7 Pieces of Advice for a Beginning Student of Chinese
Introduction
(This is background information about my own journey; feel free to skip to the next section if you want.)
Sometime in 2016, I decided that I was going to move to Taiwan or Mainland China, and I started studying Chinese using the Pimsleur method. It’s an old school system, originally a series of cassette tapes.
This being the 21st century, I used MP3s of course. Anyway, the Pimsleur audio goes something like this
Narrator: You’re meeting a colleague for lunch at your hotel. Ask her if she wants anything to drink.
Pause.
Male voice: Nín yào hē shénme dōngxī ma?
There are four levels, each with thirty 30-minute-long lessons.
Pimsleur is actually great for foundational stuff, like numbers and greetings, but it only covers a few hundred vocabulary words, so it’s quite limited.
Also, the conversations are overly formal and stilted — it’s primarily aimed at business travelers. The most important takeaway I had from Pimsleur, though, was the importance of spaced repetition. This is the idea that in order to learn something, you should be introduced to it lots of times, and then have to recall it in longer and longer intervals. Eventually, it gets lodged in your long term memory and becomes nearly impossible to forget.
I was also using a website called clozemaster.com, which I’m surprised to discover still exists. This site gives you tons and tons of sentences, all with a word removed, and you fill in the word, either directly or via multiple choice options.
In principle, it’s a great idea, but there are a few glaring issues. First, the sentences are boring (the one I just saw said, “That dog is blind”). Next, the text to speech engine is terrible, and when the sentences are read out they sound too robotic.
Actually, some of the best practice I got back in my early days came from location-shifting to China on dating apps. I would look for Chinese guys who didn’t speak much English, so our conversations would have to be in Chinese only. I think maybe I was using Blued, which is the biggest gay dating app in China. The fact that these exchanges were text-based was super helpful — I could use a dictionary to look up unfamiliar terms and take my time while composing responses.
In October 2016, I moved to Taipei. I made an effort to use Chinese — by, for example, translating the menus at little dumpling stands or exchanging pleasantries with my colleagues. I also started dating a Chinese guy. Still, my Chinese wasn’t progressing very much. I was busy at work, where everything was in English. I hit a plateau.
At the same time, I was getting sick of Taipei. While I loved the people, I hated just about everything else: the weather, the food, the architecture.
On New Year’s Day 2019, I moved to Bangkok, Thailand — my favorite city in the world. Of course, my Chinese language skills started to decline. I stopped practicing, and I tried (unsuccessfully) to learn Thai.
Eventually, though, I decided I would likely return to Taiwan (or mainland China) at some point, so I picked Mandarin back up. Around this time, I came across some of my favorite study techniques. I’ll talk about these in the next part of the article.
In late 2019, I passed the HSK 4 proficiency exam (there are 6 levels of the exam, and that is the fourth), and in 2021, I reached the height of my Chinese abilities. I was relatively “fluent,” meaning that I could carry on extended conversations in Chinese on a range of topics — family life, travel, politics, and so on.
At some point in 2022, though, I stopped studying again. I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe it was because I wasn’t going to to move back to Taiwan, and I didn’t see any immediate need to keep going with the language. Anyway, that’s my Chinese language learning story. On to to advice.
So, without further ado, here are 7 things I would tell a beginning student of Chinese:
1. Classes Are Your Enemy
I’m not talking about proletarians and capitalists.
I mean school, teachers, desks, classrooms — the whole lot of ‘em.
Why?
Well, first of all, if your class is any good, it’s going to be interactive. That means you’ll be answering questions, having mock conversations with your classmates, and doing in-class demonstrations. Great, right?
No. Terrible.
What that really means is that you are going to be listening to non-native speakers (your classmates) mangle Chinese pronunciation and grammar, for hours every day.
Maybe — and this is a big maybe — a class could be good for teaching you the very basics of Chinese (and forcing you into a routine), but do not expect it to do very much.
In school, I took 5 years of French classes, 5 years of German classes, and 4 years of Japanese classes. I can barely string together a sentence in any of those languages. I can almost guarantee that none of my classmates could either. To go a step further, I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who is fluent in Chinese or Japanese who attributes it to classes. Such people almost always say classes are a hindrance.
Rather than doing a class, get a private tutor. It’s so worth it.
One-on-one instruction is wildly effective for a number of reasons. First of all, your specific issues can be identified and corrected. Second, you can focus on materials and topics that interest you. Third, you learn to talk about your own life a lot, which is very important for keeping a conversation going. There are even more reasons than this, but I will leave it at that for the sake of brevity.
For online Chinese tutoring, I like iTalki a lot. I completed around 200 1-hour long lessons on the site. Here’s my referral link. You get a little discount for using it, and I get a kickback too (in iTalki credits). If you end up using it, feel free to email me and ask for some tips and tricks: matkline @ [world’s most popular email hosting service].com
Still, even with a private tutor, you need to be aware you’re going to have to do most of the heavy lifting yourself.
