Learning Chinese -- A roller coaster

[taylor04]

This post is a general overview on studying Chinese. Many details will be omitted since I'm not writing a book. Any detailed questions can be asked below or searched for.

1. You start going up the roller coaster by learning the basics. You are thinking how hard it is to get the basics down, especially weird pronounciations like ǜ. Hearing the differences in tones is a difficult task, let alone speaking them quickly. You are forced to learn characters through brute memorization. The ascent is very very slow and you can't even make a basic conversation.

These are the basic skills you should MASTER in level one, all are equally important to your foundation.

Pinyin (pronunciation) Memorize all pinyin, and have a native speak correct your pronunciation.

Tones You should speak with tones, know the tone rules, and practice tone recognition.

Radicals After learning some characters, you should learn the first one hundred radicals or so. It will help on character retention and for memorizing new charcters.

Stroke order Even if you decide not to write, stroke order is important for dictionaries. If you decide to write its extremely important

This is a great thread with ideas on how to start. Beginner's guide

2. You get to the top, and start descending rapidly. You are able to understand some conversations, even picking a word out in a movie is inspiring. This is the stage where everything just 'clicks'. You start thinking Chinese is easy. Words come easily because they are used broadly, 开车，开门，开灯，打开电脑, etc. Grammar seems easy, 了 just makes everything past tense right?

You should have mastered basic grammar and start learning some intermediate grammar points

Learning words is equally important as learning characters

Strive for near native pronunciation, if needed spend more time on pronunciation

3. You're at the bottom and start realizing the once simple 了 is one of the hardest grammar points in Chinese. Reading Chinese starts getting harder because characters start looking alike. Chinese people start misunderstanding you because of minor tone mistakes, 通知，同志，统治，同治，童稚，统制，especially when you start using more advanced vocabulary. But all in all, still confident in yourself, especially since Chinese people are complimenting you all the time.

You will most likely become very self conscious about your tones, and realizing you forgot a lot tones to the most basic words (I didn't use Anki at the time). This is when you will start questioning your grammar, if you start becoming unsure about something you write or say, just write it down and ask someone. Classical Chinese is helpful to further understanding written Chinese.

4. Realizing you suck at Chinese. You start going back up the roller coaster, realizing there are countless idioms and sayings to remember. Reading newspapers is a daunting task; everything has its own abbreviation. 浙江大学 is 浙大 for example. While many grammar points are easily learned. You can understand and talk about most topics, but its just not good enough yet.

This stage is probably the hardest to get past. While you have a solid foundation in Chinese, its not enough. To top it all off, you are getting severly diminishing returns

For modern texts, the most frequent 1,000 characters cover 89.14% of all written material. The next most frequent 1,000 characters cover a further 7.99% of all material. The next 1,000 only an extra 2.05% and the next 1,000 only 0.56%.

I saw this in one of imron's posts. This is the stage where you have to decide if you want to master Chinese or if spoken Chinese is good enough. The only thing left to do is just start plowing through native material, newspapers, tv shows, magazines, books, anything thats made for native speakers. You should imitating native speaker's tones. The initial attempt to get out of this stage and onto 5 is hard and frustrating. You just have to push through this stage.

5.

I think at this level it's almost like being on the roller coaster...when all of a sudden, it slowly dips down quickly, and enters intense fog. As you look around in the fog, puzzled, the roller coaster comes to a sudden and abrupt end. Hearing a crunching sound, you look down to notice that the wheels are gone, and even the track is gone. The cart has crashed into the ground. A bit confused, but unhurt, you get out of the roller coaster car and stand up, unsure of which direction to head to next. Through the fog, you can see cities, trees, mountain, and some people.

You feel unsure about where to go, and curious as to why the journey stopped when it did. But you know realize that you have power in your legs, and you can walk (or run) anywhere you want...but where? and why? The answer is up to you...

Thank you wushijiao!

I hope by creating this, the new learners know what to expect instead of blindly running into the difficult stages. Any specific questions can be asked or searched for.

Edited December 21, 2009 at 09:09 PM by taylor04

[Horse]

Yeah i agree with a lot of that.

I was wondering if anyone else has found it to be the emotional/motivational rollercoaster i have.

