6 rules to become fluent in Chinese
Back in 2006, I was a kid playing video games 6 hours a day and I had never heard about anything related to China. I’m still a kid, but I’m now fluent in Chinese and I’m a student at Peking University MBA (taught in Chinese). I meet Chinese entrepreneurs, journalists and investors all around Beijing. Being successful in learning Chinese has changed my life forever.
Ten years ago, few people were serious about learning Chinese. Yet, I have met many people who succeeded in reaching a great level in Chinese. Based on their story and my own experience, I have noticed some behaviours and patterns highly correlated to being successful in learning Chinese.
Here are 6 simple rules to become fluent in Chinese:
- Learn Chinese every day.
- Know why you are learning Chinese.
- Be aware that learning Chinese is not easy.
- Enjoy the adventure.
- Keep calm and know nothing.
- Focus on logic whenever you can.
#1 Learn Chinese every day.
If there were only one rule, this would be the one.
It is the rule of my first Chinese teacher. He had an impressive academic knowledge of the Chinese language, as well as being extremely funny and a great speaker. As he was French, I realised very soon that the Chinese language was accessible to foreigners.
The rule was enunciated during our first class and I remember it word for word:
“If you want to learn Chinese, you need to learn every day. Even during weekends ! Even during vacations or days off! Learn every day, at least for 10 minutes.”
I have been following this rule for 10 years and I will never stop.
#2 Know why you are learning Chinese.
You need to know why you want to learn Chinese in order to keep your motivation intact.
You will be less likely to give up if your core motivation is authentic and personal. Additionally, motivations based on a genuine interest in the language tend to be stronger. For example, “knowing Chinese might be useful for my career” is a reasonable motivation, but too generic and probably not personal enough.
Be aware that your motivation(s) can change along the road. This is normal and fine, as long as you are still aware of why you are spending 10 minutes a day learning Chinese.
My first motivation when I started was that I found Chinese characters intriguing and mysterious. I was curious and wanted to see how people could possibly make sense of such a strange way of writing. Chinese characters are beautiful and have a lot of secrets and stories to tell. People with a similar attitude often do very well in learning Chinese.
Note: This rule is also the first step of my 5-step framework to master the Chinese language.
#3 Be aware that learning Chinese is not easy.
Again, a rule from my first Chinese teacher. This was actually the motto of our Chinese class. Every time the class started, the teacher would randomly chose one student responsible to start the class routine.
- This student would stand up and say “起立!” (qǐlì) — Stand up!
- Everyone would stand up and say “老师好!” (lǎoshī hǎo) — Hello Teacher!
- Teacher would answer “同学们好” (tóngxuémen hǎo) — Hello Classmates!
- Teacher and students would say together : “勤学 苦练 多思 好问” — (qínxué kǔliàn duōsī hàowèn), which means “Study constantly, practice hard, think a lot and love asking questions”.
- Finally the teacher would say “请坐” (qǐng zuò) — Please sit down, and the class would begin.
This motto reminds us that learning Chinese is not easy.
Learning Chinese is a day-to-day challenge that requires hard work, personal thinking and curiosity.
Learning Chinese is not easy. Any book or online resource promising you the opposite, like “learn Chinese easily” or “become fluent in three months” is a lie.
Hopefully the following rule makes the challenge accessible to everyone.
#4 Enjoy the adventure.
Learning Chinese is like learning anything else. It takes time to become good at it (you know the 10,000 hours rule).
The only way to succeed is to find pleasure in your studies.
Instead of being afraid by the apparent difficulty, take the challenge.
For example, don’t say “there are so many characters, I will never be able to learn all of them”. Instead, feel the pleasure of being able to read or write just a few of them.
Here is a scan of the notebook I used the first time I wrote Chinese characters. Even 5-year-old kids in China do better. When I wrote them, I knew it was bad handwriting. But I was even more excited about the pleasure of this first achievement: “I’m writing in Chinese”!
Here is another example: don’t say “my pronunciation is very bad and I only know 5 words”. Instead, go and find the first opportunity you have to use those words, make a sentence, and say it to the first Chinese people you encounter. It is very likely that people will have a hard time understanding you at the beginning. But once they do, you will feel proud and excited about this new achievement.
Come on! You are speaking Chinese! Isn’t that exceptional?
For me, it always feels like having superpowers.
#5 Keep calm and know nothing.
Having the right attitude to embrace surprises, new ideas and concepts is key to learning Chinese.
Forget everything you know about your own language. Be curious, study with no preconceived idea and try to avoid making systematic links between Chinese and any language you might already know.
When you start learning Chinese, you literally know nothing, so the only way to start is to build some basis using your own language.
But as you make progress in your studies, you will realise that trying to find systematic equivalents or explanations based on your own language is often misleading.
For example, words in Chinese do not necessarily have an English equivalent, and vice versa. Some Chinese words even describe some feelings or situations that do not exist in other languages (like the word in the next paragraph).
So whenever you can, try to learn about the context (when and how to use a word) and try to get a understanding of the language based on feelings and sensations rather than on the mere translation of words (语感 — yǔgǎn). Find many sentences in which you can try to use the same word in various situations to see if it works. Make mistakes. In other words, learn like a kid. Try to create direct connections between items or ideas from the real world and the words in Chinese.
#6 Focus on logic whenever you can.
In life, there are things you can control and things you cannot control. It is considered wise to focus only on things you can control and to not be too hard on yourself for the things you cannot control.
When learning Chinese, there are things you need to memorise and things you don’t need to memorise. Every time you find an opportunity to make sense of what you learn and avoid memorisation, you must go for it. Do not spend time memorising things that you can understand.
You can remember many things using logic or mnemonics.
- Stroke order of characters. You just need to understand the main rules. Once you have covered about 100 characters as examples, you will feel comfortable with guessing the correct stroke order of 99% of all characters.
- Key elements of characters should be learnt to learn characters more efficiently. For example, you need to know that the left part of 海 means “water”. Many of these elements are easy to remember (here 3 drops of water).
- Many characters can be understood by analysing their inner elements. For example, the character 想 xiǎng (ideas) is composed of 相 (image) and 心 (heart/mind). Images coming from the mind is a poetic definition of “idea”. Many characters can be worked out like this. Some people also like to invent their own stories or mnemonics to remember characters.
- Many words can be understood and remembered as the logical combination of several characters. For example, here is the word “chameleon” below.
Save your memory for things such as “what is the pronunciation of that character I learnt two minutes ago?!”.
I hope these rules can help other Chinese learners as much as they have helped me. I wish you pleasure and success on your way to mastering the Chinese language!
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