5 Steps to master the Chinese Language
A Framework to learn Chinese efficiently
A lot of people have asked me the question “How to learn Chinese?”.
This article provides a comprehensive answer, based on my own experience of learning Chinese as a second language for 10 years.
Learning Chinese is a hobby for me. Yet, most of my Chinese friends consider my level as being close to that of a native speaker.
With the 5-step framework explained in this article, you will learn more efficiently and will be more likely to master the Chinese language.
The Building Blocks of Chinese Language
Before introducing the 5-step framework, I need to explain my conception of Chinese Language as a network of Building Blocks.
There are four different types of blocks in Chinese:
- Characters components are the smallest units of meaning existing in Chinese. They are made of strokes and are used to build Chinese characters.
- Chinese characters are built with strokes and components. They all have their own meaning (or range of meanings) and own pronunciation.
- Words are made of Chinese characters. Most of the words in Chinese are composed of two characters. There are also words with one, three or even more characters (in this case, we are more likely to be faced with an expression or a combination of words).
- Sentences. As in other languages, sentences are how we express ideas in Chinese, combining words with appropriate grammatical structures.
Learning Chinese is all about learning blocks and understanding how those blocks are linked together into a network of knowledge.
Let’s now see what the 5 steps to become a master in Chinese are.
Step #1. Discover Chinese
(= motivation)
The first step to learn Chinese is to discover this language and be interested in learning it. Your personal attitude and motivation will be decisive to achieve your goal to master the Chinese language.
Learning Chinese is not easy. It is a long-term investment. Hence the fact that having a genuine, personal motivation is a must-have to start the adventure.
Find your own Motivation
Be genuinely interested in learning Chinese. The Chinese language is beautiful and interesting enough to keep you motivated on the long term if you have the right attitude toward it. Make learning Chinese something you like. You will spend more time learning without considering this as work. And the time you spend learning is actually the #1 factor in your success.
This advice can be applied to anything you want to learn about. So here are some examples of specific motivations I hear the most from successful Chinese learners:
- I want to be able to read and write Chinese characters.
- I find Chinese characters beautiful and interesting.
- I find this language very different from my own native language.
- Learning Chinese is said to be very difficult and I want to take this challenge.
Here is one example of weak motivation that won’t work :
“Well, Chinese economy is booming and I believe learning Chinese can be very valuable for my career…”.
Step #2. Learn about blocks
(= understand)
Step #2 is about learning the fundamentals of the Chinese language. You need to learn more about the different building blocks.
Frequent mistakes
- Some people feel time pressure or are too much focused on short term results. They want to be able to learn what they think is directly useful, such as “How to order food in a Chinese restaurant”.
- Some people underestimate the importance of having a good pronunciation right from the beginning. The most common mistake is to completely neglect the tones.
- Some people have in mind that they want to learn Chinese to answer a specific need, like being able to have a conversation in Chinese, and as a result will think that they don’t need to learn about Chinese characters.
Do not rush and start with the basics
- Learn what the strokes used to write Chinese characters are.
- Learn more about Chinese characters and components.
- Learn about pinyin and how to pronounce it.
- Learn about the 4 tones of Chinese language (and neutral tone).
Step #3. Find new blocks
(= discover)
Once you understand what those various blocks are, it is time to start finding a source of blocks. This is the part I like the most.
Think about the blocks as precious stones that are linked together in a complex network. As a foreigner, this network is hidden in the dust, and the only thing you can do is doing some research and discovering those precious stones one by one, following the flow of the network. Every time you find a new character, you will see how it can be combined with another one to create a word, revealing new connections.
How to learn new things
- Find the resources you like. Consider resources as a way to get access to this network of precious stones. Those resources are of different formats (books, short stories, podcasts, radio or TV shows, textbooks, Chinese classes, articles, movies, songs, etc.) and with different topics. Pick up the resources you like and feel comfortable using on a daily basis. Those resources can be anything, as long as you enjoy them.
- Isolate the characters, words or sentences you want to learn more about and make more research on them. You can find those blocks in your resources or use existing lists like HSK vocabulary, most frequent Chinese characters, collections of thematic sentences, etc.
