Answers

Jul 26, 2018 - 03:49 PM
With Fluenz Mandarin we teach using Pinyin which is the romanized form of Mandarin. We don't teach the Chinese writing characters as we believe it is best to learn the basics of the language first (vocab/the sentence structures etc.) then learn the characters because learning these will be much more meaningful when you know what the word means and how and why it fits into a sentence. It wouldn't make any sense for us to accept the characters in a program that doesn't teach them. We hope this helps

Jul 27, 2018 - 03:00 AM
It gets easier with practice. Tones are so important that it makes sense to force students to master them. Chinese characters do not have a tone mark so you cannot guess the tone just by looking at a character.