Learning Languages: Mandarin
Mandarin Chinese. Many consider this language to be among the most difficult, if not the most difficult language to learn for westerners. I’m in. It probably also helps that I am madly in love with chinese culture. Their philosophers, films, and martial arts have a special place in my heart. I would move to China in a heartbeat if it wasn’t for the excessive pollution that the country is experiencing due to its industrialisation. But even faced with the possiblity of never going to China again (I went once when I was ten years old), I don’t lose one bit of motivation to learn Mandarin.
And here is how I plan to do it (I’m already doing it and will be taking the HSK 1 exam in November):
Characters
The Chinese writing system is at the heart of its language. If you want to properly learn the language there is no way around just learning the characters off by heart. It is easy to claim that it’s not really necessary as a lot of writing programs will recognise the pinyin you use (romanized words of the Chinese characters) and propose the relevant character options, of which you can then choose the correct one. This aproach is inferior as it hinders you in two ways. It limits you text editors that have this capability. Handwritten notes become impossible, as does calligraphy (the beautiful hand written writing style of Chinese characters). And, it makes reading more difficult. Just like knowing how to speak a language will automatically allow you to understand it, knowing how to write will automatically allow you to read. Not knowing how to write the characters will still give you a certain capacity to recognise characters when presented, but it will be impossible to reach full comprehensive fluency when reading a chinese text.
So how do you go about learning the characters? My approach is simply brute force. There are any number of books that provide techniques for character retention. These range from imagining the characters being derived from actual images of what they describe, to entire stories being devised around a character. These might work, and some people will swear to their effectiveness, but what I have found works for me is just simply repeating the characters over and over again, writing them over and over again, and doing this for an extended amount of time. And the best way to do this, I have found, is with an app called Skritter. This is an amazing app for learning Characters (versions exist for Chinese and Japanese). It provides you with a list of characters that are progressively added to the testing cycle, during which the writing, meaning, and pronunciation of a character are asked. A new character appears and you give the required response. This is how I worked myself up to the first 150 characters required for the HSK 1. The app does come at a price though. A recurrent 15 euros per month. But I have found that this is money well spent. And if I’m not going to spend money on education, what am I going to spend it on? (rhetorical question)
Listening Comprehension and Pronunciation
To me, listening comprehension and pronunciation go together. Mainly because my approach combines the two. Pimsleur and Michel Thomas. These are audio books that you can get on audible or iTunes. I have a subscription to audible that lets me download a free audiobook per month on Audible, which equates to 5 lessons, or 150 minutes of material. These audiobooks introduce you to vocabulary bit by bit and provide context to construct useful sentences with these. Simultaneously, previously introduced material is repeated at set intervals. To be honest, I find that the material progresses at a fairly slow rate, but for learning pronunciation and listening comprehension, they are invaluable. Especially for pronunciation I have found that imitating the native speaker on the Pimsleur courses has given me a considerable basis for speaking Mandarin.
Speaking
I consider speaking to be a skill in itself, and is the end of the first stage towards fluency (btw my definition of fluency is someone that could be mistaken for a native speaker of the language judging by the way they talk). The reason this is different from pronunciation and vocab and grammar is because I consider it the end-goal of the first stage. Vocabulary and grammar are just the building blocks to get there. However, merely knowing words and sentence structure will never provide you with enough knowledge to speak in any useful way. It’s one thing to know your vocab and your grammar, it is something entirely different to listen to someone speak and respond to the stimulus in a spontaneous, unprepared, and unforced manner.
This is something that can only be learned by doing. The problem lies in the transition needed to acquire enough skill to get the ball rolling and speak with someone. If your counterpart (with whom you wish to speak Chinese) happens to also speak English, and changing to English would make things easier on everyone, the natural result will be that any future interactions will be conducted in English. When you become more proficient in their language than they are in yours, the scale tips and it’s fairly easy sailing from then on. The question is what to do until then. Several options:
- Just insist on speaking the language you want to learn. Even when they switch, carry on struggling with Mandarin in this case. People will get annoyed, but it is an option.
- Speak with yourself. You’ll be surprised how effective this can be. Just repeating to yourself the words and sentences you learn using Skritter, Pimsleur, and Michel Thomas will allow your brain to adjust and become more accustomed to expressing ideas off the cuff.
- Get a teacher that gets paid to speak with you in your chosen language. One option are language courses. These can be quite expensive and may not be tailored to your specific needs. Another option is taking one-on-one online classes. A good website I have tried this with is Verbling. They have legions of qualified teachers just waiting to do skype sessions with you, and the mass of offers reduces the price to around $20 per lesson depending on the language. Languages with a large supply of qualified teachers will have lower prices. An hour Spanish goes for about $13. More exotic languages with less teachers like Mandarin Chinese is closer to $25 an hour. Again, the aim here is to get you better at Chinese than the average Chinese is in English. This may be a stretch, but one you pass that point, any Chinese speaker can be a conversation partner and help you continue levelling up.
Thats all on Mandarin for now. I may elaborate on these steps with another post after a couple more months of studying Chinese. Next up: Spanish.
