sjowens

I know that as a Chinese kid, they learn the pinyin firstly in school ,but at that time ,they can say a lot of phrases and sentences.So I think pinyin gives people a system to learn pronunciation but phrases to make a sentence are much more important to learn Chinese. When I started to learn Chinese , I was in hurry to gain the basic skills. I took an online 1-on-1 lesson on www.echineselearning.com. I started with also pinyin,phrases and grammars. They are the basics of learning Chinese. You can ignore none of them but to learn in different order. As my point of view, pinyin is really hard to understand cause it have the same look as English letters , but by pinyin you can read every word you learn. wish you good luck