Transcript for:
Learning Chinese: Tips, Techniques, and Hacks

[Music] but it doesn't have to be that hard in fact today I'm going to share with you 10 major tips techniques and hacks that will make learning Chinese not only a lot easier and a lot faster but also a lot more fun the very first tip is probably the most important and that is have a plan Chinese is very different from English and therefore it inevitably takes longer to get good at but the reason why I think it takes so long and it's so notoriously difficult for so many people it's not because Chinese itself is super hard it's more because people just don't know how to acquire a language and they specifically don't have a plan for Chinese because Chinese is a whole different ball game from say Spanish or Italian right it's got a whole different writing system to master and while there is amazing information out there on how to learn Chinese really efficiently and effectively I think most people give up before they figure it out or they get too deep into traditional methods that aren't that effective and then you don't want to switch to more effective methods so here's the plan that I would suggest for anyone looking to learn Chinese to a high level first just realize that your core focus is input Chinese that you understand into your eyes and your ears that's the main thing you want to be focusing on whether you're a beginner intermediate or Advanced that's where you spend most of your time and the reason is that's how all languages are acquired by listening and reading to stuff you understand so really there's only three things you need to focus on number one get comprehensible input number two increase your ability to comprehend input by learning pronunciation and characters that's really important we'll get to that soon and third practice speaking a lot now the reason why speaking or output could be writing too is step three is because it's not as important as the first two right now the reason why input is more important is because how can you say something produce something that you haven't heard many many times you can't do that in your native language and you certainly can't do it in Chinese so right now unless you consider yourself a more advanced learner like myself I would suggest you focus fully on input right now so if you don't know 3 000 characters for example you need to put aside a big chunk of your time that you spend studying each day on getting to 3 000 because that is sort of the minimum amount you need to be able to understand and comprehend Chinese to a high level so if you want to speak you want to get out there and connect with Chinese people I recommend you do that but you don't have to right now if you're a low level you can as Steve Kaufman says enjoy your silent period spend three to six months with the language just focusing on getting to those three thousand characters and getting lots of listening and reading practice preferably at the same time but we'll get to that later too so your basic plan if you're a beginner is to focus on pronunciation make sure you've got all the sounds roughly down you've grasp the basics of Pinyin and all the sounds of the language and then start learning characters and start building your vocabulary of your most common 1000 to 1500 words and that will give you the ability to understand a lot of simple sentences in Chinese and that's when your progress will really start to take off because then you'll be able to start doing immersion it will be very simple immersion you'll start with graded readers you'll start with graded podcasts and just focusing on individual sentences so once you've already got that 1000 1500 words and you've already got a few characters under your belt you have the ability to understand simple sentences you're at about eighty percent of The Language by frequency you're now ready to start really hitting immersion hard now once you're at that 3000k character Point things really start to get interesting because you can start accessing all sorts of advanced native TV shows and movies in Chinese with subtitles and making flashcards out of them and things like that I'll tell you more about how to do all that later on the video now once you're at the level where you can understand say a Chinese TV show you can just turn it on you can understand it quite well with subtitles you'll be able to focus a lot more on speaking you'll be able to start honing that part of your skill set so I'm personally at this stage right now where I can pretty much turn on a TV show or a movie and understand everything occasionally I'll need to look at the subtitles here and there but my level of comprehension is there so I can actually really start focusing on all kinds of speaking activities to up my speaking and output level so that is the general plan that you want to follow if you're learning Chinese and you might be wondering at this point hey what about textbooks tutors classrooms all that stuff well that leads me on to the second tip for you now this next tip I'm not really looking forward to telling you because it's pretty controversial but going to come out and say it tutors textbooks and classrooms are mostly a waste of your time just hear me out because I know a lot of people love your textbooks I used to love them too the thing about textbooks and the traditional classroom environment and if you go to a average tutor online or in person what tends to happen is you start to learn Linguistics now there are exceptions to this rule as there is with pretty much everything and I'll share those exceptions with you in just a sec but generally just think about this a textbook a classroom a tutor what they usually do is explain how the language works sometimes in Chinese sometimes in English depending on the level