If I Had to Learn Chinese Again From Scratch, Here's What I'd Do

When I first started learning Chinese, I thought 5 years would be enough. But I've been learning for more than 7 years, and I still feel that my Chinese isn't good enough. So if I look back at my journey of learning Chinese, if I start learning Chinese again, then I will probably change a lot of my learning methods. And you definitely do get to have a deeper understanding of the language and the culture, as opposed to just speedrunning it. But on the other hand, with hindsight now and looking back on things, there are a lot of things I would do differently to be able to achieve the same level of Chinese, but in a shorter amount of time. So if I had to study Chinese all over again from scratch, the first thing that I would be focusing on is my pronunciation. And I'm quite glad that when I did start learning Chinese, that I had a massive focus on pronunciation and pinyin, which is the romanized version of Chinese characters. The good thing is with pinyin is that there's a finite amount of syllables. So once you learn them all, that's it, you've got it. Unlike English, how there's so many different pronunciations for different letters. And if you have good pronunciation, very standard pronunciation, then a lot of people perceive you to have an even higher level of Chinese. So even if you don't know that many words, but your pronunciation is perfect, a lot of people will think that your Chinese is amazing. I remember when I was traveling in China a couple years ago, and I was on a train and someone was in my seat. And I just said, And yeah, she got out immediately and went to her correct seat. But after a while, we were sitting there, and she just approaches me out of the blue and wants to start chatting with me. Full-on conversation in Chinese. And I'm like, whoa, I'm not ready for this. But she said because my pronunciation was quite good, that she thought I was just fluent in Chinese. And, you know, that's not necessarily the case. So it does give you a good impression if your pronunciation is good. But on the other hand, you will have to deal with the consequences. To perfect your pronunciation, I really recommend to follow the guidance from an actual native speaker. And also, there's a lot of videos online on YouTube about how exactly to position your tongue in your mouth to create those sounds in Chinese. Now, the only other thing that I'm quite grateful for myself for doing is actually learning characters quite early on. And the reason for this is because the Chinese language has a lot of homophones, which means that there's a lot of syllables with the same pronunciation, but a different meaning. For example, the syllable fǔ. It can mean father, husband, clothing, and so many other different meanings that it's really important to distinguish these by learning the characters. What I wish I had done more, which really benefits you with learning characters, is to learn the radicals or the bits and pieces that make up characters. And most of these radicals are actually idiographic representations of the thing in real life. So it does make a lot of sense to learn these and then you'll have a better understanding of how characters are made up. Now, I can hear you asking, do I really have to learn the characters? You know, everyone nowadays, they just type on their phone, on the computer, and you don't really need to write by hand much nowadays. But to be honest, I think it's a really good skill to have and it really does improve your reading as well, because now you can actually identify characters a lot more easily and this way your reading will also improve. Now, related to the topic of reading, I used textbooks for so long. Pretty much all of my time learning Chinese, I was mainly focused on consuming materials from textbooks and this is how I would get my reading practice in. But it turns out a lot of textbook materials, they're quite outdated and a lot of the expressions aren't really how people communicate in real life. So if you have the opportunity to and the motivation, I would really encourage you to consume more native-like texts, even just graded readers, those materials that were designed for Chinese learners, even though they're not designed for actual Chinese native speakers to consume, but they still have a more practical component rather than just some outdated textbook. And once you progress further in your Chinese studies, then you can move on to, say for example, short stories made for kids, and then progressively on to novels made for adults. But I recognise now, after seven or so years, that this is something that I really lacked in my study routine and now I'm paying the consequences. You know, I've got a quite slow reading speed, there's still a lot of words that are new to me. And to be honest, if I did incorporate more reading of authentic materials, then I wouldn't be dealing with these problems now. So please read more and it will definitely benefit you in the long run. Now, another piece of advice, which you probably all heard before a lot, is to practice speaking more with native speakers. And I know this can be really hard for a lot of you guys who are quite shy and don't really want to just put yourselves out there and come up to some random person on the street and start chatting because that's kind of weird. So here's some of the things that I wish that I incorporated into my routine a lot earlier on that I'm really only starting to do now. So I've been using italki, which is an online platform where you can just find a native speaker who can tutor you in Chinese. And mainly I just use it for conversation practice. And it's quite cheap to find a native speaker online and book a lesson with them. And I will leave the link below in the description if you want to look into that more. Another app that I've been obsessed with using is HelloTalk. And I've only just recently downloaded this one, but I'm literally obsessed. Like you could just go into a random room with people there and just start chatting and you can have some really interesting conversations. And it's not only Chinese native speakers, but there's also so many speakers who are wanting to learn Chinese. So you can also connect with a lot of different people that way. And this is particularly beneficial if you have trouble finding native speakers. If you don't have a lot of friends that speak Chinese, a lot of these online websites and apps can really help with finding people to practice speaking Mandarin. Now, apart from practicing your speaking, you really won't know how to form sentences and how to actually sound like a native person without listening a bunch. And when I started learning Chinese, I feel like I was mainly focused on reading. I did a lot of reading of textbooks. But to be honest, you really need that audio input to be able to come up with expressions that actual native speakers use. And at least now I really try to incorporate a lot of listening practice into my everyday routine. You know, if I'm folding washing or washing dishes or riding on public transport, you know, I will try to put on a Chinese podcast and listen to that. And even if you're not taking in every single word, I think it's still important to get exposure to native content like that just to hear how they express themselves, the intonation that they use, you know, the rhythm of the language. So all of these things, it just naturally seeps into your brain and it does affect how you then form sentences and how you communicate. So currently I'm listening to 大叔中文 and 聊聊东西. But if you are more of a beginner, then I'd probably recommend something like ChinesePod or those kind of podcasts if you are a beginner. So if I had to study Mandarin all over again, that's what I would do. Perfect my pronunciation, learn characters early, including the radicals, read more native-like materials, practice speaking more on italki or halitalk, and also listening to your Chinese podcasts.