How to Learn Chinese Faster and Smarter　＃如何快速學漢語　　＃學中文

Picture this, you've just spent hours and hours learning hundreds of new Chinese words and now you're sitting down to chat in Chinese with a native speaker. In the space of about 30 seconds all of the new vocab you thought you had just burned into your memory seems to evaporate from your brain and you're left tongue-tied and struggling to say anything beyond even a basic If you've ever had a similar experience of struggling to memorize and then actually use new Chinese words and you're looking for a complete system to supercharge your vocab learning then this video was made for you. Today I'll go over the best system I found so far for effectively prioritizing, memorizing and then actually mobilizing new Chinese vocabulary that you've learned. This will be from a combination of my own personal experience self-studying Mandarin alongside my medical degree at Cambridge, tips from experts who've written books about language learning theory and also evidence-based research in the field of memory and effective learning techniques. I'll walk you through how to apply this practically and also focus especially on techniques beyond just the basics of spaced repetition. If you're new here my name's Izzy, I just graduated from Cambridge University and I'm about to start work as a doctor and on the study Mandarin in my free time. Without further ado let's get into the video. So this video will be broken up into three main parts, firstly prioritization, secondly memorization and thirdly mobilization. In each of these sections I'll break down a few different techniques that you can apply and talk about how it all fits into the structure and really for a complete vocab learning system you actually need all three parts to kind of work together, almost like legs of a tripod you kind of need all three to support the structure. So firstly prioritization, the first question we need to ask when we're learning a language is what to learn and in terms of what vocab to focus on it's all good and well learning random bits of vocab that you pick up here and there but some words are factually not used as frequently as others. So for example in English the word windmill is unlikely to be used as much as the word the which I've already used several times in the making of this video. This is the same across all languages Chinese included so what we really want to do is in order to be able to speak quickly and to actually be able to communicate with people we want to focus on that core center of words that are really frequently used in everyday life. So to be strategic and smart with choosing what vocab to learn we can use something called vocab frequency lists. So vocabulary frequency lists are just an incredible tool that's actually really highly recommended by lots of people in the field of language learning including in certain books like fluent forever which I would really highly recommend. Vocab frequency lists essentially list out the words in a language from the most frequently used to the least and so this means that by taking let's say the top thousand words that are most frequently used in the language actually you can basically speak the language at a basic level with just the core 1000 words. You can find these vocab frequency lists either online or also you can buy books which have vocab frequency lists. I'm going to include some links below to books on Amazon and also some free resources online that you can use for vocab frequency lists for Chinese. So to supplement the vocab frequency list you may want to note down any words that are really related to you. For example for me personally I really frequently use the words yisheng, yixue, jianqiao, yujia those sorts of words talking about myself when I'm introducing myself to somebody. I'll often use these words to tell them about myself and who I am and what my hobbies are. This prioritization structure where you use vocab frequency lists for the language in general combined with your personal vocab list of words that are really valuable for you to know personally leverages something known as the Pareto principle or the 80-20 rule which is essentially that this core vocab will really allow you to communicate quickly and other vocab that's not really related to you or is not so commonly used isn't really going to move the needle as much in terms of your communicative competence. So now that you've decided what to learn the next question is how to learn it. For memorization of pretty much anything I absolutely love a piece of software called Anki. You've probably heard me talk about this in my other videos because I just use it so much for languages. Anki is essentially spaced repetition software where you can create flash cards to really supercharge your learning with spaced repetition and also active recall of all of these new pieces of vocab. So for me my Mandarin learning Anki decks have a word on it and then when I turn over the flash card or Pareto answer then it provides a sentence where it's given in context along with more details about the exact characters and the radicals in them and also a picture as well. And what I'll do is I'll essentially just repeat after the card in order to practice my pronunciation. Shift v essentially brings up this little pop-up where you can record your voice and then it plays it back to you which I think is pretty neat. Other than just spaced repetition on Anki in Chinese a lot of words are formed by two characters which combine to form the meaning. One thing I would really recommend is when you learn a new word is break it down into each of the characters that are making up the word and try to understand their meaning because often it will link in in some way to the overall word and it also helps you to put the word in context and relate it to the rest of the language. So for example the word電話 means telephone 電 sort of means electric and 話 is like speech or speaking so it literally means electric speaking which is sort of like a telephone I guess and on the other hand another word 電腦 means computer which means electric 電 means electric again it's the same 電 and 腦 means brain like 腦子的腦 and so electric brain put together means computer and both of them both 電話電腦 both have 電 meaning electric in it and so when you break it down and you break down each of these words into their smaller parts then you can get a more intimate understanding of the language in context. An app called Pleco is really really good for this because you can just type in whatever word you are just learning or copy and paste it and then you can click on each of the characters in it and it will give a little bit more information about it so for example here 電 means electricity telephone lightning etc 話 is word or talk and then you can even just go into 電's page on its own and then click on words and you can see all these other words that use the character 電 in them so 電話電影電腦電視電子電力電台 so many words and this just gives you this almost mental map in context which I find personally really helps me to stick and remember vocabulary so much more effectively. Another tool that I find so helpful for putting these new words in context and helping to memorize them in this big network of memories and connected language components that you're building in your brain is comprehensible input. In terms of vocabulary this comprises two main sections firstly reading so getting some kind of graded reader is a really good