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Thread: English help travelling in China
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[quote=SCHINAJJ ,29067]Hi Rockeleven. I hate to rain on your parade but, while "learning" Chinese from a book and CD is a really good start, it's not going to help as much as you think. The cd will give you some basics on standard Chinese, but it's a whole new ball game when your actually here trying to communicate. In China some people speak Mandarin, some Cantonese, some Mandarin with a Cantonese accent, some with accents from their own home towns, some with completely different dialects. Plus, most of what you can learn from a CD is very polite formal language, not the everyday language that most people speak. I have lived in Shenzhen for over a year and a half. When I first came here I "learned" Chinese from the Pimsleur CDs which didn't help me much in everyday communication. Since then I have taken several structured courses in Mandarin, I have been taking private lessons for more than 8 months and I still can't even come close to doing something like going to a travel agency and buying train/plane tickets - and I live in one of the major cities. If you haven't been studying Mandarin for several years you WILL need help from a native speaker when you leave the big cities for the small towns and villages. [/quote]
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