Experiences Learning Mandarin: 7 Confessions of a Lazy Student

Written by Mr. Languagespud in Uncategorized

I lived in China for two years before I could say anything other than hello (你好 – nǐ hǎo) and thank you (谢谢 – xiè xie).

To some, that might seem like a wasted opportunity, but I can promise you that this is a common occurrence among foreigners in China.

I was your typical, run of the mill English teaching grunt who came to China to pay off student loans, get drunk, travel, and get rejected by women.

My job was literally to just talk in my native tongue. All of my friends were foreigners. If I needed help with the internet or deliveries, I’d ask a colleague. When I went to a restaurant, I’d use Google Translate and point at items and pictures on the menu.

I didn’t need to learn Chinese, so I didn’t bother.

But then, something changed…

The Turning Point

It was the end of my second year in China, and I finally realised it was time to draw out some future plans.

I was in my apartment brainstorming ideas on how to ‘level up’ in my life and decided I needed some pringles to provide me with much needed mental energy.

I walked into my local store, smiled at the lady, put the pringles on the counter, got out my phone, and paid.

She knew I didn’t speak Mandarin. As usual, she began to talk to me anyway.

On this particular day, something was a little different. As I stood there shaking my head and pointing at my ears with an awkward grin, telling her I “听不懂“ (don’t understand), her brow furrowed with disappointment.

This lovely woman looked upon me with sad eyes and then said in English

Why don’t you learn Chinese!?

This woman was right.

Why didn’t I learn Chinese!?

Confession no. 1

I began learning Chinese out of social embarrassment.

It might not be a good enough reason to take you all the way to fluency in a new language, but it’s a start.

If you want to learn Chinese, you need a reason why.

Your reason for learning Chinese might change over time, and that’s normal. Mine definitely has. But if you don’t have a reason to get started, you are likely to give up quite quickly. Your reason can be obscure or generic, but it’s got to be enough to get you moving.

Although social embarrassment might be one of the obscure reasons to get started, the following are the most common reasons people feel impelled to learn Chinese:

  • An unexplainable burning desire and need to learn.
  • A love of languages
  • To meet Chinese girls/guys
  • To learn to communicate with a Chinese partner and their family in Chinese
  • More work opportunities
  • To make life much easier whilst living in China
  • To impress friends in restaurants
  • To learn naughty words
  • Boredom

If you want to learn Chinese, your first step shouldn’t be spending copious amounts of money on a whopping online course or a long stretch at university.

It should be looking within yourself and finding your ‘why?’

Once you’ve found it, put it in your pocket for future reference.

Now you’re ready to begin.

Confession no. 2

I’m a lazy man.

This is both a blessing and a curse.

I have wasted countless hours in an attempt to find the holy grail of Mandarin learning resources.

I have tested over a combined one hundred apps, online courses, and textbooks. I have had private tutors and taken part in language exchanges. I’ve been to five different language centers and two universities in China.

I’ve even had a session of hypnotherapy over Skype.

Although much of this research helped me find the best learning resources and was a reason I started this blog, it taught me a few very important lessons:

  • Some people enjoy the idea of doing something more than they enjoy doing the actual thing they’re thinking about.
  • Some people do enjoy learning Mandarin Chinese, they’re just master procrastinators (me).

Confession No.3

I failed to manage my expectations.

Not only am I lazy, but I’m also arrogant. Since history began, many a budding new Mandarin student has said the following:

“I’m going to be fluent within a year!”

I was one of these people.

Chinese teachers and advanced learners rolled their eyes at me, and then I went home and said, “I’ll show them!”

I didn’t show them.

Now I’m the one who does the eye-rolling…

Confessions No. 4

I didn’t give myself a chance to enjoy the process

The majority of people who start learning Mandarin give up within a fairly short space of time.

The first reason is usually that their ‘Why?’ wasn’t strong enough.

After a few study sessions, they might think, “I don’t really need to learn Chinese for business, do I? Loads of Chinese people speak English now. I could always pay a translator if I can’t communicate with a client, right?”

Another common one is “I’m living in Shanghai and I’m only going to be here for a year or two. I can easily get by without learning the language and I’m never going to use it again, so what’s the point?”

These people make good arguments for why they’ll never learn Chinese, and that’s fine. There’s no point in learning a language if you don’t have to or you really don’t feel like it.

However, my responses to these common statements are as follows:

Take the pressure off yourself and see if you actually enjoy it.

Stop thinking long-term for a second – Give yourself a chance to enjoy the process of learning. If you pick up a textbook and after a week you aren’t able to discuss astrophysics, don’t worry. Nobody can. It’s normal.

You don’t have to become fluent – For most people, it’s just not necessary. There are still plenty of reasons to learn.

Confession No.5

My improvements came after I committed… surprise, surprise.

OK, so here it is:

Learning Mandarin Chinese is hard.

There. I said it.

You don’t have to be a genius to learn. Hell, you don’t even have to be smart to learn. But you need to accept that to become proficient in Mandarin, it’ll take thousands of hours of study to get there.

Learning Mandarin is a long-term commitment of daily attention. If you’re at the beginning of your Mandarin learning journey, ask yourself the following questions:

  • Am I committed to spending a unit of time each day on learning?
  • Am I comfortable knowing it will take at least 2-3 years before I can comfortably converse about a range of topics?

