How long have you been learning Chinese?

[HeDiWen何迪文]

大家好。

hello, this is my first post. I'm sorry if this is the wrong forum for this but I could not figure out where to post this thread.

I am curious about how long everyone has been studying Chinese. I recently finished my first year of Chinese classes in college. I will be a second-year student in he fall.

I am always looking to improve my Chinese because I am hoping to study abroad and work in China after I gradaute college.

Look forward to your response.

谢谢大家。回头见。

[skylee]

I studied Chinese throughout my years in primary and middle schools (12 years).

[Shadowdh]

only about 3 years for me, still sooooo much to learn...

[HerrPetersen]

started around two years ago, but effectivly i have around 6 months under my belt.

[Lugubert]

You asked for it, so please endure.

In 1968, I had a short overview course of Chinese in General linguistics. In 2001, I enrolled in first semester Chinese.

Retiring next week, I nowadys have to put substantially more effort into learning than in my youth, when languages just adhered to me.

Anyway, I hope to be finishing second year (recalculated as full time academic studies) in spring '09. For university financial reasons, there has been little opportunity to work on much more than translation from written Chinese into Swedish. Being a professional translator, that suits me fine to a certain degree. But in a couple of weeks, I'm leaving for a two(?) months' trip to China. I hope that will boost my speaking and listening abilities.

So, see you again towards wintertime!

[HeDiWen何迪文]

Wow! it seems like everyone has been studying for quite some time. I hope I can keep with it for as long as I can, since I plan to work and study directly in China or do something with my Chinese after graduation.

[trien27]

I've studied since I was young, maybe since primary school. That's many years ago. Don't be fooled by my log in name [You can subtract two to three years off my log in name's # to get a rough estimate], I might be younger or older.

[Don_Horhe]

I've been studying for one year at university.

[doviende]

I normally discount anyone's time that they've studied chinese if it's just from university courses. IMHO, you'll basically never learn chinese just by taking 3hrs per week of classes. I've met several people who claim to have been studying chinese for 3 years, but they can't have a basic conversation.

Personally, i got a lot out of the immersion program i was in, where i had 20 hours of class per week for 10 months. But lately i've been using Anki to study and i'm making much faster progress. For instance, i've learned more characters on my own in the past 2 months than i did in 10 months of "intensive study" without using an SRS. and when compared to someone doing a 3hr/wk university course, this might be years worth of characters...so in the end, these time estimates don't matter much.

If you're going into 2nd year, i strongly recommend that you try to get up to 2000 characters as soon as possible (this should be doable in 3 months if you use good strategies like mnemonic stories about each char). This will make it WAAAY easier to absorb new content and guess vocabulary words. It'll be sorta like an english speaker reading spanish....you can guess the vocab a lot. In chinese, you can get this effect by learning the meanings of the individual characters. you should make sure you know the proper pronunciations of them too. if you don't get to 2000, you should _at least_ do the 800 characters that are part of the HSK basic level (HSK1 to HSK 3).

Once you know plenty of characters, you can try to read things like books and newspapers, and you'll get lots of new useful words really fast, and you'll start to understand all the grammar ideas much better from seeing examples. As you learn more characters, the whole system makes more and more sense. i'm at around 1800 characters now, and it's become really easy to add new ones.

ok, rant over. that's a lot of the stuff that i wish someone had told me right at the start. it would have saved me a lot of wasted effort ;)

[HeDiWen何迪文]

Thanks for the advice doviende. I remember my Chinese teacher, a chinese woman from 长春, would always complain about the 2nd and 3rd years not knowing enough Chinese and not taking it seriously. Hanzi has been one of my biggest hurdles. There are sooooo many and its difficult to remember all of them and how they are used. I only know maybe 200-300 right now off teh top of my head. Also, out of those I may only know how to write 200 or so and only recognize all of them. Hopefully by the end of 2nd year I can increase to 2000 and by the end of 3rd year we are expected to know 3000 or more hanzi. Where can I download the Chinese version of Anki and what is an SRS? And what did you do to help you learn how to write all of these hanzi? any more advice for learning hanzi is greatly appreciated.

