On other side, knowing tips and techniques of learning a new language can make all difference on how effective and successful you can achieve.

Based on personal learning experiences, along with others(either online or offline), here are some of learning Chinese language tips and techniques on becoming successful in mastering Chinese language.

By using one, or a combination of these tips and techniques, will maximize your effectiveness, minimize your time, and at same time, make your learning fun and enjoyable.

Step I - Where to start?

Start from learning Chinese pronunciation.

Learning Chinese Pinyin should be first step of learning Chinese language. Pinyin contains all Chinese phonetic alphabets where they are used in pronunciation of Chinese characters. To distinguish different tones, pay close attention to four types by reading Pinyin letters, initials, finals, and all possible combinations.

The objective of this phase is for you to be able to read any Chinese character with marked in Pinyin and also write a given pronunciation in Pinyin format. Be warned: learn correct pronunciation from start, do not build bad habits!

Step II - Listen, practice and memorize simple Chinese vocabulary and sentences

Tips:

Take a local community Chinese class, do practice drills with your study partner. The more you speak, easier it will be for you to learn.

Get a good dictionary and make sure it has phonetic spellings of words.

Find a native Chinese speaker to converse with, many Chinese students would like to practice their English as an exchange to teach you Chinese.

Visit a Chinese restaurant or Chinese community center where Chinese is spoken natively.

Read out loud, listen to and repeat after tape or online radio, watch Chinese movies and TV programs. Listen carefully to new sounds. Repeat them as accurately as possible, try to forget sounds of your native language.

Sing Chinese songs.

Borrow cassette tapes from local library, review and listen to tapes frequently until you're able to speak words and sentences all by yourself.

Review older vocabulary every so often to refresh your memory. Step III - Write Chinese Understand Chinese writing strokes and rules

Pictographs

The original written format were found on markings scratched onto tortoise shells and animal bones, so-called "oracle bones". These ancient writings were pictures or Pictographs.

Many people tend to think that Chinese characters are all pictographs. Actually, pictographic characters are only one kind of Chinese character, there are only about 600 pictograph characters.

Pictographic Chinese characters are pictures of concrete objects, they are basic units for forming other Chinese characters.

These are a few examples showing pictographic characters:

山 Mountain ; 羊 sheep ; 月 moon

Ideographs

As time went on and people needed to express more complex ideas or concepts, pictographs were extended or combined to form ideographs. Ideographs are graphical representations of abstract ideas.

For example:

a sun 日 and a moon 月 together means 'bright' 明

a woman 女 and with a child 子 beside means 'good' 好

The single character ? stands for a tree, two trees together ? refers to a group of trees-grove character made up of three trees ? means a place full of trees - a forest Phonetic-Semantic Compounds

Over 90% of current Chinese characters are semantic-phonetic compounds.

There are many objects, abstract and ideas that are difficult to express through Pictographs or Ideographs.