My system for learning Mandarin Chinese (10 tips)

In this blog post I explain my system for learning Mandarin Chinese as quickly as possible – in the form of 10 tips. It took me a while to gain these insights and I could have made a lot more progress early on, had I been aware of them back then.

1 Background knowledge

1.1 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?

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

1.2.1 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.
1.2.1.1 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”.

1.2.2 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)

2 Tip 1: Learning Chinese is challenging

It helps to know what you’re in for if you learn Chinese: It will require a lot of work (if you only know Western languages). According to the USA Foreign Service Institute, for English-speakers, Chinese (2200 hours class hours) is almost four times as “difficult” as French (600–750 hours) — which corresponds to my experience. No matter what you do, you’ll have to spend a lot of time with that language.

Knowing this beforehand makes learning less frustrating because you know that it’s not just you – it’s difficult for everyone.

On the upside: Learning Chinese can be a fun challenge – especially if you know the techniques and resources mentioned in this blog post. And you’ll get to know an ancient and rich culture.

3 Tip 2: 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 terrible – as long as I can express what I want and as long as people can understand me.

#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 3: Make sure you get the pronunciation right

For most people, pronouncing pinyin properly is not something they can wing. However, the basics are relatively simple – if you know what to look out for:

  • For the tones, it helped me to know that English also uses pitch (more information).
  • Most Chinese vowels are relatively straightforward.
    • Tip for pronouncing “ü” (German umlaut “ü”, French “u”): say a long “eee” and then only move your lips, as if you wanted to pronounce the “o” in “or”.
  • For some consonants, the tongue needs to be curled upwards and point to your palate (retroflex consonants):
    • sh (SHock)
    • ch (CHance)
    • r at start (pleaSure)
      • r at end (Real)
    • zh (Joy)
  • For some consonants, the tongue position is similar to those of the corresponding English consonants:
    • s (Sun)
    • c (caTS)
    • z (kiDS)
  • For some consonants, the tongue is pressed against the lower front teeth and points downwards:
    • x (SHock)
    • q (CHance)
    • j (Joy)

Resources with more information:

Interestingly, in some accents of Mandarin, people don’t do retroflex consonants – e.g., in Taiwanese Mandarin and southern dialects, they often “drop the ‘H’” and say “sì” instead of “shì”, “zōng” instead of “zhōng”, etc.

5 Tip 4: Learn Chinese characters early on

I learned Chinese characters right from the start. That has two benefits:

  • You can consume written Chinese.
  • There are many Chinese characters that are pronounced the same (including the tone). Learning the Hanzi helps with keeping the different meanings separate your brain. For example, the following characters are all pronounced “shì”: 是 视 事 试 士 市 示 氏 世 柿 适 饰 势 室 实

The downside is that learning Chinese characters does slow you down. The next two tips will help make this task less daunting than it may appear.

6 Tip 5: 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 (without accents), 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.

7 Tip 6: 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 [two volumes]

Tips:

  • The Apple Books versions of these books work well for me. Whether or not that is an option for you, depends on what devices you are using. I’m under the impression that Apple Books ebooks look better than Kindle ebooks – which is important in this case. But I may be wrong.

  • 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.

  • The book recommends coming up with over-the-top stories for characters because those are supposedly more memorable. I’m using a different strategy: I’m pretending each Chinese character is a pictogram that precisely tells me its meaning. Once I come up with a way of “reading” (i.e., interpreting) it, I tend not to forget it.

8 Tip 7: Learn the most important vocabulary first

It’s hard to understate how important learning vocabulary is in Chinese. I don’t particularly enjoy learning vocabulary and, with the Western languages I learned prior to Chinese, learning vocabulary passively by reading or listening, got me very far. Not so with Chinese – partly because the sounds of Chinese words are less memorable for Western brains, partly because you also have to learn Chinese characters (vs. only the spelling).

Given how many Chinese words there are to learn, you can save yourself a lot of initial 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.

Read on to learn more about each of these options.

8.1 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.

8.2 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.

8.2.1 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

8.2.2 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

8.3 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.

8.4 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.

8.5 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?”.

9 Tip 8: 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.

10 Tip 9: 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.

11 Tip 10: 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.

11.1 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”.

11.2 YouTube: comprehensible input

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.

11.2.1 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.

11.2.2 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:

11.3 YouTube: advanced content with English subtitles

I’m also getting a lot out of Mandarin content with English subtitles. I previously thought that I’d only focus on the subtitles and not listen to the Mandarin, but that’s not true: I’m ending up picking up quite a few words.

The keyword “engsub” is useful when searching for content: If a Chinese video has English subtitles, that keyword is often mentioned in its title.

11.3.1 Animated movies and TV series: donghua

The Mandarin word for “animated” is 动画 (dònghuà) – “Chinese anime”, if you will. If you search for this word on YouTube, you’ll find lots of good content. These are donghua that I enjoyed (they are all free to watch on YouTube):

  • “The Infinitors” – quoting the description: “A worn-out corporate slave receives a mysterious invitation. ‘Do you want to know the meaning of life? Do you want to truly live?’ He is teleported into God’s ever-changing space. An invitation and challenge sent by humans from the future to the present world. As human march into space, the various challenges they faced are adapted into ‘dungeons’ for chosen people to clear. Traverse through numerous traps. Get reliable companions. Become a team leader. All for the evolution and existence of humankind and the infinite future!”

  • “Time Prisoner” – Google-translating part of the description: “In 2060, the World Organization selected elite agents from around the world to form the Crisis Bureau to solve various supernatural crises. The Crisis Bureau selected the elites of the elites to form an ace team named Phantom.”

11.3.2 Mandodrama, CDrama

Chinese dramas (most of them live-action) are called Mandodramas and CDramas. You’ll also find them on YouTube.

11.4 Music: C-pop and Mandopop

Most music services (Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, etc.) have Mandopop – popular music with Mandarin texts. Wikipedia explains:

C-pop is an abbreviation for Chinese popular music, a loosely defined musical genre by artists originating from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan (the Greater China region). This also includes countries where Chinese languages are used by parts of the population, such as Singapore and Malaysia. C-pop is used as an umbrella term covering not only Chinese pop but also R&B, ballads, Chinese rock, Chinese hip hop and Chinese ambient music, although Chinese rock diverged during the early 1990s.

There are currently three main subgenres within C-pop: Cantopop [with Cantonese texts], Mandopop [with Mandarin texts] and Hokkien pop [with Hokkien texts].

11.5 Podcasts

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

  • “Every little thing Chinese” is a podcast for learners at the HSK 2 level. It’s available on major podcasting platforms (all episodes) and on YouTube (some episodes).

12 Various helpful resources

12.1 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.

12.2 Online dictionaries

I often look up words in the following 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 how it structures its information – e.g., it puts example sentences, related words etc. under a given meaning of a word or character. 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.
    • If a word has more than one character, the box at the right-hand-side of the “Chinese” section is very helpful: It shows which of the meanings of the characters affect the word.

  • 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.

  • Chinese Character Wiki helps with looking up the history and components of characters.

  • Chinese English Pinyin Dictionary specializes in looking up entries via pinyin.

General tips:

  • Many dictionaries let you search for entries via pinyin.

12.3 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:

13 My daily routine

  • I use Anki flashcards to learn 10 new HSK words per day. That usually takes me about an hour (due to also having to review previously learned words).
  • I consume comprehensible input:
    • I watch comprehensible videos (5–20 min.)
    • I read graded texts (5–15 min.)
  • I also regularly talk to myself about various things: something I see in my room; situations I expect to be in; etc.

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