Seven tips for learning Mandarin Chinese faster

Learning Mandarin Chinese can seem like a daunting task for people whose native language is Western. In this blog post, I give seven tips for speeding up that task.

1 Required knowledge: Chinese characters vs. pinyin

The main writing system in mainland China are Chinese characters (simplified Hanzi). These characters are more like pictures and don’t have much connection with their pronunciations.

But there is also pinyin: a system for describing the pronunciation (incl. tones!) of Chinese characters with Latin letters. Pinyin is relatively easy to learn for people who know the Latin alphabet.

For example:

  • Chinese characters: 火车站在哪里？
  • Pinyin: Huǒchē zhàn zài nǎlǐ?
  • English: Where is the train station?

2 What’s difficult and what’s easy in Chinese

2.1 What’s difficult?

The following aspects of Chinese make it difficult to learn for Westerners:

  • You have to learn two languages:
    • The written language does not use an alphabet but symbols that have to be learned.
    • The spoken language
  • There are many characters to learn. Thankfully, parts of those characters are often reused, which means that new characters are rarely completely unfamiliar.
  • There are few if any similarities with Western vocabularies.
  • Spoken Chinese is challenging to understand and learn, due to the use of tones (which don’t sound that different to Western ears) and due to a rhythm that’s different from Western languages.

2.1.1 Tones are important

The difference between, say, “mā” (first tone) and “ma” (neutral tone) is as significant to Chinese ears as the difference between the following words is to the ears of English speakers (foreigners often find those difficult):

  • “love” vs. “laugh”
  • “lose” vs. “loose”
  • “food” vs. “foot”

These are a few examples that demonstrate how important tones are (same words, different tones):

  • “hànyǔ” (汉语, Chinese) vs. “hányǔ” (韩语, Korean)
  • “mǎi” (买, to buy) vs. “mài” (卖, to sell)
  • “yǎnjīng” (眼睛, eyes) vs. “yǎnjìng” (眼镜, glasses)
  • For more examples, check out the article “On the importance of tones in learning Chinese”.

2.2 What’s easy?

There are also some things that make Chinese easier to learn than, say, English:

  • Advanced vocabulary is composed of simpler parts (vs. English using Latin or Greek words) – e.g.:
    • 飞机 (“flying machine”): airplane
    • 手机 (“hand machine”): cell phone
    • 电脑 (“electric brain”): computer
  • Grammar is relatively easy at the beginning: There are no noun genders, no cases, no verb declensions. Alas, things get more complicated later on: Getting the word order right for complex sentences can be difficult.
  • Some things are very logical:
    • Names of months:
      • 一月 (month one): January
      • 二月 (month two): February
      • 三月 (month three): March
      • Etc.
    • Names of weekdays:
      • 星期一 (weekday one): Monday
      • 星期二 (weekday two): Tuesday
      • 星期三 (weekday three): Wednesday
      • Etc. (Sunday is the only exception)

3 Tip 1: Figure out your goals

It’s important to figure out what exactly you want to achieve by learning Chinese – e.g.:

  • Do you want to speak Chinese with others?
  • Do you want to watch Chinese TV?
  • Do you want to read Chinese books?
  • Do you want to use Chinese while traveling?

All of that informs how and what you learn.

3.1 My own goals

  1. I want to understand spoken and written Chinese as soon as possible.
  2. I don’t care if my spoken Chinese is horrible – as long as people can understand it.

#1 is important because it enables me to consume content. Doing so a lot will eventually also improve my spoken Chinese.

My goals have the following consequences:

  • Vocabulary is incredibly important. Without it, I can’t do anything.

  • Getting tones right is important. Otherwise, people will have difficulty understanding me and I may misunderstand them.

  • Grammar is much less important. I can still understand a lot and be understood.

4 Tip 2: Don’t learn handwriting

Obviously, whether or not you should learn handwriting, depends on your goals. But you can save a lot of time by not learning it and it’s less important than you might think:

  • With computers and cell phones, the most common way to write Chinese characters (in mainland China) is via pinyin: You type pinyin, the computer shows you characters that match the pinyin and you pick the ones you want. Usually, you’ll type words and not single characters because the former produce far fewer matches. That means: If you know the pinyin = pronunciation of a word and you can (passively) recognize it, then you can type it.

  • In modern times, handwriting is not needed very often.

5 Tip 3: Use a system for decoding Chinese characters

  • Most Chinese characters are compound: They can be split into parts.
  • Some of those parts are compound themselves.
  • Or they are atomic and can’t be split anymore.

