The 15 Minute Routine To Sound Native in Mandarin

I don't know about you, but in the process of learning Mandarin, I found pronunciation to be one of the hardest parts, but I've got some good news. It doesn't actually have to be this way. In this video, I'm going to be sharing with you the six step method that I've been using over the last six years to improve both my own pronunciation and the pronunciation of loads of Mandarin students that found this to be really helpful. So stick with me as this will completely skyrocket your speaking skills and also make you sound so much more natural in the language. Now let's check out this together. So as you can see, this is a short 15 minute routine that you can do on a daily basis. Now the first step we're going to be looking at is focusing on your selection of content. So the first thing for this specific method, I would be focusing on content that is one to three minutes for a reason that you'll notice like in the next step, it will make a bit more sense in a minute. Now this kind of content, I think in general, like podcasts and videos work quite well for this. Some things story related, they're all quite good, but the main focus is making sure that it's the right level for you. It's relatively interesting and also it's one to three minutes. Now another thing you can start to consider is also like, is the voice of the person, you know, that's producing this video, etc. Would you want to sound like that in Mandarin? Because the more you imitate that person, the more you will sound like them. Okay. So that's another quick thing to bear in mind for this specific method in general, like I've actually designed my speak Mandarin with me videos, and I've also got chunking Chinese. But anyway, speak Mandarin with me videos are designed specifically for this method and they're free on YouTube. So you should definitely check them out. Now there's a debate here as well about whether the content that you're using specifically for this 15 minute method should or shouldn't include pinyin. And I think for this particular goal, because we're looking at like improving pronunciation, then I think it's actually probably a good idea to have pinyin to kind of have a crutch to make sure that you're not mispronouncing the hanzi in this video that you're watching. Now, if we move quickly on to step two, we have line by line imitation. Now what on earth does that mean? Well, it's just a simple game of listen and repeats. You listen to one line, one sentence at a time, and you repeat it straight after. Now, it sounds really simple, but this is actually like one of the most effective methods that I found personally for improving pronunciation and also for improving your ability to speak as well. I found that and also helping with listening. I found these are kind of some weird good side effects, if that makes sense, of doing this. And I've had loads of great feedback from doing this kind of practice as well. So I think there's kind of four options as to how you can go about doing this listen and repeat. Now, these are in order of technical difficulty or the amount of effort you have to put in. So the Speak Mandarin With Me videos, they very much just do it for you. So we purposely have put in pauses to give you enough time to repeat each sentence once or twice. This is the same in Chunking Chinese. So this is very easy. It's all done for you. So it's all set up to almost help you with doing that. Now the second way you can do this is to use Language Reactor. Now Language Reactor is a really, really helpful bit of software. I highly recommend it. And as far as I'm aware, its auto-pause feature is actually available on its free plan. So this is a way of doing this for free. And what it does is on any content that you watch on YouTube that has CZ subtitles, if you turn this auto-pause function on, it will automatically pause after every line, making it really easy to do the whole listen and repeat thing, right? So this is another one to consider. Now the next one is Pause Manually. I wouldn't recommend doing this. I mean, it's definitely, definitely doable. But yeah, that's like your last resort option, I would say. And then the other one we can consider doing is Audacity. This is a bit more complicated, requires a bit more effort. But if you have a method of like downloading the audio file, you can then use Audacity or other audio editing software to split it so that you give yourself a gap. Now, the positive of this is that you can then export the audio file that you've edited and listen to it on the go. So that makes it really quite convenient as well. So you can definitely consider Audacity. So step number three is looking at our bottlenecks. So when you're doing this listening and repeating, I don't want you to just focus on, you know, the whole listening and repeating, which is obviously really important. You also want to be paying attention, where do you get stuck? Now, there's going to be times throughout when you're doing imitation of Mandarin, where you find yourself struggling to pronounce things or you think you can tell that you sound different to the native speaker in that situation. And that is what I like to call a bottleneck for pronunciation. Now, I've talked about listening bottlenecks in another video. Let's talk briefly about pronunciation bottlenecks here in step three and step four. So what you've got to do is you've got to work out why you've got stuck. Is it because it's an initial or final that you couldn't quite grasp? Is it because there's a tone pair that you're struggling with? And I want you to actually write down these examples as you're going through. Where are the specific areas where you don't sound quite right or where you're actually struggling to keep up or you can't quite get the word out? These are things you want to write down and then you're going to use them for the next step, which is step four, practicing the bottlenecks. So I want you to take these in isolation and actually look at them and break them down and focus on them. And this targeted practice is how you're going to get your pronunciation better in Mandarin. And the first one could be tones. So you could find there's a specific tone of a specific character that you're struggling with. And all you need to do there is you need to go and have a look at the tone pair that that's found in. And maybe it's the tone pair with a specific initial or final. And you need to go and practice that. You need to find some recordings or, you know, get some native speaker recordings if you've got friends around you or even use AI in order to try and help you, you know, listen and repeat to those, just that tone pair, not the whole sentence, just that specific tone pair that you're struggling with. And then there's initial and finals. And I think with initials and finals, obviously a lot of practice is needed. But if I were you, if you find yourself struggling, I would do some research. So I remember when I was first starting out with, like, taking Mandarin pronunciation a bit more seriously, one of the things I think I did that was a really good idea and definitely helped me set up a solid foundation was actually learn, like, how things are pronounced in terms, pronounced in terms of, like, what shape should your mouth be? Where should your tongue be relative to your teeth? What part of your mouth, you know, should be doing what? I know that sounds really weird, but it actually really helps because sometimes as non-native speakers, we can't hear why we're, how we're pronouncing something wrong and also why you're pronouncing it something wrong. But if someone tells you exactly where to put your tongue, you can feel what the right way of pronouncing something sounds like and, like, actually feels like. And eventually that will become natural once you practice that enough and enough. So go away and do the research on those initials and finals that you're struggling with. There's loads of great YouTube videos out there on this. And then practice them. And then finally, we have rhythm. Rhythm could be another one. And for that, well, that's not really got any kind of easy fixes. Well, none of these have got any easy fixes. But with rhythm, I think it's more of a paying attention to the whole intonation of the sentence. The intonation is quite important. And I think in general, I wouldn't worry about it too much because if you're doing the rest of the other steps in this system, I think rhythm will come with time. It's mainly the tones and the initials and finals of these really isolated bottlenecks that you want to practice in isolation. And once you have done that, I want you to actually go back and do the line by line imitation again. And hopefully you'll find that it's become easier because you're not getting stuck on those bottlenecks as much and you're starting to reinforce things more and more. Alternatively, if you're up for a challenge, you can actually do some shadowing. So instead of repeating line by line and having these pauses, you can repeat exactly almost at the same time as the native speaker. Now, this is certainly more challenging. This difficulty level is generally quite hard. So I wouldn't worry too much if you're struggling with that. If it's too hard to go back to the line by line imitation. I think for most people, in my experience of doing this quite a lot and working with lots of students on it, line by line imitation for most people is probably going to be better anyway. Now, the final step is to repeat. Like, I don't want you to just do this once and never again. It needs to be a daily 15 minute system that you implement, not just, you know, you watch this video, you do it once and then never do it again. So try and make this a daily habit. And if you do, you're going to find yourself getting great benefits from it. So as I said, if you want to try out this method, the easiest way of you doing that is watching this video next, which literally just guide you through it. It's one of my speak Mandarin with me videos, but it will guide you through the various steps and help you with doing that. So I'll see you inside.