3 Growth Hacks To Learn Mandarin Chinese Faster
Accelerate your 普通话 learning with these three unconventional techniques.
I’ve been learning Mandarin Chinese for more than a decade. I started learning from my late Grandfather, a teacher who had led tours to mainland China in the 1970's from New Zealand. Since then, I’ve tried everything: evening tuition, full-time university study, immersing myself 24/7 using Chinese language audio, books, practice with countless taxi drivers and much, much more.
Yet I still forget basic vocabulary all the time, stutter over basic phrases and use the wrong strokes when writing. Learning Chinese is a tough journey. Teachers give you conflicting advice, native speakers criticise the way you speak and the volume of learning material grows every day (with many claiming they can make you learn the language in under 24 hours).
Which is why I wrote this article: I want other learners to have it easier. I learnt Chinese through trial and error, brute forcing as much of the language as I could with many (mostly bad) techniques.
If you are happy with your Chinese language abilities, halt! Stop reading now! This article is for those who feel confused, frustrated or just plain overwhelmed in their quest to speak Mandarin— or even for those who want to learn but don’t know where to start.
If that’s you, start reading now. You can read this Medium article in less than two minutes. 加油 (go for it)！
Buy Remembering The Hanzi
Learning to read, let alone write, Chinese characters often seems like an surmountable Everest.
Which is why you need to use the method James Heisig & Timothy Richardson created to help learners memorise hanzi （汉字）quickly. It was originally created for Japanese kanji, then adapted for 汉字。
I promise you that even if you only make it half way through the book, it will change the way you think about Chinese.
The method put my Chinese reading skills into hyperdrive. A friend lent me a copy and it changed everything. It let me understand Chinese street signs, the gist of newspaper articles and order from Chinese-only menus.
Don’t feel daunted by the length of the Remembering The Hanzi. Just try and make it through one character at a time. It starts getting better, I promise y’all.
Listen More
Listening to a language you’re learning, even when you don’t understand what is being said, accelerates your acquisition. Research shows it.
I applied this principle to my own learning early on. I listened to Mandarin radio stations, put the audio tracks to Zhang Yimou’s films on in the background while I worked and ate as much as possible in delicious Chinese restaurants.
学以致用
Xué yǐ zhì yòng. Put into practice what you learn. Apply what you learn.
Do things in Chinese you enjoy in English. This was a valuable lesson that Khatzumoto taught me over at AJATT (All Japanese All The Time). I love watching cop dramas in English, and transferred my passion into Mandarin-dubbed Hong Kong police dramas.
Move to Chinatown. Play Chinese-language MMORPGs. Gamble at casinos with Mainland tourists. Party at Asian nightclubs. Join an underground street racing ring full (seriously, these are full of Chinese speakers all over the world). Invite the guy who owns your local Chinese restaurant out and belt out cheeseball karaoke lyrics after too much baijiu.
Rinse, repeat and do not halt until you can live your current life — or something better than it — in Chinese.
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