That means a relatively small set of atomic symbols is used to create many Chinese characters. Thus, learning Chinese characters is much easier if you have a system for identifying and naming the parts of characters. The best system I could find is:

“Remembering Simplified Hanzi: How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese Characters” by James W. Heisig and Timothy W. Richardson

Tips:

  • I bought an ebook via Apple Books and it worked well for me.
  • The website Hanzi Help is very useful for working with “Remembering Simplified Hanzi”.
  • The book presents the characters in a specific order: It mentions components before mentioning the characters that use them. I did not use that order because it does not make sense if you are learning the language at the same time. I used a word list and worked my way backwards from the characters to the components. In the beginning, that was a lot of work, but it got easier fairly quickly.

6 Tip 4: Learn the most important vocabulary first

Given how many words there are to learn, you can save yourself a lot of frustration if you start with the most important ones. But how to pick? We’ll look at three options next:

  • You can use a word frequency list.
  • You can use a vocabulary that is required for an HSK test.
  • You can create your own sets of words.

This section concludes with guidance for how to best use these options.

6.1 Word frequency lists

Word frequency lists contain the words of a language, ordered by how often they appear in various corpora: collections of movie subtitles, social media posts, book texts, etc. In other words: The most frequently used word comes first, then the second most frequently used word, etc.

For example, one English frequency list starts like this:

  1. the
  2. of
  3. and
  4. to
  5. in

Wiktionary has several word frequency lists for Chinese.

6.2 HSK

HSK (hànyǔ shuǐpíng kǎoshì, 汉语水平考试), means “Chinese Proficiency Test” and is a standardized test created by the People’s Republic of China. There are two versions that are relevant today.

6.2.1 HSK 2.0: 2010–2021

Version 2.0 consists of 6 levels (each level includes all words and characters of the level before it):

WordsCharacters
HSK 1150 words174 characters
HSK 2300 words348 characters
HSK 3600 words618 characters
HSK 41200 words1064 characters
HSK 52500 words1685 characters
HSK 65000 words2663 characters

6.2.2 HSK 3.0: 2021–

Version 3.0 was introduced in 2021. It consists of 9 levels. Work on it is ongoing, which is why HSK 2.0 is still dominant. However, there are already word lists that you can download.

WordsCharacters
HSK 1500 words300 characters
HSK 21272 words600 characters
HSK 32245 words900 characters
HSK 43245 words1200 characters
HSK 54316 words1500 characters
HSK 65456 words1800 characters
HSK 7–911092 words3000 characters

6.3 Create your own set of words

You can create specialized word sets – e.g.:

  • For topics you are interested in: fitness, history, programming, etc.
  • For situations you want to be prepared for: smalltalk, buying tickets, visiting a doctor, etc.

By going deep instead of broad, your language level in specific situations will be much higher than your language level in general.

6.4 Which approach to use for your vocabulary?

Custom word sets are always useful and complement other approaches.

It’s a shame that HSK doesn’t prioritize words that are useful in daily life such as 厕纸 (cè zhǐ) “toilet paper”. Thus, you can probably become conversational more quickly if you use a word frequency list.

However, a lot of learning material (graded readers etc.) is ranked based on HSK levels. Thus, following those levels still makes a lot of sense – even if you are not preparing for an HSK test.

6.5 How many words do you need to know?

Daniel Nalesnik, Founder of Hack Chinese, explains what he was able to do with a given amount of words:

  • 600 words: limited ability to communicate
  • 1200 words: handling tasks such as purchasing a cell-phone plan, opening a bank account and paying bills.
  • 2500 words: conversational Chinese. Caveats: Can’t read most books for adults. “understanding TV news is hit-or-miss, most newspaper articles are still filled with unknown words, and even ‘easy’ conversations can occasionally slip past you.”

For more information, see “How many Chinese words do you need to know?”.

7 Tip 5: Use spaced repetition to learn vocabulary

Spaced repetition is a learning technique, which usually involves flashcards: The front of a card contains a question, its back contains an answer. Quoting Wikipedia: “Newly introduced and more difficult flashcards are shown more frequently, while older and less difficult flashcards are shown less frequently […]”

Anki is a popular app for spaced repetition. This is how I use it to learn words:

  • The front of a flashcard contains a Chinese word (only the characters).
  • The back contains the pinyin, the “Remembering Simplified Hanzi” keywords and the meanings in English. I also often include example sentences or words and other tips and notes I find helpful.
  • That means that given characters, I have to recall sounds and meanings. That seems to be enough if I additionally listen to Chinese and read Chinese (see “comprehensible input” below).
  • Tip for learning vocabulary with flashcards: If you get a tone wrong, it means you get the card wrong. Some words I have to repeat over and over (and over) before I finally remember the tone.

