Starting Mandarin (Traditional Characters)

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Hey Everyone,

I am hoping to start learning some Mandarin and I was wondering if anyone had good ideas about where to start. As you can see in the title, I am going to be focusing on traditional characters as far as the written system goes, but I am open to using both pinyin and bopomofo for the phonetic systems. If there are resources that provide them all together that would even be better. Do people have any suggestions about resources for learning the written language as a complete beginner (traditional)?

A second thing I would love to find are videos that provide spoken Mandarin that is more easily comprehensible for a complete beginner. If there are resources that have videos captioned with characters + phonetic system all in one, those would be perfect. I’d prefer these things in 100% Chinese mostly to just start hearing the language and to connect the sounds to the phonetic systems.

Any other general tips or resources would be appreciated. I don’t have a particular need to learn about anything specific and am simply just interested in learning the language over a long period of time. I have a particular interest in consuming content rather than anything else, so I’ll be focusing on learning the written systems and sound recognition/comprehension to begin.

Thanks in advance to anyone who replies. :smiley:

If there is a similar post already, please just point me there :smiley: and save everyone the time!

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I’m not doing Mandarin with Traditional characters until the summer time but one thing I can say from learning Spanish, French and now Russian is that in the early stages what you want is TPRS.
So search youtube for “Mandarin TPRS” and you should find comprehensible input.

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I don’t have any tip, but I appreciate that you’re learning traditional characters! 加油 :slight_smile:

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I selected traditional character in the setting, but I don’t think they are being displayed. How do I know? I spent a lot of time in college writing “xue” as in to study and the top of the traditional character is different than what I see. What I would like is for lessons to to have traditional character with pinyin underneath. Is that possible?

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Hi mathproof - Are you sure you have Chinese (Traditional) as the language selected?

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Check out the youtube channel “Grace Mandarin Chinese”. The host is from Taiwan. There are many videos there have transcript on both Trad and Simplified Chinese

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I just looked at it, I think she uses simplified characters but I was very comprehendible!