For me it was: start off first 3 years total love affair with the language, can't get enough of these strange, exotic pictograms, feel ever-more impressed with yourself as you improve rapidly.

Then a period of fatigue, just hit a plateau after about 3 HSK exams, just feel like you're ploughing your way through an endless amount of characters, idioms etc. Still working hard but not as into it.

Total fatigue/ slump; can't really be bothered, extended periods of not really learning or revising vocab, just watching TV and reading newspapers to try to maintain.

That period lasted about a year for me after my last HSK advanced and am now getting back into it, learning vocab, flashcarding etc.

I thought it would be a much more straightforward route than it has been. Never thought about chucking it in tho

[chrix]

As I just wrote in another thread, Chinese is indeed a languages that plateaus out for a long time... to be stuck in intermediate can indeed get quite frustrating...

I agree with a lot the OP writes. I personally already knew kanji before learning Chinese, so I don't know this myself, but what do you think about beginners placing too much emphasis on hanzi over words? At some point they realise, it's not just characters you need to know, but words (and then, as taylor writes, much later you stand before the gates of chengyuland). Or was this no problem at all?

[taylor04]

I took classes at the university and we simultaneously learned words and characters, also, I wasn't aware a post like this was made, can you give me the original? I plan on updating it and hopefully creating a guide on what to do with each level. And yeah horse, I'm at the stage where I'm hating Chinese, feel like I'm not getting anywhere. Since I know this is a stage, I keep pushing on

[chrix]

oh no, it wasn't a similar thread, just an aside there: http://www.chinese-forums.com/showthread.php?p=212058#post212058

[wushijiao]

This is the little journey I've had, I'm wondering if most people had the same.

Hehe...I also made this analogy at one point:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/5007-some-advice-for-beginners

[renzhe]

I'm totally in the burnout phase now. It's been very hard to find motivation recently. The last three years have been really intensive, though.

I'm hoping to get through the rut over the holidays by finishing the Torrents, chilling with my girlfriend and watching some wuxia. Then re-evaluate and set some reasonable goals for the next year.

I do agree though, that Chinese is very extreme in the amount of work you need to put in to get past the intermediate stage.

[taylor04]

I updated the OP with a little guide and some minor changes to the original. I hope someone could write a little something for level 5 to throw in there.

[wushijiao]

I'm totally in the burnout phase now. It's been very hard to find motivation recently.

Sorry to hear, although burnout is hard to avoid.

I saw this in one of imron's posts. This is the stage where you have to decide if you want to master Chinese or if spoken Chinese is good enough. The only thing left to do is just start plowing through native material, newspapers, tv shows, magazines, books, anything thats made for native speakers. The initial attempt to get out of this stage and onto 5 is hard and frustrating.

I think it is hard, in a sense. But I don't think it necessarily needs to be frustrating, especially if you focus on content. I guess I can only speak for myself, but my goal in learning Chinese was mainly as a tool to understand the related society, culture, and politics. So, I think the key at the Stage 4, so to speak, is to focus most of your attention on content. For example, after reading about the book 中国农民调查 in the English press (I think it was this New York Times article) my goal became to read the book. I found it at some illegal bookstall, but my level wasn't up to it for several months. Finally, after a few attempts, I read through it over the course of around two months. After doing that, my ability to read similar stuff was greatly enhanced. During that (relatively) long period of time that it took me to read that book, I could have become frustrated by my relatively mediocre Chinese/slow reading speed (at times maybe only two to four pages per hour), but I was happy because I was learning about fascinating content. I guess at one point, I had bought lots of interesting books in Chinese that were on my shelf, unread, and looking up at them, saying to myself, "I will read you one day, damn you!" ...that was my motivation!

I have to say, in the last year or two I've met many Westerners that have great Chinese abilities, many with massive vocabularies. The one thing they all of in common is that they all have done lots of research in particular fields, in Chinese. Generally, these people tend to be pretty passionate about their research. Their Chinese levels are in part so good because they read so much, and can pick up nuance easily, and they know how things are phrased in all sorts of settings/ So, I can say from my own experience, and drawing from their experience that, by focusing on content, you can hopefully avoid burnout, and develop solid Chinese skills as kind of a side effect. But, then again, that may just be one path of many.

I hope someone could write a little something for level 5 to throw in there.

