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How To Learn Chinese: A Guide To Unlocking Mandarin

Why We Wrote This Book We made this book so learning Chinese stops being a mystical mysterious language that is literally associated when people want to describe something hard to do or impossible to read. It can be done, and it is surprisingly simple once you learn that the trick isn’t to translate words but to shift your current thinking about learning a new language altogether. What is the “Shift” I needed to make? The shift that needs to take place is to put yourself in the traditional Chinese person’s shoes 5,000 years ago. You need to resist the urge that Chinese is structured in any way to English or any of the European languages you may have previously been familiar with. How can you get your message across when you live in an enormous land with multiple cultures who travel through your town and there is no centralized and formal library of literature to take your communication skills from? You need to begin using symbols to illustrate objects and events that an individual living far away can understand even if your dialect and education may have nothing in common. This is the root of Ancient Chinese Characters. When going into detail with each word, you will begin to see that nearly all of today’s characters evolved from a rudimentary drawing of what they originally described. Over the course of centuries, as culture evolved, the relationship between objects and characters changed and thus formed new characters that make sense only in relation to each other and the context they are in. The Sleeping Dragon While this may sound a bit intimidating, I challenge you to skim through the book and observe a few examples of the origins of some Chinese words and their meaning and return to this page to compare your previous notion of how you thought learning Chinese would go for you. It occurred to me about 5 years ago that China is an unstoppable growing force aka the “Sleeping Dragon” in the world economy and with it, raising the awareness and exposure of successful Chinese business people and the Chinese cultur

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