Is it worth while to learn how to speak Chinese?
370260
No. Everything important (business, international politics) operates using English.
892281
You are trying to learn Chinese, in Ahmadabad.\n\nCheck with Colleges in Ahmadabad.\n\nThe one I know of is St. Xavier college.\n\nLanguage department head can help.\n\nWrite to or contact Chinese Consulate/ embassy, ask them to put you in touch with some one, say you are interested in spoken Chinese.\n\nSpoken Chinese is very different, it has many dialects, so you need to be region specific, eg Cantonese, Mandarin, Beijing, Hanan, Shanghai........ \n\nIt is not even like Gujarati, Kachii, Kathiawardy.... it is just very defferent and they do not understand each other.\n\nIn big city you will get by with English.
1102321
Speaking from experience, I would suggest that you put yourself in an environment that you have to speak English in order to survive. In such an environment, you will learn English very quickly. To learn good English, you need to surround yourself with people whose first language is English; you do that just so you can learn to speak English with the correct accent. English conversation partners would be one of the best ways for you to practice English. You can also listen to English talk show on radio to practice your listening skills. \n\nI have no idea which country you are living in.  Please don't take what I am going to say wrong; please understand that I am also a Chinese (from Hong Kong) and this is just my observation.  I am living in the US.  If you live in China or any Chinese speaking country, what I am going to say probably won't apply to you.  What I want to say is, when I first came over to the US to attend university, I noticed that a lot of Chinese always hung out together.  While there is nothing wrong with hanging around Chinese people, but since they only hang around with Chinese, learning English is only for class and not so much for socializing.  Understanding English in class is relatively easy because you are more alert to certain words.  Say for eample, if you are taking a math class, you are more alert to the math terminology.  But in a regular conversation with your friends, there is no set topic and the topics can change many times during a conversation.  To truly learn English, you have to be able to understand any regular conversations with your friends.  At first, you may feel lost when the topics are changing in a conversation.  In times, you will be able to catch up.   That's why I suggest you to put yourself in an environment where you absolutely have to speak English in order to survive.  Since you cannot fall back on Chinese (because nobody understands Chinese), it forces you to use English more often and so your English skills can improve.
17234
Yes, it depends on what you think is "useful".  Many people believe that English is a very useful language because it is a language spoken in some countries with economic power, so you can use English to do international communications and business.  However, if you are a farmer in a small town in China, your native language is probably the most useful to you because it's a language that you can use to communicate with people in your same community.  So it depends on what you want to do with it.\n\nI think the more languages a person knows, the better!
624819
dont most chinese learn it from their family?
513010
I guess it depends on how good you are with languages :)\nYou should check out http://www.chinese-forums.com.  There are a lot of people with the same question.  Or go to http://www.chinese-forum.net , it's fairly new though.
401260
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_martial_arts should help.
732043
Ni Hao Conor, I'd just like to say for the record there isn't a language called Chinese. In China there's two main languages, Mandarin and Cantonese. Cantonese is usually spoken in Hong Kong and Mandarin is spoken pretty much everywhere else.\n\nI think it'd be great to learn Mandarin, it's a widely used language. You could learn it for business or for traveling, or to even have foreign friends.
334096
I have been going to school for many years trying to learn mandarin speech..It's not easy and Cantonese has (debatable) up to 9 tones--where the same word can have 9 different means according to the tones used.  Good luck.
56583
probably depends on where you're teaching and what level you are teaching. and u probably need to know chinese
395417
The easiest way that could be done is by finding yourself a friend that speaks mandarin chinese or a girl/guyfriend who does the same and try to learn chinese that way. You could also get movies in chinese that have english subtitles. You could also try and find some resources online!\nHow fast you learn a language depends on your interest and langugae learning skills!\nGood luck!
456086
I'm good at english.. but too bad.. cause i know chinese already. We can communicate.. take care!
916365
I'd recommend Mandarin Chinese.  It is very different from English and so it will stimulate new and different parts of your brain.  Also, China may be taking over the world soon.\nIf not that, how about International Sign Language?  Again, a very different language, and a useful one, too.
479813
Writing? When I learned chinese, I used the New Practical Chinese Reader, which is pretty good, because it comes with a workbook, and because they break characters down into their components. You should draw all over the textbook, because you can look back and see how you're progressing. Mastering Chinese takes a long time, but it is possible.Like I said, I would really recommend the NPCR, which Amazon has:\n\nhttp://www.amazon.com/gp/search/102-0249102-2318525?search-alias=aps&keywords=new%20practical%20chinese
53807
My girlfriend uses it. Its a simple program which she downloaded from the net. If you are asking how to use it, Well its simple, If you want to type a chinese word then you have to know how it sounds like, for example you want to type Wa(means I in chinese) then you type WA and the program will show you a list of chinese words to choose from, if you know which it is, you just pick it and then type the next word and so on...
647233
The Rosetta Stone stuff is good in that it teaches you how to think without translation. But for really learning how to learn to speak the language it will be slow. It doesn't give you dialogs or conversations to work with. What they do is teach you basic sentence structure, but each and every language is the same, meaning they don't take the mindset of the target language into consideration when creating the lessons. They just translate the lessons into the target language, this doesn't always work so well when the other language is not of the same mindset. \n\nI think it works better for European languages than Eastern languages because the mindset is so different in the East. I speak Mandarin and Mongolian and it is soooo different from European languages.\n\nPlus you get no explanations of anything what so ever. It's all guess work until you understand.\n\nBTW, you won't find any problem communicating there, I haven't met a Filipino who can't at least speak pidgin English!\n\nEnjoy!\n \nCheck out the sites below for some other options.
67520
Whoa!!!\nSome incredible answers...\n\nJapanese is definitely the easiest language you can learn to speak. Writing comes from Chinese, so if they are saying it's hard just because of the characters, then Chinese has at 50 times more characters.\n\nChinese/Mandarin is not correct. Mandarin is Chinese. There are many dialects of Chinese, but characters are the same when written, no matter what dialect. Sounds may take a while to learn, but grammatically Mandarin is easy, compared to some other languages.\n\nRussian is very hard. They have an alphabet, but it is different than Latin alphabet. Grammatically, there are many things that are hard to learn. It is the hardest language I can speak (I can speak 4 fluently and learning 3 more), but not the hardest language to learn in the world.\n\nTurkish, rather easy, has a Latin alphabet, with few letters missing such as x, q and w, and has few extra letters. There are no dipthongs in Turkish, unless . There are also no gender, so he/she/it are all the same word, and no irregular nouns or verbs, which makes Turkish very, very easy.\n\nEnglish, in my opinion, is the easiest of the European languages. Unlike Romantic languages, it only has one definite article, and 2 undefinite articles. Some other features of English also make it easy.\n\nSome people agree that Hungarian is the hardest language, but I don't have any experience speaking it so I cannot say.\n\nMalayalam, which is spoken in Southern India, might be hard to learn. They have an alphabet, but it is very confusing, especially to a beginner. The language is aggluginative, which means you can add multiple suffixes to a word and make it much longer. Sounds are hard to make, because they are rolled out of your tongue, similar to other Indian languages.