of the class but still you're just having stuff explained to you but that's not how you learn your native language and that's not how you learn any other language you learn a language by comprehensible input and especially input that you find engaging and compelling now when you're a lower level you don't have much choice because you have such a small vocabulary and a number of characters that you have under your belt to work with that you can't really access super entertaining stuff but still you know doing exercises like fill in the blanks or drilling after the teacher you're just repeating monotonously after what the teacher says don't get me started on sitting exams this is not how language is acquired so if you want to be able to describe perfectly how a grammar structure works then fine you know go ahead and go to a traditional classroom environment but it's not going to mean that you will be able to produce that fluently when you need to now for the exceptions right so textbooks there are some great textbooks out there but the reason why they're great is because they have nice articles for you to consume or they come with audio that you can also listen to at the same time but why is that great well it's because it's giving you comprehensible input all the other stuff can be pretty much thrown away in my opinion now there are times as well where grammar being explained to you is a good thing it helps you click with your input that you are trying to comprehend faster so you can actually comprehend it faster which therefore speeds up your acquisition now as for tutors well the reason why I'm kind of saying they're mostly a waste of time is because when when they're doing the classroom thing when they're going through a textbook with you or they're in a class with you and they're explaining something to you that sort of situation is not necessarily going to make you better at Chinese with any efficiency but having conversation and them correcting your speech and correcting your writing and pointing out things classes that are based on comprehensible input where no English is used and lots of visual aids are used these sorts of classes like for example tprs classes can be extremely effective but the problem is most classes aren't like that these are relatively rare and difficult to find and that level of training for a tutor is also quite rare so what you get when you usually sign up for a tutor on italki is you know you get someone going through a textbook with you and they do that because that's easier for them I completely understand but it's not really going to get you where you want to go tutors and language exchange partners are absolutely vital I just want to make that clear but only when you are using it for purely output practice so you just I'm going to practice speaking even writing is great you know getting them to correct your writing making sure you have the proper output all great as long as it's purely output or entertaining comprehensible input if they're just explaining grammar to you instead of actually facilitating and entertaining meaningful connection and conversation pretty much a waste of time alright so the next tip we've got is to start with pronunciation incredibly important this was one of the very few things I actually did right on my journey with Chinese and it was purely by luck but I picked up a program called pimsla and I listened to that program for around 100 hours just listen repeat listen repeat now while the content was pretty boring and some of the phrases were a little bit bienyo as I say in Chinese a bit a bit a little bit awkward overly formal perhaps I made great progress in those 100 hours and simply because I mastered pinyin and I was able to pronounce any syllable and with the correct tone in Mandarin correctly because I'd spent so much time just imitating the language from the very beginning of my journey I then traveled in China for the first time for around two months and it was amazing because I could always read anything accurately from a phrase book and because my pronunciation was so good it helped me connect with the locals and just made an amazing impression on people well one of the benefits that I didn't actually realize at the time was that great pronunciation also allows you to identify the sounds easier and that's even more important remember because it's all about comprehensible input so having a solid grasp of pronunciation early on by getting a lot of listening practice and repeating a lot as well it gives you the ability to comprehend way easier it gives you a huge boost and that small boost at the beginning if you extrapolate that over your entire Journey with Chinese it's it's a huge difference so if you can get comprehensible input earlier because of great pronunciation you're going to be way ahead of everyone else because you can get to a high level of native Chinese input much sooner so yes if you're a beginner start with pronunciation but also remember that if you're a higher level you may have some room for improvement as well even some bad habits that you've solidified over the years I highly recommend that you do some sort of pronunciation refresher course as well check out the link in the description below to get access to our short course pronunciation Mastery which will teach you everything you need to know about Mandarin pronunciation how to read it how to identify the sounds how to produce a sounds like a native speaker in just six to eight hours my next big tip for you is to learn to read as soon as possible now I've already mentioned this of course in tip one but I just want to really reiterate it here because it's so so important reading is the most comprehensible form of input if you try and listen from day one even really simple stuff based on