Course recommendations for minimal Chinese?

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Hi all. I will be traveling to Taiwan in August. I can only devote about 15 minutes/day to language preparation. I do not expect to continue studying Chinese after my trip, so will happily trade typical pedagogical goals of building a solid foundation for further study for quick access to tourist/survival phrases. (Hello, thank you, how much does it cost, help!, police, call an ambulance…)

What course do you recommend in this situation?

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I have no recommendations for courses or resources, other than: [wiki] Let's create a nice resources list! [Mandarin Chinese]

My pointers:

  1. Your pronunciation will be absolute shit, try to use most of your time to make it less shitty. Memrise is not a suitable tool for this. I’d recommend getting an (online) tutor once or twice a week.
  2. No need to learn characters.
  3. No need to learn pinyin perhaps even, though I’m less sure about that.

Points 2 and 3 lead us to courses that teach you some useful words and phrases, like you say, like thank you, hospital, toilet, chopsticks, and prompt on Chinese audio and have you choose or type English.

As your pronunciation will be shit, and something like “qing” can mean dozens of different things, in the courses look for words that are two syllables instead of one “yī yuán” (one dollar) “yī yuàn” (hospital), so people can have a chance of making out what you’re saying from context: yī yuàn zài nǎ li ? (Where is the hospital?)

If you’re really looking for police or the hospital, best would probably be to ask a young person if they speak English (nǐ huì shuō Yīng wén ma ?), and to always have your smartphone on you, and on that smartphone have Pleco installed (you can do OCR on Chinese characters now too, useful in restaurants and such).

…And a translation app would be good, though I don’t know enough about those to recommend any, and I guess you need internet on your phone to use them.

… for simple phrases, Chinese grammar is very easy:

nǐ hǎo (hello) qǐng wèn (I’d like to ask) xǐ shǒu jiān (rest room) zài nǎ li (where?)

nǐ hǎo (hello) qǐng wèn (I’d like to ask) zhège (this one) duōshǎo (how much) qián (money)?

So you can just learn a few useful phrases and some useful nouns to put in the right place in those phrases.

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