First Steps at Learning Mandarin from the comfort of your iPhone

I wanted to learn how to speak Mandarin for a couple reasons. First was that my girlfriend’s parents only spoke it and if I wanted to impress them, I would need to learn how to communicate with them properly. I’ve also always wanted to go to China but am terrified that no one would be able to understand me while I was there. Once I decided to learn, I asked several friends what is the best first step in learning how to speak the official chinese language. They all gave me the same answer, “its all about the tones”.

Apparently speaking the language is all about how you say, not just what you say. I could memorize (and did a little bit) the words I needed to say but when I spoke, no one had any clue what I was trying to communicate. The way Chinese are taught in school today is by use of pinyin. This gives european alphabet to the chinese characters based on how they are spoken. the Pinyin has two sections, a beginning and end. With a combination of the two, you can create a syllable. Any chinese character can be turned into a pinyin combination.

Sounds simple? That is because you are only half done! The other part is the tone. Each pinyin has about 4 tones to it. Each tone is spoken differently. So depending on how you say something like “qian” (which is q and ian) you can say either “an autograph” or “an apology”.

As you might be gathering, it starts getting a little complicated but with this new app that was recently released on the iphone, things couldn’t be simpler! It is called “Beginner Mandarin” and for good reason! It is the best first step that you should take when learning the Mandarin language.

“Beginner Mandarin” will help you hear and speak the language by having every single pinyin tone recorded and saved to your iphone directly. It also does not waste your time with tones that are not used and leaves that section blank. To help make things easier and as an extra bonus, “Beginner Mandarin” also provides a few examples of simplified chinese characters with their english translation to help aid in learning as well as adding to your vocabulary at the same time.

I might add at this point that there are multiple dialects to Mandarin. For instance people in Malaysia also speak Mandarin but their dialect is so different, it is actually hard for others to understand them. (think New York accent vs Country accent in english.) “Beginner Mandarin” worked with the niece of a professor at the University of Beijing. Beijing is the known as the best place to learn the correct dialect for Mandarin.

One last extra is a quiz mode that lets you hear or see one tone and you have to figure out which sound or pinyin is really is. It will keep score as well so you can slowly see you score improving and compare with your friends.

“Beginner Mandarin” is a great first step in learning Mandarin. It will not make you an expert by itself but it will put you in the right direction.