficult for westerners to pronounce. For example like there is a sound pronounced like “uee” this is one of the most difficult sound my students have. But don’t worry about your abilities, it’s simply because there is no such a sound in English. You just need to practice more. It’s like the “th” sound in English. When I was learning English, I couldn’t pronounce the “th” sound. There is no such a sound in Chinese and I was not used to “bite” the tongue to speak. My teacher would bring a pair of chopsticks to the classroom. Every time when I made a mistake, my teacher would try to take my tongue out of my mouth. Actually, she never did but it reminded me every time. For the difficult sounds Chinese, you need more patience to practice. Listen to the sound carefully and then try to imitate it.

Second, Chinese Language has tones. There are four tones and one toneless tone in this language. If you speak Chinese without tones it will sound very confuse, because the same pronunciation with different tones can form a totally different meaning. If you want to speak like a native, you must learn and master all the tones.

Third, if you listen to northern Chinese speak you will notice they have a lot of “er” sound in their speaking. This sounds like the “oor” in “poor”. For example: “na3 li2″ means “where”. As in Mandarin a lot of people would say “na er”.

Those are the tips that can help you speak Chinese more natively. Further more if you really want to learn how to speak Chinese like a native, I suggest you to find a repetitive program or course and learn with the program. There are tones of different programs and courses that you can easily find them online.