How I learned Mandarin in 6 months self-taught at home

Mandarin Chinese is one of the hardest languages in the world for a native English speaker to learn. It's ranked as an FSI Category 5 language, which is the hardest category. In this video, I'm going to share with you how I taught myself Mandarin Chinese in six months. This method is how I've gone from being practically a beginner to passing my HSK4 Chinese proficiency exam with 99% and also being able to have basic conversations with my native Chinese friends. This method is fully self-taught, so you don't need a teacher and you don't need to join a class. It's really low budget, and finally, this method can be done from pretty much anywhere in the world, from the comfort of your own home, and there's no need to buy tickets to China just yet. If you're new here, my name's Izzy. I'm a medical student at Cambridge University, currently on a gap year learning Mandarin and also working with a health tech startup. On this channel, we talk about designing lifestyle systems to stay happy, healthy, and efficient while studying. Let's get into the video. To start, I'd just like to say two things. Firstly, my Chinese is far from perfect. I still have a lot to learn, and secondly, I'm not an expert. I don't teach languages, I am just me, and today I'm just sharing with you what worked very well for me personally in the hopes that it might help you as well. So firstly, I'm going to talk about my process for planning, and secondly, I'll move on to the key resources that really helped to improve my Mandarin. Also, I just wanted to say that during these six months of me learning Chinese, I was learning very intensely. I would be studying Chinese for between four to six hours per day, and you can obviously take it at your own pace. There's no rush, it's not a competition. So firstly, we need to remember that learning Mandarin is a marathon, not a sprint. This means that we need to plan, prioritise, and also stick to our motivations for learning the language. At the outset, ask yourself what your motivations are to learn. I wrote down my motivations in my bullet journal as always, which is my favourite productivity tool, and whenever I felt like I was losing motivation, I would take a look at my reasons to learn Mandarin page in my bullet journal, and this would help me to get back on track. At the outset, you also want to define your language learning goals. So for me personally, this was conversational competence, digital literacy, and also passing my HSK4 exam, just as a personal milestone for me. By defining your aims at the outset, this means that you can more efficiently prioritise your time and target the exact areas that you need to improve to reach your goals. For me, that meant working mostly on speaking, listening, and reading, and also writing, but only by typing on a keyboard, whether that was on my laptop or on my phone, because actually I realised that for myself, I wasn't interested in learning to actually handwrite Mandarin Chinese, as this would probably double the time it would take me to learn vocabulary, and not really add very much to my communicative competence. With all of this information, I of course made a big old Excel spreadsheet to plan and track my progress with my Mandarin. When you're making your master plan, remember that a little bit every day is much better than a big huge session once per week, as this gives your brain time to integrate what you've learned each day while you're sleeping at night. So now moving on to the main resources that really supported and bolstered my learning. The backbone to my learning which really gave me a lot of structure was the HSK curriculum. HSK stands for 汉语水平考试, which basically means Chinese level exam, so Chinese proficiency exam essentially, and this is the official standard that they use in China. I got copies of the HSK standard course textbooks and workbooks, and I worked through these systematically starting from HSK1 to HSK4. The HSK standard course has all of the vocab, the grammar points, a few dialogues and exercises for you to work on, and I found that it gave me a really nice structured way to go about my Chinese learning. They also come with listening CDs, or if you're like me and you don't have a CD player then you can find them on YouTube as well. For me personally when I was using these textbooks I would listen to each dialogue first, try to understand it just by listening, then I would read the text and try to understand all the characters and look up any that I didn't understand, and then finally I would look at the translation of the text. For HSK1 to 3 I just used the textbooks and workbooks alone, and I would just read through them myself, work through all the exercises, but then when I reached HSK4 I decided to invest a little bit more in my Chinese learning since I was spending so much time on it, and so I bought the Chinese Zero to Hero HSK4 video course, which is essentially a series of videos following the HSK standard course, which explains each grammar point and each dialogue point in a little bit more detail to help you understand it more. I personally think it's really good value and very much worth it, although I think that if you're on a tight budget this is completely optional and you don't need it to do well in your HSK or to learn Chinese, it's just a nice addition. My second favourite resource was AnkiDex, so I absolutely love Anki for learning pretty much anything, and if you're not familiar with Anki, Anki is spaced repetition software which makes use of active recall. Spaced repetition and active recall are both evidence-based ways to maximise the efficiency of memorising literally anything. Using Anki for this makes it really efficient because the software automatically calculates the next time you need to review or actively recall a fact or a word or vocabulary, and this means that you don't waste any extra time going over things that you actually already remember. I used two AnkiDex for my Chinese learning, one was simply all the characters that I wanted to learn for my HSK4 exam, which I set to learning 10 new characters per day, and the second one was full sentences that would come up on the flashcard along with audio of a native speaker reading it out, and also all the characters. Along with using the AnkiDex for learning characters, I also needed a Chinese dictionary in order to understand any new words I didn't know and put them in context with example sentences. There were two Chinese dictionary apps that I would recommend, the first one is Pleco, this one's amazing, and the second one is Hanping which integrates with the AnkiDex that I was using. The third key resource is finding language buddies or native speaker friends who you can practice speaking with. For me personally, I had a few native speaker friends who I could practice with. Two websites that I used to find my language exchange buddies were italki, where there's a community section, and a website called language.exchange. There are plenty of others out there as well, I'll leave a link in the description. For Mandarin, if your language buddies are in mainland China, it may be worth installing WeChat, so I use WeChat for most of my language exchanges, simply because pretty much everyone in China has WeChat, so it just made sense. Just do remember that little and often is better, so try to have short sessions more frequently if possible, and remember that your language buddy can also help you with your grammar or correcting any of your exercises as well. The fourth main category of resources I used were comprehensible inputs. These were to practice my listening primarily, and they include TV, movies, music, podcasts. The term comprehensible input refers to language that is intelligible to us, so we can understand the meaning, but we don't fully understand every single word or grammar structure that's used. This is such a great way to supercharge your language acquisition because you will naturally pick up these words and grammar points as you listen to these comprehensible inputs over and over again, much like how a baby would learn a language. TV shows that I would recommend for people who are beginning would be things like Peppa Pig or other children's shows, which have very clear pronunciation and excellent grammar, because it's actually designed to help kids learn. I would also highly recommend a Chrome extension called Language Learning with Netflix, which lets you watch shows with two sets of subtitles, one set in your target learning language and one set in your native language. So for me, I'd be watching cheesy Chinese dramas with both Chinese subtitles and an English translation at the same time, which meant that I could watch the shows and kind of mostly rely on the Chinese subtitles along with the Chinese speaking. And then if there wasn't something I was sure about, I can pause and read the English subtitles as well. I would also listen to Chinese podcasts or music at any opportunity that I got. I had loads of podcasts that I listened to, but two that I really loved were Chinese Pod and Chill Chat. So those are all my top tips on how to learn Mandarin Chinese by yourself, at home, on a budget. Overall, just remember to enjoy the process. Ultimately, language learning is about having fun and developing new skills that you can communicate with others. As Confucius himself said, it does not matter how slowly you go, as long as you do not stop. So keep at it! If you'd like to see more language learning content, please leave me a comment below, and if you enjoyed this video, I think you might enjoy this playlist over here with lots of tips on how to stay happy, healthy, and efficient while studying. I actually used a lot of these tips while I was learning Mandarin. Thank you so much for watching, take care of yourself, and remember that the journey is the destination. Good luck!