Words that you've already learned so if you listen to a sentence in Chinese and you've learned all these words and you're familiar with the characters and the words individually even how they sound your brain most likely still won't be able to comprehend fully at Native speed and that's just because our brain needs time to get used to all the sounds and this can take hundreds of hours if you want to get to a high level but reading is a different story as long as you are familiar with the words and characters involved in a sentence it might take you a while in fact it will take you a while at first when you're first starting to read entire sentences but you can decipher the meaning of a sentence every now and then the grammar will be a little bit off and that's where like I said earlier grammar explanations do come in handy here and there but generally if you get those characters down you can read where members of our course the Mandarin blueprint method get to level 13 which is just 104 characters they can actually understand a ton of different sentences already because we feed them sentences we know they can understand based on the words and characters they've already unlocked it's really cool to see their reactions on this and you get to experience that too if you start reading it's hugely motivating and it's also incredibly effective for building vocabulary quickly I do recommend that you always listen and read at the same time because listening like I said just takes time you have to get that immersion in so really you need to get that in at any point otherwise you'll end up with 3 000 characters completely literate able to read novels in Chinese but your listening will suck and it will be really demotivating for you so please make sure you are building your characters daily if you aren't at 3000 and you are doing some reading as well every single day because people avoid reading like the plague they avoid characters big time and the reason for that is that characters are really tough to learn luckily for you I made a video all about how to learn characters using memory palaces it's pretty much the most effective method I've ever seen we call it the hanza movie method and it's the same method we teach to our course members so go ahead and check out this video right here if you want to learn how to do that now I keep mentioning this number of 3000 characters you can actually do that in about 100 hours using the method that I just mentioned you don't have to get to 3000 before you can start reading that's just to get to a very high level so for example the most common 250 characters make up 65 of the entire language and the most common thousand characters make up 91 of everything you will read if you start learning characters with an effective method you will start being able to read at an amazingly high level very very quickly in a matter of weeks even so this is kind of our specialty at Mandarin blueprint we make courses that get you to a very high level of comprehension quickly and efficiently whilst using all these sorts of cool mnemonics and Memory Palace techniques and everything's powered by SRS flash cards so you never forget anything so if that sounds interesting to you go ahead and check out the description below there's a link in there to go and look at our courses so what we do is we teach you pronunciation first then we start teaching you characters those characters unlock common words and you'll see those words in sentences immediately with awesome male and female audio and then eventually after you get to a few hundred characters you'll be unlocking entire long form pieces of content like dialogues articles and entire stories in Chinese needs which you can understand perfectly and you can take it as far as you want all the way to essentially native level of literacy and comprehension now I mentioned just then about using mnemonics and memory palaces well that leads us nicely onto our next point which is never learn anything by rote Now by wrote some of you might be familiar with it's the idea of just reviewing something over and over again or writing something down so this is unfortunately the most common way that people learn Chinese characters by just writing them over and over again which is why people don't learn characters and they don't learn to read and therefore they their Chinese kind of sucks right but there's another side to rote learning that I want to warn you about here it's a rather Insidious sort of hidden disguised form of rote learning it's a trap that I fell into several times during my journey with Chinese and it really slowed me down I'll use my personal story as an example here way back in the day in my first year with Chinese I dropped the traditional methods and I decided to go the auto Didact route and I found a website AI called memrise.com and I thought I was hacking Chinese because I was learning all of these words using these digital flash cards this space repetition flashcards SRS is very important and awesome by the way and I'll talk about that more later on the video but the way I was using it was wrong so here's what I would do I would look at the word and I would try and burn the shape of the squiggles into my mind just through repeated reviewing and I would learn this character or this word by looking at a single English definition I never learned the individual characters of the word or the components of the characters and I never saw the words or characters in context of a sentence I just did that for 9 000 words and I built up 16 million points on this website now I'm not bashing memrise I'm just saying that this is not learning a language memorizing a word list is not learning language now I thought I was learning because if you showed me that character I'd be like ah that