[doviende]

SRS means Spaced Repetition System. The basic idea is that your memory can be trained by having something repeated at increasing intervals...you don't need to see the same thing every day forever, but instead you can have it shown to you after 1 day, then after 2 days, 4 days, 8 days, or something like that.

anki can be found here: http://ichi2.net/anki/

It's a general SRS flashcard program, and you can find instructions on the site about how to make your deck. There are some pre-made decks, but i like to put everything into it myself because i learn the things as i go along. Anki just makes sure that i'll never forget it after i learn it myself.

For learning characters, you need to remember the parts that make them up. You can go to http://zhongwen.com/ to see some explanations of the little pieces of each character. Also, it helps if you make up your own stories of what each little piece looks like. For instance, i like to call the piece on the right-hand-side of 改 and 救 “steven seagal" (because i imagined it as a picture of a man with a ponytail). It doesn't matter that it's not the real meaning of that piece of the character, and it really helps me make a funny story about all the parts of the character. Making up mnemonic stories like this will really help you remember how each character is constructed. Another important method for learning characters is to learn the simpler pieces before you go on to the big crazy ones. When you see a complicated character with lots of parts, you want to be able to instantly recognize all the little components from other characters you've already learned. The japanese learners refer to this as the "Heisig" method. This is what really helps you remember how to write them, because then you don't think of a character as 20 strokes, you think of it as two or three familiar pieces. You can recreate a little funny story in your head that reminds you of all the little pieces you need to construct that character.

I suggest you get in the habit of using Anki every day, at least for a few minutes. It works best when you do it consistently every day, because then it can schedule your reviews at the right time. I tend to use it for at least a half hour every morning and every evening, usually more if i have extra time.

For more information on this type of learning, i highly recommend the site http://alljapaneseallthetime.com/ Yes, it's about japanese, but the methods are equally applicable to chinese or any other language.

[Kai13]

I'm in my first university year. I started in late September.

[AdamD]

I'm teaching myself to read and write. I started learning (simplified) characters six weeks ago, and am hovering around the 450 mark. Speaking and listening can happen later, once I have a reasonable grip on characters, words and grammar.

[MademoiselleSky]

Hi there,

I started mandarin roughly a month ago at university (yeah french universities start pretty late). And have been self-studying for 4 months now. I guess it's easier for me to understand because of my upbringing. I still however have to learn pinyin, writing/reading, and mandarin pronouciation. It's kind of funny though because although I look like a typical chinese girl, I have a "european" accent when I speak cantonese or mandarin (irritating really, when people don't understand what I'm trying to say).

[taijiphoenix]

I'm just in my first semester of chinese. I try to supplement my classes with extra material, like the michel thomas program and pimsluer.

[Kevinman]

i have been to china 3 times, and have been studying for about 6 months; i can read and speak about 200 - 300 characters from various topics. But still, I cannot communicate very well. studying chinese is so dam hard, i dont even know how to study it.. some times it just 'clicks'.

[Understudy]

Hey,

I've been studying for around three years now, headed off to China in about a month. Don't kill yourself rushing to try and memorize all the characters overnight! Take your time and really get to learn their meaning and good usage of each word. You will learn them slower, but you will be able to use them to much better effect and your conversations will sound far better. I would also say to put more emphasis on the major grammar points early on, as these will be the foundation that all of your vocabulary rely on. I find that copying out dialogues can really help, though it does get dull.

[zhouhaochen]

I studied for 8 months at BLCU (then we had SARS and they closed the university), then for a year at SOAS (though only as a minor) and then pretty much ever since whenever I get a chance to.

For me, it was only possible to learn Chinese because I first did it very intensively at uni for some time and then kept studying and studying and studying.

I find myself forgetting very fast if I dont....

[taylor04]

Going on my fourth year including self study

1 year in an American university

1 year in a Chinese university

[Sarevok]

About five years now, I started in 2004 at a university here in Czech Republic. I went to China in 2006/2007 for one year scholarship program (at Xi'an Jiaotong University) and then again in 2008 for a short term summer individual course at Shenyang Normal University. Doing a lot of self-study/SRSing at every oportunity... 看来我已经中毒太深，不可救药了~呵呵