No Study Stage
Below phenomenons may happen when you first start learning Chinese.In this stage,your Mandarin Chinese sounds like a bunch of nonsense crazy noises. To the native Chinese speaker, these noises are truly strange bizarre and they may think that only aliens can understand what you are talking about. So it seems so natural that the notion that these noises can make up a real sentence is really ridiculous to people in this stage. It is also a reasonable stage to be in for everyone especially when you can't speak Mandarin Chinese at all and do not have a lot of meaningful contact with Chinese culture in your mind.A large number of non-Chinese (especially non-Asians,like Europeans and Africans) people will be stuck in this stage for their whole lives.However,in fact,it doesn't take much time to get over it and to come to the next stage.With hard working on it,one semester of Chinese courses should do it.That’s the reason why face to face Chinese courses are more effective and efficient than online Chinese courses and one to one Chinese courses are more expensive than a big group Chinese course.Choose a right course for yourself is extremely important.We are not saying that the more expensive lessons are better.We are just telling you that creating a Chinese atmosphere is a necessary and important thing for a Chinese beginner.
Beginner Stage
In this period,a learner has become a real"learner", and has abandoned the notion that Chinese can not possibly be a real language.A learner also begins to master a small number of common vocabulary words as well as phrases then they can usually make him or herself understood in the most basic talking scenarios.Though the pronunciation may still have a long way to go.Tones are in a complete mess, probably he or she still hasn't started to get a handle on the Chinese "r" or "ü" yet or on the distinctions between Mandarin's "q/ch","x/sh",and "j/zh" pairs.This a stage in which most of the Chinese learners stay for a long time,not only beginners, even those foreign teachers who has been living in China for a few years and claim they can speak some Chinese.To be honest,it takes hard work to go to the next stage and many years of university study in the West, but by study in China,the process will be accelerated.