means this this in English instantly because the SRS algorithm is very very effective so all of these 9000 words were at the top of my memory I spent three hours a day on this thing just do do just going through all of these digital flash cards but then I found after about nine months of doing this I couldn't really use any of the words in conversation with my friends and that was very disappointing to say the least it was so sole crushing actually so how is this related to rote learning well that's exactly what it was it was rote learning even though I was using call digital flash cards and SRS algorithms and I was even making mnemonics occasionally to memorize some of the words but I had such a weak connection between my own personal life experience and my foundational knowledge of Chinese and the new information that I was trying to take in so if that's rote learning and that's ineffective what is the effective way of learning a new character or word well the short answer is you want to learn them holistically that's what I see is wrong with most textbooks teachers classrooms what they'll do is teach you a bunch of words without learning the characters individually so you don't really have a true grasp of the words because if you do learn characters you can see there's a beautiful logical relationship between them in the individual words but also you'll be given like an article or tons of example sentences where you have tons of gaps in your comprehension you don't know a lot of characters or you don't know a lot of words you don't have a deep relationship with a lot of the words so it's you find yourself like deciphering this wall of text really that's too top down and what happens is with top-down learning is because there's such a weak foundation so few connections to the new information that this new information just kind of Fades away pretty quickly so for example the people that you hear about who went to China for a year and got really good at Chinese and then after three months of coming back home they forgot pretty much everything well it's because they were most likely just top-down learning focused they were forcing stuff into their head when they weren't ready for it so top down learning is like building house with a very bad Foundation that could easily fall over bottom-up learning is also not great because if you just learn 3 000 characters and never see them in context of words or sentences or long form content then you're just going to have a brickyard and that's not something you can live in either so what holistic learning is is building a solid house you build a few bricks and then you put those bricks together in a smart way so for example you learn a few hundred characters then you learn a few thousand words based on those characters and then you see all those words in a context that you can understand easily so to truly avoid rote learning just make sure that you try and learn holistically wherever you can my next tip for you is to make sure that you do use spaced repetition software I've already kind of mentioned it and talked about it but it's if you're not using it it's you're just shooting yourself in the foot because it makes your journey so much more efficient I'm talking like 50 times more efficient so in case you aren't familiar with the concept space repetitions software are just flash cards that are powered by an algorithm this algorithm is based around the spacing effect which is an effect that describes how our memory works when learning new information when you learn something new you rapidly start forgetting it now how you learn it does have a factor in that so for example like I said before if you have lots of connections to it you're building upon what you already know and use mnemonics memory palaces and stuff like that you will remember much better your forgetting curve as you can see here will be much shallower but generally on average when you learn a new piece of information you rapidly start forgetting it no matter what so what this algorithm does is it predicts based on how the average person's memory works when you'll get to around 90 percent likelihood of understanding it and it shows you the card again and every time you review the card and get it right successfully it strengthens your memory of that word or character or whatever you're learning and your forgetting curve gets shallower and shallower and shallower making the distance between that 90 percent further and further away so you'll see cards that you get right less often and see cards that you get wrong more often it's really simple and beautiful and you really should be doing it especially because in Chinese you have to learn those characters and depending on what method you're using you will need to also make sure that you're learning that base vocabulary that I mentioned earlier like a thousand fifteen hundred words something like that now there are a couple of things to remember reviewing with SRS so first just make sure that you are reviewing and not learning like I did okay so don't try and use the flash cards to learn new information you learn the information first in the right way like I described in the last tip and then you use a flashcards to review and refresh those connections that you've already made to that information now the second thing to remember about flash cards is that you must finish your reviews every day you can lower the number of new cards you take every day or just stop taking new cards entirely but just make sure you finish those reviews because the algorithm is entirely dependent on you doing that each day and finally just make sure you ramp up the new card that you take on each day slowly and steadily otherwise you might find yourself getting overwhelmed by reviews pretty quickly my next