Hi all,
Making this post for a few reasons.
- Get feedback on my methods
- Share what I believe is an extremely efficient method
- Procrastinate studying
- Share why I think going to Chinese school is a really bad idea.
First off, if you haven't read this guys post on learning chinese https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/43939-independent-chinese-study-review/ go do so now. My method is very similar.
My current Chinese level is as follows:
- I have friends. We only speak Chinese. Often I don't understand a word they use but they can almost always use Chinese to explain the word I don't know. Group settings are very difficult still.
- When I don't understand, it's usually because they are slurring their words or speaking really fast or using really colloquial phrases (or idioms). They need to speak maybe 75% of normal speed and make an attempt to not slur their words around me.
- I know over 2000 words both reading and speaking. About 1500 characters.
- I never need to speak a word of English in my daily life. If people speak English to me, I ask them to speak Chinese back. I will literally tell them I don't understand English. Obviously I don't lie to my friends, but random shopkeepers? Cashiers at the grocery store? No problem.
- People I meet assume I've been learning Chinese for 2-3 years because I use natural sounding sentences and my pronunciation is good.
- Am I fluent? Hell no. I have a long way to go there. But I think I'm better than Benny Lewis's 3 month Chinese video. My speaking is a lot more smooth and my pronunciation is infinitely better. Not sure about his listening ability.
- It hasn't even been 3 months yet but I rounded up.
- I can read my friends texts whether in group chats (so between native speakers) or directly to me. But if I read formal documents such as signage or newspapers, I am completely lost. My formal reading and formal writing ability is nonexistent, because I have never practiced it. I don't think it's important to start with this kind of reading.
The most important tip and key factor to my chinese success is bolded below.
So here's what I've done. I moved to Taiwan, not even for the purpose of studying Chinese, but for the living abroad experience. I have no other commitments right now, no work, no studying. Quickly found myself needing to learn Chinese to really understand the local culture and the people.
The first thing I did was concurrently learning proper pronunciation and also memorized about 300 words, while listening to Michel Thomas Chinese. I spent about 30 hours working on pronunciation. I used a wide variety of resources, including the yoyochinese pinyin pronunciation chart, the ChinesePod pronunciation series, and just general googling online on how and where to place your tongue and lips. I also worked with a tutor and invented very useful game to practice my pronunciation. I would say words or sounds and make them write down the pinyin of the word I said. I would often choose very similar sounding words to ensure my pronunciation was correct. Sometimes I wouldn't even say the whole word, just a part of it. My tutor said "But this is impossible, it's hard for us to guess what word you are saying" and to that I replied "Well yes, I know, that's the point. That's because my pronunciation is bad. In English we can easily distinguish the words pig and big despite them being very similar". I then noted what sounds I struggled with and went home to practice them and returned to try again. My tutors complained about this game and literally told me it was dumb. I refused to believe them. By the end they could guess every single time the pinyin I was saying. I even switched tutors to make sure they weren't just learning how I pronounce words.
Michel Thomas gave me the basics of Chinese sentence structure but to be honest the pronunciation lessons on there are extremely poor and they sound horrible. It's a grammar lesson. The students sound horrible. I didn't finish the series. Basics and that was it.
I use Pleco flashcards to memorize vocab.
I actually also started with a tutor and let her design the curriculum. It was a HUGE WASTE OF TIME. We met about 6 times, every day for 2 hours. I can't even begin to explain how horrible this class was, and how stupid textbook learning languages was. It was then I realized that if you work with a tutor you need to have your own plan. I started googling and found the link above. It seemed smart so I decided to mimic it with a few twists.
Real advice here
But all of this was just to get an initial feel for the language. After about 50 hours I started the real language learning process. Each week I had 26 hours of Chinese tutoring with 13 different teachers. I paid them 1/3-1/2 of their normal rate because they didn't need to prep any class. It was only pure casual conversation. A few of them are not even tutors, they are just random native speakers. I insisted we only speak Chinese. If they spoke English, I asked them, in Chinese, to stop. If they kept doing it, I fired them. In the beginning, it was extremely frustrating and awful, but over time it became much better. Our conversations were basic, repetitive, and I asked them to repeat themselves on average about twice every sentence they said (I wish I was exaggerating). Early on, I didn't mind if I made a lot of mistakes, as long as they could understand my meaning I was fine. But after about 4 weeks of that I was becoming a lot more comfortable, and was able to converse with locals on a daily basis. So I already had that sort of practice often. I started to insist that my tutors correct every sentence or pronunciation that I made a mistake in. If they didn't correct me, I asked them to correct me more. If they didn't, I fired them. Chinese tutors are a dime a dozen.
I can't even begin to explain how useful this forced speaking in only Chinese has been. My comfort level speaking Chinese is very high. A lot of tutors were really hesitant of my method. I insisted and stuck with it. They are all shocked now.
So essentially my method is as follows
- Speak with tutors in only Chinese. They teach me nothing. We only converse about daily lives. Sometimes I'll ask for us to converse on a specific topic (say, stocks/investing or practicing food ordering). Despite having friends, having tutors is still incredibly important. With my friends, they never correct me, and I never stop our conversation to add a word to my flashcard list. It's rude and disrespectful. They are friends, not language teachers. I don't expect them to correct me or teach me new words.
- Every time my teachers use a word I don't know, if I deem it useful, I add it to pleco flashcards for later review. At this point in my Chinese, almost every word they use that I don't know is deemed useful. Early on, I made a judgment call.
- Every time they correct my sentences, I add them to my Anki deck. I only do Chinese to English because I find English to Chinese not fun and very frustrating. I'm not sure what is better. I find Chinese to English more fun and I think that having fun is the most important part of language learning so that's why I do it this way.
Honestly speaking is about 75% of my formal study time. The other 25% is vocab flashcards, anki flashcards, and listening to ChinesePod dialogues when I walk around. I also have a lot of informal study time by talking with friends and strangers. I am constantly looking for opportunities to approach strangers to chat. I find waiting in line anywhere really effective for this. Or at restaurants when you have the large shared tables.
And to be honest in the last month I've been a bit lazy. I've done my usual tutoring work, saw friends a lot more, exercised a lot more, and only done maybe 10 hours of flashcard work and 10 hours of Chinesepod audio listening.
I have never studied grammar, unless you count Michel Thomas as a grammar lesson, and my tutors constantly comment how my grammar is probably my most advanced part of my Chinese. Because I take the same sentence structures as other people use and mimic them, just replacing words. You do not need to study grammar to learn grammar. You do not need to attend Chinese school to learn how to speak Chinese. Their methods are wildly inefficient, and you won't work on the two hardest parts of chinese, Speaking and listening. Character recognition is easy, albeit time consuming. Speaking and listening are extremely hard and unless you're at a point where in your Chinese class the teacher is only speaking Chinese and you are not allowed to speak English, I think that it is a big waste of time to attend Chinese school.
I spend 85% of my overall time (formal + informal studying) practicing speaking and listening, and despite all of that, my reading and typing ability far surpasses my speaking and listening ability. Don't go to a school where they teach you grammar in English. It's a huge waste of your time and your abilities will not be well rounded.
I'm open for feedback and questions. I have 3 more months in Taiwan.
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