Confession No. 6

I hate writing characters

I’m not the only one, either. Many foreign learners of Mandarin Chinese see writing characters as a huge waste of time for the following reasons:

  • It takes up so much time.
  • Seriously, learning to write will take up the most compared to any other aspect of learning Mandarin, whilst bringing the least reward.
  • This time could be slent learning characters, listening, reading, and speaking.

I didn’t practice writing characters ONCE until I went to study Chinese at a university in China. Like a lot of foreign learners, I adopted the mindset that learning to write characters was a waste of time.

“If I know the pinyin and what the character looks like, I can read and write Chinese on my phone and computer. What’s the point of learning to write by hand?”

But there are one or two benefits of learning to write characters by hand which I never considered:

  • Being able to write radicals and components will give you the building blocks to learn to write all characters going forward.
  • If you can write a character by hand, you are much less likely to forget it or confuse it with similar-looking characters.
  • You don’t need to learn how to write every character you can say (especially if you’re an advanced learner) to gain the benefits of writing.
  • It looks pretty cool and it can be therepeutic.

Learning to write characters has its pros and cons, and only you can decide whether it’s worth your time.

Confession No. 6

Learning Chinese at a University in China isn’t the best use of your time.

Don’t get me wrong, it was a very interesting experience and I definitely learned a lot of the language on the course, BUT…

Teaching methods in China are pretty old school.

Expect a heavy emphasis on writing, loads of dictation, and lots of listening to cassette recordings from the eighties. Even in my speaking classes, I did minimal speaking. This was partly down to the teacher, and partly down to the large class (25+ students).

You can still get a lot out of your time at a Chinese University. The opportunity to immerse yourself in a Chinese-speaking environment is right here for the taking. Just remember that although University language courses aren’t amazing, studying at a university here is what you make out of it.

Confession No.7

The answer to every challenge you’ll ever have with Mandarin Chinese is to SPEND MORE TIME WITH THE LANGUAGE!

I can’t tell you how many little hissy fits I’ve thrown over the years when struggling to understand something in Mandarin Chinese.

“It’s simply too hard!”

“It’s a badly designed language!”

“It’s his/her accent that’s the problem!”

None of these statements are true, of course.

The only thing that’s true is that I didn’t understand something because I didn’t don’t know enough of the language yet.

MY CURRENT STUDY ROUTINE

To finish off, I thought I’d let you know how I learn Mandarin Chinese.

The way I study mandarin Chinese has changed over time for two main reasons:

  • My language level has progressed.
  • I have become more knowledgeable in how to learn a language.

Some of the resources listed here will include affiliate links, and some of them won’t. Either way, I use all of the following resources almost daily.

HSK Textbook

Not the most riveting piece of literature, but it serves one main purpose:

It provides structure to my studies and helps me progressively add new language to my database (brain).

However, I don’t use the textbook conventional…

  • Audio – I take the audio from the textbook and download it onto my phone. I then import the audio into an app called AudioStretch. With AudioStretch, I can listen to the audio normally, slow it down to practice shadowing, or I can crop complicated sections of the audio to repeat it over and over again until it clicks in my head.
  • Reading – I write out the text from each chapter (or scan using the OCR text reader) and save it as a reader file in the Pleco app. Then, I can read it on my phone whenever I like, (often at the same time as listening to the audio), as well as highlight complicated words.

I will listen and read a chapter from my textbook a few times each day. I will often listen and repeat for days on end, sometimes listening and reading to the same chapter between 50-100 times. Yes, that’s right. Reptition really is key.

Extensive Reading

We acquire language with our eyes and our ears, and reading is where I feel the most benefit when learning Mandarin Chinese.

The perpetual bombardment and repetition of language in front of my eyes force me to learn.

Textbooks give you some material to read, but it’s not enough. As a beginner/intermediate learner, reading native-level material is still out of reach.

That’s where graded readers come in.

Read them. Read them all. Read them repeatedly. Find a list of recommended graded readers here.

I read whenever I have the opportunity to give myself some extended time alone. Sometimes that’s a few hours a day, but when I’m busy, it’s for about half an hour before bed. The more time spent reading the better.

Learning characters

I’ve spoken in other posts about how I rely less these days on flashcard apps. There’s definitely a place for them when learning characters, but I’m at the point now where I prefer to learn organically through exposure via extensive reading.

However, I still advocate SRS flashcard apps as part of an overall study plan, NOT as a stand alone strategy to learn Mandarin.

The Pleco app and Anki are popular cheap options for flashcard apps, but if you have the money, I recommend using Hack Chinese. It’s not an app (yet) but the study options on it are superior to anything I’ve seen.

You can get the Anki app for free on Android, but you have to pay a one-off fee of $24.99 if you’ve got an iPhone.

Memrise and Quizlet are good free options.

Listening

As previously mentioned before, Chinesepod is my favourite listening resource out there. It costs money, but long-term subscriptions bring the cost down and it is totally worth it.

I’ll try to listen to a full upper intermediate/advanced podcast each day and read the transcripts provided.

I incorporate a lot of shadowing when listening to Chinesepod.

I’ll listen to the same podcast usually over a week-long period, sometimes two if it’s quite difficult and includes a lot of new language.

YouTube

Whenever I can, I’ll use watch videos just for a bit of novelty and fun. I’m well aware that youTube is blocked in China, but with a good VPN, it’s easy to use. There are loads of Chinese TV shows on YouTube these days.

The best things about using YouTube as a learning resource are:

  1. YouTube is free.
  2. A lot of the content has Chinese subtitles.
  3. The content on YouTube is there because it caters to foreign tastes.

Further Reading

Recent Posts