tip for you is to Shadow a lot and you can actually start doing this as early as you like because shadowing can be on the level of individual sentences which is often referred to as chorusing where you just essentially listen to a sentence and repeat after it and just do that a lot a lot a lot a lot okay and as you get to a higher level your tolerance for the amount you can Shadow will increase gradually so you can take on whole paragraphs or even little mini podcast episodes or entire articles or stories you can just Shadow the whole thing so what you want to try and do is familiarize yourself with the content remember we're learning holistically still so you want to make sure that you understand what you're reading and look up any missing words before you really start diving into shadowing so get this piece of content and preferably find a piece of content that you actually enjoy that is about something useful or something interesting to you personally and again when you're a lower level maybe you don't have that luxury but you can usually find something that at least piques your interest then just listen to the content and repeat after it as much as you can we get really good at our native languages because we imitate you get lots of comprehensible input of course but to actually be able to produce the language smoothly you need to do a lot of practice and shadowing I find as someone that is very introverted I I love shadowing because I can just do it on my own I could do it while I'm out walking my dogs and I try to do personally shadowing at least 30 minutes a day if you're a lower level 30 minutes might be a bit strenuous because it is quite a strenuous activity but I want you to start practicing that even if you're a lower level just with individual sentences shadowing will improve your pronunciation it will make you more fluent and it will also give you a deeper understanding of the content and you'll notice that every single time you'll be able to Shadow a little bit better and also your depth of understanding of them material or the grammar structures words characters involved with the material you'll also get a deeper understanding of that too it's pretty cool my next piece of advice that I wish someone would have told me personally is to stay consistent if you've ever read Atomic Habits by James Clear he talks about a statistic there where if you can just improve by one percent every day you will be 37 times better than you are now in a year's time I'm not saying you have to get one percent better each day but you should be going to bed every night knowing that you're a little tiny bit better at Chinese than you were when you woke up that morning if that's just one character if that's just listening to One Minute of immersion time if you're really swamped just make sure you do something each day so this is kind of related to one of our key mantras at Mandarin blueprint which is never have a zero Day always do something towards your Chinese even if you get to the end of your day you've been totally swamped with activity that day and you get in bed and you know ah done my Chinese today you just open your phone and you review one flash card you read one sentence there you go you didn't have a zero day so make sure you stay consistent never have a zero day and that will compound over time into some pretty amazing results it's really easy to give up too early with Chinese because you have to do a lot more work in the beginning to see results so for example you have to learn those characters right that I've mentioned and you have to get lots of input but it might be a while it might be several months or a few hundred hours of work study immersion before you start being able to produce the language with some sort of level of fluency but do not take your foot off the gas this is the sort of image that I think of when I hear people giving up on Chinese when they're just a beginner or even intermediate level they've built all these routes into the ground and they're only seeing a tiny sapling coming out but what's going to happen eventually if you just keep going at it keep learning those characters keep immersing keep shadowing keep practicing continuing to have conversations in Chinese with a tutor or language exchange partner whilst doing all this other stuff you will notice breakthroughs in your ability come thick and fast if you are consistent and I know it's easier said than done right but this will help you a lot this is something else from Atomic habits which was probably for me the most poignant part of that book which was the advice to build your habit around your identity not your results so if your goal is I want to pass the hsk 4 or I want to learn X thousand characters or words or I want to be able to have a conversation in Chinese that's cool but you'll find it a lot more rewarding and much more motivating and easier to stick with your habits If instead of basing it around what you want to achieve base it around who you want to become so instead of saying I want to learn Chinese or I'm learning Chinese you say I am a Chinese Enthusiast I'm a Chinese fanatic at the very least I'm a Chinese learner or a Chinese acquirer you are becoming someone and every time you show up to do a flash card or learn a character or watch a Chinese TV show or have a conversation in Chinese with your language exchange partner every time you do that you are casting a vote for that new identity and eventually that identity will become you so at the point where I am for example over the last year I've really hit Chinese hard again and I've built new habits that have reinforced my identity as a Chinese Enthusiast the Chinese coach a Chinese fanatic and now if I go not just a day if a few hours without Chinese I start to feel off just like