- Even if you feel that there are thousands of things to learn, focus on what you have discovered and enjoy the process of finding and collecting those precious stones.
Step #4. Remember blocks
(= review)
It is great to find and collect blocks but this will be useless if you can’t find a way to remember them. As foreigners and adult learners, we cannot afford to follow the same strategy used by Chinese people themselves to remember those blocks.
During their childhood, Chinese people spend most of their study time copying Chinese characters hundreds of times to fix them in their memory. You have neither the time nor the patience to do that.
How to review your knowledge efficiently
- For any character or word, you want to be able to remember three things: the Chinese characters, the pinyin (with tones) and its meaning(s).
- Use the right tools and techniques to improve your efficiency in remembering blocks. We all have different ways of learning. Once you’ve found the tool that works for you, you increase your learning speed a lot. Those include flashcard systems, spaced repetition softwares, active recall, mnemonics and others.
The easiest step to miss
This step requires regular efforts and discipline. You will also have to face the fact that you necessarily forget what you learn, again and again.
This step is largely underestimated or unknown by most learners, and as specific tools for the Chinese language are starting to appear, efficient methods are still limited to a minority of learners who rightly felt the need for such a systematic approach and successfully found or designed a way to implement their own review system.
Step #5. Use blocks
(= practice)
Practice ensures that the Chinese language comes to your mind spontaneously, without thinking about each and every word every time you communicate.
Some signs that show that your practice becomes efficient is when you answer simple questions in a natural way, begin to communicate without translating directly from your native language, and in some rare cases, when you start dreaming in Chinese (this could happen sooner than you would expect).
Whenever I see “中国”, I know that its pinyin pronunciation is “zhōngguó” and that its meaning is “China”. I remember it because I have used it or seen it hundreds of times in various situations. This practice strengthened the link between Chinese characters, pinyin and meaning in such a strong way that for me, China as a concept is “中国“ and is pronounced “zhōngguó”. This occurs automatically in my mind. I don’t need to think every time about the fact that 中(middle/center) + 国(country/kingdom) = China.
Of course, before achieving this level for this specific word, I had to discover it first, and then remember it using the above mnemonics.
How to practice your Chinese efficiently
- Do not be afraid of doing mistakes. No matter what you do, and no matter what your level is, you will make mistakes. And some of them will be so funny or embarrassing that you will feel uncomfortable. You need to go beyond that. Push yourself outside your comfort zone.
- Try to take advantage of every opportunity to practise your Chinese. You have plenty of free time chunks in your day that you can take advantage of. And if you think that you need to go to China to have the opportunity to practice your Chinese, you’re wrong.
- When it comes to practising, there are four things that you can do: speaking, listening, writing and reading. To master the Chinese language, you need to balance your efforts between these four skills. The difficulty is that to make real progress in one of them, you need to focus on it for a while, which might make you develop weaknesses on other skills. For example, my writing skills are currently far behind my speaking, listening or reading capacities.
Last thoughts about this Framework
Why most people will fail to learn Chinese
Using this framework, I have identified two main reasons why many people fail to or give up learning Chinese.
The first one is to skip one step. This happens when people underestimate its value or are unaware of it.
Someone rushing into discovering sentences without knowing the basics of Chinese pronunciation will encounter serious problems very quickly, leading to frustration and demotivation.
The second one is failing to adapt study habits to the requirements of a specific step.
Someone who does not have a systematic approach to review the knowledge learnt previously will rapidly be overwhelmed by the amount of things to remember.
Avoid these two mistakes and you will be on the right track to master the Chinese language.
A never ending process
Even if those five steps are presented with a chronological order, I want to emphasise the fact that being at a given step does not mean that you can forget about the previous ones. On the contrary, you are actually never “done” with one step.
Even today after 10 years of experience in learning Chinese, my motivation can change, my understanding of the Chinese language will still improve, and even if I practise in my daily life I still need to put some efforts into isolating blocks I want to learn and into finding some ways to be able to remember them.
I hope this framework can help Chinese learners think about their learning experience and help them to achieve their objectives.
I wish you pleasure and success on your way to mastering the Chinese language !
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