way to gradually increase your vocabulary and often graded readers they are based loosely off of vocab frequency lists and they will focus more on frequent words and so you can either get a graded reader book I'll leave some links below or there are also apps such as the chairman's bow or do chinese which are also really good and secondly is listening so this includes things like podcasts tv shows youtube videos movies radio all of these sorts of inputs try to identify the words that you've learned whenever they crop up in any of the listening material that you have so for example in a podcast if they use a word that you've learned in context then maybe pause the podcast and then repeat that sentence out loud again try to imitate their accent as closely as possible to try to sound more native. I've recently started watching a chinese show on netflix called the rational life and I've also been using a chrome extension called language reactor which essentially has dual subtitles along with a bunch of other functions where you can for example hover over one of the chinese subtitles and it will pop up with a dictionary definition of the word so if there are some words that you don't know then you can sort of get familiar with them in this way. I've always been a big fan of the chinese pod podcast and I'll leave links to all my favorite resources for comprehensible input down below. On the topic of figuring out how to learn mandarin faster this video is very kindly sponsored by the canto to mando blueprint which is a course designed specifically for people with a cantonese speaking background to rapidly learn mandarin by leveraging their existing cantonese knowledge. I'd also just like to say that I only take on sponsorships that I genuinely believe in and that I think will be of interest to you guys. The course is taught by canto mando who are a group of youtubers along with a team of professional tutors. I was invited to take the course which essentially teaches a novel method of relating and converting between cantonese and mandarin. As the languages are so similar this is a more efficient way of learning mandarin than learning it directly from english because there's less of a jump linguistically. It doesn't really matter what level your cantonese is you don't need to know how to read or write beforehand as long as you can speak a little bit of cantonese then the course would be suitable for you. You can use the entire program at your own pace which I really like for a flexible part-time study schedule like my own and you also get lifetime access. For example with this sentence here Sheldon goes over the cantonese sentence and its mandarin translation along with a english translation at the very bottom. One thing that really amazed me was actually how similar cantonese and mandarin are and you can really see that here when they're lined up next to each other in terms of the grammar and the sentence structure. I really like how they show you very clearly the slight differences between mandarin and cantonese word choice such as here不知道 is 不知道 in cantonese so 不知道 would convert to 不知道 in mandarin. If you're interested in the program then check out the link below for more details. So now you know what to learn and how to put it deep in your long-term memory by combining spaced repetition, active recall and also comprehensible inputs we need to talk about how to actually use these new words. This is where the actual magic happens. Knowing a language is not about how many vocab list items you can memorize and reel off it's more about whether you can actually communicate with people and use those words in a sentence in a natural way that can communicate your meaning. Sometimes in the land of language learning especially from school days too much focus can be placed solely on the rote memorization part and not enough on the actual mobilization. So for this final step of bringing it all together don't ask yourself if you've memorized the new words ask yourself if you can use them. Here are a few practical ways you can put this into practice and learn to speak with your newly learned vocab. For the next few days after learning a word try to use this vocab in your daily life. When you look around at your daily surroundings try to think of sentences or words that describe your surroundings using your vocab. You can either say this out loud or even just think it in your mind silently and form sentences in your mind. Try as much as you can to think in Chinese using these new words even if you don't know all the words in a sentence that you want to say. The first step is for any new piece of vocabulary that you learn come up with five sentences including this new word and say it out loud or write it down. Try to come up with sentences that are structurally different from each other so that your brain can learn to synthesize and create sentences in all sorts of ways with this new word. Again I really like Pleco for this because on the page where you can see the definitions for a word you can also see a few example sentences. So for example for the word that we used earlier we can see that there are a few sentences on the page that just show you how it's used in context. So for example and so then you can look to Pleco if you're looking for a bit of inspiration. The second tip for this is for the next few days after learning a new piece vocab try to use it in your daily life in some way. Try to describe your surroundings or describe a situation using that new word. As much as you can try to think in Chinese and even if you don't know every single word for a sentence you want to say in Chinese you can substitute words in. For example if let's say I wanted to say I want to eat noodles but I didn't know how to say most of the words in that sentence but I just learned the word for noodles, mian tiao, then I could say I want to eat mian tiao and this is training my brain to understand mian tiao as meaning noodles and being able to pop it in sentences. The third tip is practicing with a language buddy either in conversation where you discuss topics around a piece of vocab that you've used and you try to bring this piece of vocab into the conversation or alternatively one thing that I really liked doing with my Chinese language buddy was each day I would type to her, type a message to her about what I was up to in the day and maybe include some sentences that included the new vocab that I'd learned. I'd send this to her and then she would correct my paragraph and then read it out loud and send me an audio note and I would listen to this audio note over and over again repeating it and trying to imitate her accent and get as close to her accent as possible. This was really effective for a few reasons because I was using vocab that I'd recently learned that I had put in context of my life and was relevant to what I was doing and was in the context of a sentence and then it had been corrected by a native speaker with audio of them reading it out loud so that I could be sure it was correct and really get familiar with being able to mobilize and use all these new bits of vocab. Don't forget to check out the canto to mando blueprint down below I'll leave a link in the description. If you enjoyed this video I think you might like this one over here where I talk more about learning Mandarin and my exact structure for it. Thank you so much for watching as always take care of yourself and I will see you in the next video. Bye!