What I Learned about Life by Learning Chinese
12 years ago, I made the life-altering choice to join the United States Navy instead of going to college.
I had nearly no idea what military life could be and no immediate family in the service. All I knew was that I was exhausted of school and wanted to learn a real skill that would benefit me in life.
I also wanted to straighten my life up and find my true purpose in life. I didn't know how to find it on my own, so I went to the military expecting the organization to find it for me.
The events that followed were, like all events I’ve been a part of, completely different from what I thought would happen. I met many of my goals, failed at some others, had good days and bad, and ultimately made decisions that worked together to create the me of today.
The military granted me access to the first thing I ever wanted to really become great at: Chinese. Because I wanted to become great at Chinese, I had to start analyzing my own habits to pinpoint and eliminate faults that were holding me back.
The following are the accumulation of lessons I learned through correcting my weaknesses to get better at Chinese.
Without Self-Discipline, You Have Nothing
The number one thing I learned from studying Chinese is how often the reason we do not accomplish our dreams is because we don’t know how to change our habits.
When you think of the word self-discipline, what do you see? Do you see a monk performing rituals in a monastery? Do you see a dancer waking up before the sun rises to be in the gym before work? Maybe you see Stephen King, sitting down to write in his study, day in and day out.
All of these people have something in common, and it might not be what you think. People of great achievement don’t necessarily have an iron-clad will that allows them to focus at all times on the “right” thing to do. What they do know how to do is find ways to create environments that organically generate the results they desire.
A quote from Stephen King:
“There should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with. If there’s a window, draw the curtains or pull down the shades unless it looks out at a blank wall.”
There is a reason Stephen King mentions controlling his environment over specific mantras, self-help books, and “10 ways of instant success”. It’s because the highest performers in the world understand that it’s nearly impossible to force yourself to do something that doesn’t gel with the environment you spend most of your time in.
I followed this principle in studying Chinese by removing almost all connections I had with non-Chinese media. I cancelled Netflix, changed my email into Chinese, changed my phone’s operating system, found easy (and sometimes fun) Chinese media to play whenever I was home, and made a group of predominantly Chinese-speaking friends during the beginning years of my studies (Thanks 弈麟 ).
These changes, which took over 4 years to implement completely, made Chinese the default language I spent much of my time in. In fact, at that time, it was easier to listen to and speak Chinese than it was to do the same in English!
You can do the model any activity in the same way.
If you want to do a bit of extra work when you get home, arrange the main part of your house into a comfy place of work. Clean up your desk. Make your work-related materials the center point of the room. Maybe even put some candy or snack you enjoy next to the computer to entice you to sit down.
If you want to work out more, join a gym close to work or that is on your way home. Better yet, change your route to work to require you to pass by the gym as often as possible. These small alterations will ensure that the activities you want to adopt begin to pop up spontaneously from your environment rather than ones you do not. Enact small changes to make it harder to perform a bad habit instead of a good one.
All changes come gradually. If you can engineer your environment to make the actions you want to adopt easier, you will perform them more often. After changing your environment to generate the activities you WANT to happen, just live your life, pay attention to what is happening, and let your actions come naturally. After a period of time, some say around 66 days in a row[1], these habits will become automatic.
Self-Discipline can not Quarrel with Biology
Early on in my Chinese learning career, I pushed myself to a degree that I would often burn out. At some point every two or three weeks, I would hit a wall where I wanted to keep studying, but my body and mind would shut down. I found it impossible to keep focusing, and would turn to other distractive habits to give my study mind a rest.
At that time, I didn’t sleep enough, and I would frequently get headaches. I took so many learning supplements (gingko biloba, choline, and others) that my nose would bleed spontaneously and my teachers thought I was seriously sick. I had a severe disrespect for my body that isn't required to be successful.
Neglecting my mental and physical health hurt my ability to retain long-term knowledge. My ignorance actually brought me further away from my purported goals. Neglect of health also made parts of the learning experience much less enjoyable. Yes, I performed well on a couple of tests by forcing myself to study in an unhealthy way, but my overall level at the end of the program was less than what it could have been if I had lived healthier.