You have to strike a balance between making progress and learning too many new words per day. You have to review all of those new words and things can accumulate quickly. I‘m currently going with 10 new words per day. It helps that the same characters show up in many words and that words are fairly intuitive.

8 Tip 6: Ignore the grammar

Again, whether or not you want to do this depends on your goals. I do learn a few grammar points but postpone learning many details until I have a better feeling for the language.

“Chinese Grammar Wiki” is a great online resource for Chinese grammar. Its content is also available as paper books.

9 Tip 7: Consume comprehensible input

Comprehensible input is an idea in language learning: As part of his work, linguist Stephen Krashen posits that consuming input (spoken and/or written language) that is slightly more advanced than a learner’s current level, is the best way to learn a language. Such input is called comprehensible input. For more information, see the Wikipedia entry on Krashen’s monitor model.

Speaking can come later. Some experts even recommend to wait with output and initially focus on input – similarly to how small children learn their native languages. However, I do read sentences out loud to practice speaking. And I occasionally talk to myself in Chinese.

9.1 Graded readers

Graded readers are books for language learners that only use a limited vocabulary. They usually indicate which language level they target (hence “graded”). Graded readers make great comprehensible input. In principle, you could even (partially?) automate the process of paraphrasing complicated words with simpler expressions.

Chinese graded readers are usually ranked by HSK level. Resources:

There are also websites with graded texts:

You can also do web searches such as “graded reader Chinese” or “HSK 1 text Chinese”.

9.2 Videos on YouTube

There is a lot of useful content on YouTube. It’s yet another monthly service to pay for, but I can recommend subscribing to YouTube Premium for language learning. At least content producers get some of that money.

9.2.1 Videos with comprehensible input

These YouTube channels work well for me (I’m beginner to intermediate):

You can also search YouTube for “comprehensible/easy/slow Chinese” etc.

9.2.2 Videos with dialogs

The following YouTube channels are also comprehensible input, but often more structured (think textbook dialogs) than the content I mentioned in the previous subsection:

9.3 Podcasts

  • “TeaTime Chinese” is a podcast that covers a variety of topics using simple, easy-to-understand Chinese.

10 Various helpful resources

10.1 Google Translate

Google Translate is an invaluable tool for learning Chinese. Apart from being fairly good at translating Chinese sentences, I also like that it shows how common the various meanings of Chinese characters are in their corpus (collection) of Chinese language. That helps when writing down a translation for a Chinese character: You can start with only the most common meanings.

10.2 Online dictionaries

I often look up words in the following three dictionaries – each of which has different strengths:

  • Wiktionary is slightly unwieldy due to how it mixes simplified characters and traditional characters (vs. keeping them separate). However, I like its way of presenting the many meanings of (e.g.) Chinese characters. Special features:

    • Provides semantic information you often don’t find in dictionaries such as online slang and computer science terms.
    • Shows the historic development of some characters.

  • Talking Chinese English Dictionary gives you a quick look at what a word or character means. Special features:

    • Describes the components of a character – e.g. which component conveys the meaning and which one the sound in a pictophonetic character such as 吗.

  • HanBook Dictionary is comprehensive. Its way of listing the meanings of a character is similar to Wiktionary, but cleaner – since it only uses simplified Chinese. Special features:

    • Lists which meanings of characters are used in which words.

10.3 App: LingoDeer

(I’m not affiliated with LingoDeer, nor getting paid for recommending it.)

I’m using (and paying for) the LingoDeer app. I’m mostly using it to complement Anki for learning vocabulary. It’s great that it lets me skip handwriting exercises – because that’s not something I’m interested in right now.

Why not DuoLingo? I don’t like how “gamified” DuoLingo is. And LingoDeer does a better job at teaching useful vocabulary and sentences. In many ways it’s similar to DuoLingo but its lessons are a bit more reminiscent of textbooks (in a good way).

10.4 Chinese history

Before I started to learn Chinese, my knowledge of China was very limited. Since then, I have learned more about Chinese history. I found this podcast especially helpful:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts