I’m curious to hear what other things everyone is doing to learn this language?
Hanzi Hero is a fantastic resource, but it can only take you so far toward fluency, and I’m wondering what other methods I should be doing other than the basic character/word learning and shadowing to actually learn how to understand and produce 普通话 myself. I feel like I am doing so much to try and understand this language and then as soon as I hear a native speaker I feel like all of a sudden I have never heard any Chinese in my life. I also feel like Graded Readings are so boring, and there has got to be better more interactive ways to start understanding the grammar subconsciously.
I would be curious to hear everyone’s philosophy on this, including personal anecdotes and personal wins, and I would be especially curious to see if the developers have any thoughts on this! Let me know what you guys think.
If there are any resources that you think are especially important to your understanding of the language, would you mind sharing them? Thanks.
Based on our HH level I’m not ahead of you, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
From what you’ve written though I might be a bit further along in actually using the language. I don’t have any trouble understanding or producing Chinese as long as it’s on topics I have the vocab for. I’ve talked quite a lot of random Chinese people (both language exchange but there are a few shop owners near me who I speak exclusively Chinese with). I’m still terrible of course, but it’s fun and I have confirmation my speaking is fully understandable to random people without requiring English - virtually every understanding breakdowns happen because I just don’t have a very wide vocab yet (it’s so far never because pronunciation/accent is poor or bad tones etc). So I’m very confident that with time/effort I could reach my goals of being conversationally fluent if I continue with what’s below (I’m just learning to chat to my in-laws, I don’t need super high native like level).
Assumptions:
Everyone has different personality and preferences so there is no “ONE TRUE PERFECT” method, different people click with different methods. What’s below worked for me, but I make no claims it’ll work for you/everyone
Every method can work with time/effort as long as your using the language, so doing mostly reading, or mostly watching TV is a personal choice based on the point above, and one isn’t inherently better than the other. As long as you’re using the language, do what you enjoy and can stick to!
Any method that that tries to exclude some of the 4 language skills (speaking, listening, reading, writing) is probably not all it’s cracked up to be. Much like any fad diet that’s “only meat” or “only lemons” should be considered almost certainly a scam, any language learning method that’s “only listen never speak” or “only speak never read” etc should also be viewed very sceptically.
So with that out of the way my study routine consists of:
Weekly 1 on 1 tutor on iTalki. I don’t follow any course or textbook, I just try to just have interesting conversations. Sometimes they’ll suggest topics, sometimes I’ll come prepared, and sometimes it’s just a chat about our day etc. Since my goal is small talk with in-laws, that’s what I practise. 98% in Chinese, only time English is used is when I need a specific word that I don’t know yet I’ll ask (e.g. “我觉得我的儿子 。。。 怎么说 ”sports team“？好的，儿子的球队还不错“ etc). Any time I get something wrong I have the tutor write the full correct sentence in the chat to study later.
Try to watch 1h of comprehensible input (CI) a day. LazyChinese, Story Time with Annie, and Mandarin Corner are my some my favourites, but I’m subbed to +30 CI channels at this point so if you need/want more recommendations I can share more links! I use 100% Chinese subs (no pinyin, only characters) and a mouse over dictionary to look up words I don’t know yet. I also only watch stuff that I can follow - so no native TV yet (I tried watching harder content but it’s a waste of time for me). A lot of the good CI channels have some really interesting content that I can follow even with only about 1k vocab. Been watching 1h a day since about Feb, it’s hard to commit the time (I got wife, kids, house, dog, career etc), but it’s made a huge difference so highly recommend it!
Learn characters on HH. I’d be perfectly happy to be illiterate, but I find knowing the characters helps with learning words. Like animal 动物 is just “move + thing” … once you know that learning 动物园 as “move + thing + park” is sooo easy. It’s not just random sounds == random meaning any more, it’s often incredibly logical. The startup cost is huge, you need to know a few hundred characters before this effect kicks in, but once you do, there are so many words you get “for free” it’s crazy useful even if I have no interest in actually reading Chinese literature.
Read on DuChinese 1 to 3 nights a week. I honestly should do this more but with the 1h CI input, it’s often hard to find time/motivation.
Any sentence I like from any source (tutoring, CI, reading, HH examples, conversations with in-laws etc) gets throw it to Anki as a complete sentence. I don’t try to memorise every sentence I find, but I add ~10 new ones a day, usually focusing on words I’m trying to learn. I study both Eng→Chinese and Chinese Audio → Eng directions so it’s input + output practise. For sentences I can get native audio I use that, but if none exists I just use text to speech (they’re really quite good now) so every sentence has full audio.
Read the Chinese Grammar Wiki whenever I’m bored, but also look up new structures I come across etc. I don’t try to mesmerise any of it, but just reading it and the provided example sentences I think helps.
All up it’s like 1.5 hours a day. 1 hour of that CI YouTube videos, and then 15-20 mins of HH for chars/words, 15-20 mins of Anki for full sentences. And as above, my main problem is always lack of vocab - there are just so many damn words! I envy those people you read about online cramming 20 new words a day, but I’m content with my ~3-5 a day for now. At least I know I can maintain it.