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I wouldn't reccomend going into Chinatown and praticing there. It's very easy to offend people. sweatdrop I don't think self teaching is effective when learning a language, it's better to find a tutor to help you because it's difficult to learn and I think learning would be easier when you have someone that instructs you with the sounds.

You can easily master speaking Chinese, I dont recommend going into ChinaTown, you have to keep in mind, Chinese have different accent, it is not REAL mandrian.

Writting..err...good luck....^.^ razz eek xp

Pff...tell that to my stupid Japanese teacher..that fat bum..he cant even teach..hes not even Japanese. (sorry for getting out of topic)

^^;
Well to me, when westerners attempt to speak chinese to me it sounds like they're making fun of it (As much as their good intentions seem to be)
I know many elderly Chinese that take offense when Chinese is mispronouced or the grammar is poor.<<; It would just make things very akward.

My aunt works at a company full of Vietnamese people and she attempted to speak Vietnamese with them. In the end, they told my uncle(he's a manager) to tell her not to speak Vietnamese again because it was unbareable to hear. That's an belief many people carry,
"If you can speak it correctly then don't try." sweatdrop

I should point out not every single chinese person in Chinatown speaks Mandarin other dialects are spoken too such as Cantonese.

But Chinese isn't something you just learn overnight, it takes years and years to become fluent. confused You're still in high school I pressume?
*looked at year of birth*
Try taking Chinese courses in College instead or try taking classes at a local community college if you want to try that badly. Hitting the streets right away won't really help you pick up much.

Learning Chinese is harder than it sounds Shokai. In all respects Chinese is much harder than Japanese despite Japenese having three writing systems. Unlike Japanese Chinese has absolutely no written alphabet as such-the romanized pinyin you see in most beginner Chinese textbook is useless if you really want to speak proper Chinese.

Sure it is easy to speak relatively simple Chinese expressions that we've all heard white people say, but actually trying to conduct a normal conversation in Chinese is an entirely different story. The grammar, syntax, pronunciation and sentence structure of Chinese are all far more complex than English. Even for a native speaker like myself, it is extremely difficult to translate an English sentence into a Chinese one, and vice versa, without that sentence totally loosing all meaning.

If you are really keen on learning Chinese, you definitely need to undergo a three or four year course on it. If it is too late to start learning Chinese at high school then you can easily apply for a course in beginner's Chinese at college. In three or four years you can be brought up to the standard of spoken Chinese that a nontrained native speaker like myself has.

yes thats true if you try and read pinyin it might come out wrong and you think that it right when its a big difference-embarassing basically

Go ahead and study language yourself if you want, just don't count on becoming fluent. wink

If you're determined to teach yourself Chinese, there's programs you can sign up for online that set up penpal relations between yourself and a native speaker of the language you wish to study. The idea is (in your case) that they'll want to learn English, you'll want to learn Chinese, so the two of you can send each other written practice in the form of friendly letters.

Try googling "teach yourself language" or something similar.