Although forcing yourself to rise to the next level might sound like a Gatorade commercial in the making, when trying to learn as much as possible, this type of behavior only leads to lower performance. More balanced people in the school who were just as committed to learning Chinese as I but were more mature outperformed me and better maintained their passion to succeed in the long run.
Excellent performance and optimal health are not mutually exclusive. You can have both.
Once I started to take better care of my health, my ability to sustain my passion to learn Chinese increased. You don’t have to kill yourself to succeed. In fact, if you push yourself and maintain health, you can go even further than if you just neglect self-care.
Only You Can Help Yourself
One of the best things I did when taking Chinese classes was to decide to learn the language in my own way.
At the time, my model of foreign language acquisition was simple: When I was a kid, I learned English through watching television, reading books, and having “fun” in the language. In fact, due to some difficulties in our family around that time, I was free to watch an exorbitant amount of television and read for long periods of time each day. Since my curiosity led me to these activities, I ended up learning a lot of vocabulary from watching television with subtitles which transferred to my reading level.
I can also clearly remember loving to read because there weren’t too many restrictions on WHAT I could read. Many children learn to read in school and have no control over the material and rate of learning. My process of learning to read was something I could control. Since my reading wasn't based on what other adults told me to do, I was able to use books to explore different authors' view of the world.
This lead to my reading progressing at a younger age than some classmates. At least, my memory of it did. So I thought the best way for me to learn Chinese would be to emulate these behaviors.
Following the model, I bought an internet-based Chinese television subscription and some books second-hand from a local book store before the third month of my class. I started to plod my way through both, guessing at the definitions of words and looking up others. Luckily, the teachers in my class were tolerant of my enthusiasm and method, so even though I often half-assed homework, they didn’t view my interest as a threat to the integrity of their class. They trusted that my extra time spent learning outside would balance out and let me spend most of my time outside of school (and some time during class) learning on my own.
Once again, because I was given room to explore at my own pace, I tended to study more. Many of my classmates felt frustrated and angry from what seemed to be a lack of control of their Chinese learning. Class was hard for them, and as much as the teachers tried to help, many ended up failing out.
This wasn’t due to a lack of trying. Listening to our teacher's instructions, many of these students tried to force themselves to study class material for long hours, memorizing all of the passages we learned each day. However, they weren’t exposing themselves to Chinese organically and lacked the ability to guess the meaning of phrases and expressions when we hadn’t learned before. I believe it was this lack of learning to deal with ambiguous Chinese and negative emotions associated with the language itself that hurt their learning in the long run.
Learning how to do something well is not something other people can teach you. Many people with years more experience learning about the subject than me discuss this idea in more detail [2], but it seems to result from the lack of play involved in teacher-focused education. In order to really excel at something, we must play with the material and question why things occur. You approach any new skill or endeavor with your own learning history and base of knowledge, so only YOU can really learn the material. Although learning paths between students will be similar, ultimately each student will have unique learning needs that class fails to address.
Contrary to what seems true, a native Chinese speaker is not the best person to teach you the process of learning Chinese. Yes, they are great for pronunciation, correcting grammar, and helping to improve your listening skills by talking to you. But they haven't been you, and they don’t know what is really important for you to learn a language from scratch.
Even if you consult with people who have achieved a goal you want to accomplish, they have never achieved that goal as YOU.
While learning new things, trust your gut. Yes, you should do your best to perform the activity as much as possible. Yes, you can model your habits after others’ successful behaviors. But the path to get there is your own. No matter how much help and support you have, only you can make the decision to help yourself.
You Can Create a Better Future
With the resources available on the internet, anyone in the world with a stable connection can learn whatever they want. Whether it be Software Development, Math, Basketball, or Twerking, there is such a huge volume of knowledge on any subject online that you can go from 0 to expert all from the comfort of your home.
What will you choose to learn? My self-learning journey started with Chinese, but yours will almost certainly different.
It all starts with being willing to explore and following your interests. It starts with you.