a athlete someone who exercises goes to the gym every single day if they miss a day at the gym they feel like just not themselves anymore there's something that doesn't feel right and that's because they're not living up to the identity they've given themselves they're not being themselves and it feels good to be yourself So eventually you will learn Chinese so consistently that you won't need any sort of habit tracker or any sort of extrinsic motivation to show up and do Chinese you'll be intrinsically motivated based on who you are how you see yourself and that's super powerful my next piece of advice for you whether you're a beginner intermediate or Advanced whatever your level is I recommend that you try to find your why so there are actually a couple of levels to this and your answer will change over time there are lots of reasons to learn Chinese it could just be you want to look in the mirror and you want to say I'm fluent in Chinese I'm awesome maybe you're a cultural connector you want to connect China and your own culture together in some way by making friends making family whatever you want to do maybe you want to just be able to connect to over a billion people through a Common Language maybe you just have to learn Chinese for work and you have no choice about it you want to do it in the most efficient way possible whatever your reason or reasons are for learning Chinese I want you to think about them often and also think about them on a slightly deeper level so for example another reason to learn Chinese is just to be different interesting more attractive make more money right you can have more business opportunities and there's nothing wrong with any of those reasons whatsoever but I also want you to think about this I personally think that we want to make money or be attractive or we want to be interesting or we want to advance our career or find business opportunities not just because of selfish reasons I really think most of us if not all of us have a desire to contribute to our family our community or even the world in some way right so I think it's a good idea just to take some time to think about how being awesome at Chinese would help you make a contribution to the world in some way and that connects nicely to the final piece of advice I want to give you today which is to enjoy the journey this is a lifetime skill you are building and you're going to be improving on it for life even Chinese Scholars aren't perfect at Chinese there's always something to learn so you're literally never going to stop improving at this ideally and sure there are amazing methods out there like some of the ones I've described to you today that will get you to where you want to be faster but as soon as you get there let's say it's some level of basic fluency you'll be like wow I'm fluent in Chinese okay now I want to get more fluent or I want to consume that piece of content your goals will always be changing and even if you become really awesome at Chinese one day that will become normality for you right so you'll just add another goal on maybe you want to learn another language or just take Chinese to a whole new level but the point is you'll never reach your destination because there isn't really a destination so you must enjoy the journey because it's all the journey it's possible for you to go from zero to actually fluent in Chinese in a year or two but you do not have to rush to get there and even after you get there you'll want to get somewhere else anyway I think the happiest most content members of our course the ones that enjoy their Journey with Chinese the most are the ones that accept that they're going to be doing this for many many years they trust their brains and that their brains will absorb the language if they just show up and immerse in understandable comprehensible Chinese every single day they push themselves when they're feeling more disciplined and determined then when they want to take it easy or life gets in the way work gets really busy they'll tone down their Chinese study maybe do some more passive listening instead of hitting the books really hard and that way they stay consistent they keep making progress but they also keep having fun find a way to enjoy the language find content that you like and as soon as you do you extract everything that you possibly can from that content listen to it over and over again absorb every grammar structure every character every word from that content join in a community find a study buddy find meetup groups have chats with native speakers wherever you can even if you're not in China there are Chinese communities everywhere find and connect with Chinese people make friends if that's what you enjoy doing support other Learners share this video and other things that you've learned about Chinese with them gamified Chinese whenever you can imagine that you have a little point system every time you listen to a sentence and you understand what they're saying you get one point every time you watch an entire TV show and understand it and make flash cards you get 50 points sometimes being a little bit bored or stressed out is unavoidable and maybe you do need to just take a break from everything for a little while but if you follow the advice in today's video I am pretty sure you won't get to that point very often if ever at all I really hope you found this advice useful please leave us a comment below and tell me what you think if you have any other advice for Learners or if you have any questions for me about learning Chinese I'd be more than happy to get back to you and if you would like a more detailed guide on how to build the right habits stay consistent and actually have fun on this journey to fluency in Chinese then go and check out this video all about building habits