2. Chinese is Much Harder Than You Probably Think It Is
How hard do you think it is to learn Chinese to a native degree of fluency?
I had a lot of advantages as a beginner: a degree in Asian Studies, coursework in Chinese history, years of Japanese language courses.
If anyone should have known how hard it was, it should have been me. I would estimate that I underestimated the difficulty by a factor of 10. Seriously.
Case in point: I passed level 4 of the HSK proficiency exam after studying Chinese for a little less than 1,000 hours.
It is still easier for me to read a newspaper in Spanish — a language I have never studied — than one in Chinese. Likewise, I could probably more easily order a meal in Madrid than Chongqing.
Why is Chinese so f#%#@#$ difficult?
Obviously, there’s the writing system. You’ll need to know ~3000 characters to read a novel. There is no one-to-once correspondence between the characters and how they sound, so you will be doing quite a bit of memorization. Believe it or not, though, this isn’t even that bad.
What’s probably worse is that there are barely any cognates to help you learn vocab (e.g., ‘airport’ is ‘aeropuerto” in Spanish, ‘aeroport’ in French, and ‘jīchǎng’ in Chinese). You will be memorizing 10 to 20 thousand new vocabulary words, with very little to help you.
However, the absolute worst of all is tones. Fucking tones. These deserve their own section.
3. If You Don’t Know the Tone, You Don’t Know the Word
If you grew up speaking a non-tonal language, like English, then from a young age you learned that tones were not really important. This idea is reinforced every time you listen to the language being spoken.
And as a beginning student of Chinese, it’s easy to buy into the illusion that tones don’t really matter. After all, people can (and will) understand what you’re saying from context, especially for the basic things you’ll be saying as a novice. You can say “Nǐ hǎo” however the hell you want, and it’s going to be understood.
As you progress, however, your bad tone habits are going to come back to bite you in the behind.
Think of it like this: tones are as important to Chinese as vowel sounds are to English. In other words, the difference between shū (book) and shù (tree) is every bit as significant as the difference between “sheet” and “shit.”
Yes, thanks to context clues, you could understand what someone meant if they said, “I need to buy a new pair of bed shits.”
But they will sound like an idiot. And that’s how you’re going to sound, too.
Enjoy.
Side note: Go ahead and really learn the difference between “x” and “sh”, “j” and “zh” and “q” and “ch”. You’ll thank me later. Also, the third tone is not a falling-rising tone. It is a low tone.
4. Learning To Write Chinese is Basically Pointless
As my good buddy Brett says, “Writing Chinese is basically a party trick.”
I think he’s right. It looks cool, but it is functionally useless. I also don’t buy that learning to write improves your ability to read in any substantive way.
How often do you handwrite anything these days? If you’re like most people, the answer is almost never.
Still, handwriting in English isn’t too bad if you have to do it. There are 52 characters to write (counting upper- and lower- case letters) and if you’re not sure how to write a word, you can just sound it out.
In Chinese, on the other hand, you’re going to need to learn the thousands of characters mentioned above, which Chinese people essentially learn over 12 years of rote memorization.
Stick with using pinyin or zhuyin input on your electronic device. Again, you do not need to learn to write in Chinese, aside from maybe your name.
P.S. This is another reason classes are terrible. They waste your time by making you learn to write.
5. Learn from Children
People always marvel at children’s language acquisition skills, associating these abilities with some plasticity of the brain that’s lost over time.
I don’t entirely buy this argument. I think you can just as well explain children’s prodigious language abilities to a few other factors, which I’ll discuss in detail in another post.
For now, I’ll limit myself to a few observations.
First, children talk to other children. This has a lot of benefits. Kids don’t talk about very complex topics — no philosophy, no politics, no complex psychological analyses.
They mostly talk about things that are close at hand and use simple grammar patterns. “That’s a big car!”; “The airplane is really loud.”; “I don’t want that.” I also feel like they say tones surprisingly clearly and distinctly compared to adults. I’m curious to hear other people’s opinions on that, though.
There is yet another advantage to talking to children. They are ruthless. If a kid talks “funny,” other kids are quick to jump on it and ridicule them. I’ll never forget having my Taiwanese students make fun of my Chinese pronunciation — and I’m an adult, with more emotional fortitude than a child (… presumably). Still, bad as it may feel in the moment, this experience does push people to improve their pronunciation (myself included).
As an aside, less urbane mainlanders will also ruthlessly criticize your Chinese. They’ll ask, for example, why you don’t sound like Dashan, a middle-aged Canadian who is the most famous Chinese-speaking foreigner. It makes my spine tingle with anger, but it’s an important experience.
