Hey all,
I'm currently in year 9, heading towards year 10 and I'm thinking on picking up Mandarin since I have a lot of spare time before VCE. I'm currently studying Japanese and plan on continuing it to year 12 and I think learning Mandarin will compliment my kanji vocab. My whole extended family pretty much speaks it and I never bothered to learn it so I think it would benefit me a lot. I heard the character memorization is quite difficult, however the grammar is quite easy. Is this true?
Also, how long would it take to be able to understand and speak conversational Mandarin? Because I'm willing to dedicate a lot of time towards it until the end of next year. I don't plan on doing it in VCE because it's probably too late. Also, does anyone recommend somewhere to learn it for beginners that is full of people around my age? I live around the south eastern suburbs.
Thank you. 
Hi undefined,
I was in a very similar situation in year 9 in terms of doing Chinese, with the exception of doing Japanese. What my actual situation was that I have been learning French since year 7 but eventually decided that French wasn't for me anymore. Being from a Chinese background, I often spoke Chinese at home so am familiar with the Grammar and all that stuff. So I decided that maybe I could do Chinese, thereby spoke to my Chinese teachers so that I could get an idea of how it may be like. Since I spoke Chinese to them when speaking that, they'd were afraid that the year 10 class would be wasting time, so they'd put me in the year 11 VCE class. Soon, was able to catch up (with difficulty), did year 12 the next year and ended up with a 30 SS.
You are right that character memorisation is quite difficult, but you can come up with strategies to memories characters. For example: You can visualise these characters. After all they are pictographs. Or you can use the radical combinations of the characters to remember what they meant.
In terms of the grammar, well it's easier than English grammar, which causes great difficulty when doing translations (if you choose to do VCE Chinese).
Tenses:The Chinese past tense is accompanied by the word 了. If I use I run as an example, the English past tense has I ran, and I had ran, but Chinese you can use 我跑了 for both translations. For future tense, the same applies, but the word is 会, which roughly translates to the word "will" in the context of tenses. However, present tense 我跑 are very simple since you don't have to care about verb-subject agreement like you do in English. When the word 在 is used, (我在跑）then it is present continuous tense, translating to "I am running."
Verbs "to be" and "to have"Compared to what my schoolmates say about doing European languages, you do not have to memories a set of these types of words. Instead, there is a "to be" word (是) and a "to have" word (有) for any pronoun you want. So this is actually much simpler than the English "I have, she has, he has, they have" and the "I am, she is, he is, they are, you are." All these pronouns use the same word.
So in a sense, Chinese grammar is more simple than English grammar (and there's obviously more to Chinese grammar that what I'd written here) but you will still have to learn quite a bit since the sentence structure and others stuff about grammar since it is quite different to that of English.
So picking up Mandarin: You do
not have to do VCE Chinese like I had. The poster above me has posted about XJS but they are a very VCE orientated school, so I am not sure if it is the best to go there (although you can do year 12 level Chinese and saying that you are not doing VCE). So in terms of learning it, your first priority should be talking to Chinese teacher st your school. They are likely to have a much better idea that I have.
If you don't have Chinese teachers at your school, then perhaps you can look at getting your parents to teach you, but I do suggest you take classes. Maybe online classes? Or even take it in small groups with someone else.
But whatever you choose: Good luck.
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