But back to learning from children. Put yourself in positions where you can chat with kids, but also take advantage of material designed for kids. Kid’s books are great, but children’s television shows are even better. Safety Rangers, from Malaysia, is one of my favorites. It’s aimed at elementary schoolers. I can understand 90%+ of the dialogue, which puts me in a great situation for learning new vocab through context.
Speaking of Chinese Language media:
6. Douyin!
Douyin is the original recipe TikTok. While the rest of the world sucks down whatever slurry is in the TikTok hog trough, Mainland Chinese drink from the pure mountain spring water of Douyin.
Do you think the CCP is going to let 1.3 billion Chinese gurgle a bunch of sewage?
Actually, don’t answer that.
No. That’s the answer. No, they aren’t, dear reader. At least not via the state-approved, all-knowing Douyin.
Douyin lets you use the time-honored algorithmic addiction engine to your advantage. Rather than seeing a bunch of surgeon-general-warning IG reels or YouTube shorts, you can see the best China has to offer. And, as you spend time looking at particular genres of videos, Douyin will serve up more and more of that genre.
More action? Sure. Mr. Beast dubbed over in Chinese? Definitely. Gay? Even this is no problem for the Douyin juggernaut.
However, the absolute best videos on Douyin are the movies that have been edited down so that they are only 10 to 30 minutes long, with a Chinese narrator explaining every scene. You’re gonna want to look at these in landscape mode.
Sometimes these are trashy Eastern European films (which may still have 10 minutes worth of good stuff in them); other times, they’re Hollywood movies. I ended up watching all 30 minutes of the Good Will Hunting cut; I had never seen the movie, and I got sucked into the story — and Matt Damon’s dimples.
Situations like that — really getting immersed into Chinese-language content — are amazing.
Unfortunately, they’re few and far between. By and large, Chinese-language television shows and films are cheesy, for lack of a better word. Stilted dialogue, ridiculous plots, bad special effects, etc. etc. And that’s not even to mention the censorship. I hold that the USA has set an incredibly standard with our high quality media, and it’s nearly impossible for China to compete.
Douyin remedies this by simply dubbing over foreign cinema. Love it.
Of course, there’s more than just movies on Douyin. A whole world of videos is out there waiting to be explored. What are you waiting for?
Disclaimer: You will probably need an Android phone to run the Douyin app if you didn’t buy your phone in China. Douyin is not available on the Google Play Store. You will need to manually download the APK and install it. Douyin accounts are only for Chinese citizens, but you can still use the app without an account. Fun.
7. Audio, Audio, Audio
I’m a believer in the input hypothesis, and I am convinced that audio-based comprehensible input is the most important aspect of language learning. Of course, you get some of this as you’re using Douyin or watching Chinese tv shows.
Still, it’s nice to just be able to walk around town and have some Chinese-language content piping through your earbuds.
I’m partial to a podcast called High Hanging Fruits, which is hosted by two Chinese graduate students in the US. I’m often surprised at how well I can understand this podcast, and I have a theory as to why this is.
When you’re learning a language as foreign as Chinese, you need to learn about a new culture and a bunch of unfamiliar situations, too. That adds a whole new level of complexity.
The miraculous thing about High Hanging Fruits is that it talks about cultural contexts I’m deeply familiar with — America and American academia. If they’re discussing a shopping trip, it’s not a shopping trip to a Chinese wet market to buy century eggs and Pu’er tea. Instead, they’re at, say, Costco, buying stuff I’m very familiar with already.
There’s an important principal here: Chinese-language content set in America (or whatever your home country is) is pure gold.
I also listen to ChinesePod, although I can’t whole heartedly endorse it. I feel like there’s too much English and the topics can get a bit iffy. Still, not bad.
So much for passive listening.
The most important tool in my audio arsenal involves a bit more activity. It’s called Glossika. I used to subscribe to the Glossika website, and this definitely has it’s advantages.
For now, though, I just listen to old Glossika mp3s on repeat.
Essentially, you hear a sentence in English, and then you hear it twice in Chinese.
Voice 1: I locked the door. I clearly remember locking it.
Voice 2: Wǒ suǒ shàngle mén. Wǒ qīngchǔ de jìdé suǒle tā. (x 2)
All in all, there are 3000 sentences like this across the Glossika mp3s, and I try to listen to them frequently and repeat them, mimicking the pronunciation as best I can.
Usually, I leave one of my earbuds out so I can hear myself doing it. I also sometimes using a Bluetooth speaker and listening to the sentence in the shower. Pro-tip: I find that the acoustics of bathrooms are especially good for practicing tones.
Conclusion
Well, that ended up being a lot more than I expected, and I think I even have more to talk about. If you liked this post — or hated it — feel free to reach out. I’m always down to chat about Mandarin, general language learning, or a host of other topics.