Since I'm a fan a of these sorts of metaphors, I'll give it a shot, (excuse the cheesy-ness). I think at this level it's almost like being on the roller coaster...when all of a sudden, it slowly dips down quickly, and enters intense fog. As you look around in the fog, puzzled, the roller coaster comes to a sudden and abrupt end. Hearing a crunching sound, you look down to notice that the wheels are gone, and even the track is gone. The cart has crashed into the ground. A bit confused, but unhurt, you get out of the roller coaster car and stand up, unsure of which direction to head to next. Through the fog, you can see cities, trees, mountain, and some people.

You feel unsure about where to go, and curious as to why the journey stopped when it did. But you know realize that you have power in your legs, and you can walk (or run) anywhere you want...but where? and why? The answer is up to you...

[taylor04]

I edited it and put your metaphor in wushijiao, its pretty good, you should be a short story writer (maybe even novels?)

[chrix]

I think most intermediate learners at some point will see that they did too much reading at the expense of the other three skills, and should spend more time on honing their listening comprehension, and do more writing exercises etc. Or maybe it's just me

Also, I personally think, at some point you need to tackle all these literary expressions. You know I'm a 成语迷, and plenty of people just learn it as part of their normal vocab exercises, but if you really want to express yourself in a sophisticated manner, you need to know the most important 500 expressions ACTIVELY, not just passively...

[wrbt]

Heh I'm permanently stuck in intermediate. Every time I start thinking I'm crawling out something will happen like realize I can't tell the difference between 香 and 春 unless they are part of something like 烧香 and 春天, or that I got confused because I misread 陪 as 部 despite having contextual clues.

Forever onward and laterally!

[taylor04]

I'm crawling out something will happen like realize I can't tell the difference between 香 and 春 unless they are part of something like 烧香 and 春天, or that I got confused because I misread 陪 as 部 despite having contextual clues.

How is your writing? I started off with not being able to write anything and just now starting to learn. However, I've noticed I've gone from passively recognizing characters to consciously recognizing them. It has helped quite me quite a bit to learn consciously learn the subtle differences between them.

[chrix]

Maybe another thing to ponder about: at our last local meeting, I was discussing this with renzhe, and he said that he thinks it is important to get the basics right from the beginning, otherwise you run the risk of internalising grammatical mistakes, or tone-less pronunciation etc. Any thoughts on this (and correct me if I misrepresented what you said, renzhe).

I think people who started out not paying much attention to tones will have a hard time trying to correct that at some later stage. Maybe we should include a list of things you shouldn't fail to cover as a beginner in stage 1?

[taylor04]

I think people who started out not paying much attention to tones will have a hard time trying to correct that at some later stage. Maybe we should include a list of things you shouldn't fail to cover as a beginner in stage 1?

Thats a good idea, or maybe even a short list of things to master before moving on to level two? In order of importance I would probably list

Pinyin (pronunciation)

Tones

Radicals

Stroke order (for people who want to write)

After getting these down finally moving onto

Characters/words

Grammar

Speaking/Listening

Reading

Any other suggestions or what should be rated most important?

[chrix]

sounds good to me.

Radicals: I think it is important to explain the Six Principles early on. Even though I do think you need to know at least 100-200 characters to begin seeing patterns, but still..

Grammar: I think it is a good idea to get a separate grammar/work book to work through early on as well, because often textbooks and/or instructors don't do a good job of explaining it.

Also, much later on, maybe somewhere between 3 or 4, you should consider taking a look at classical Chinese. It will help you a lot with all these literary expressions and the literary style. What do you think?

[taylor04]

Yeah I do agree with you, my personal opinion is starting with radicals is usually easiest. They are very simple and straight forward and will help learn new characters. Maybe only around the first one hundred should be known by heart and roughly know the rest, I haven't even remember all two hundred. I completely agree with the separate grammar book. As far as classical Chinese goes, I haven't started learning it yet so I wouldn't know.

I do want to make this clear though, this is not my thread, this is everyone's thread. I started it all of with all my opinions, but I will make any changes by request. I just wanted to start a thread for the "big picture". A thread where hopefully most questions can be asked and answered relating to improving your level of Chinese, no matter what your level is. I welcome all suggestions and will change things with the popular opinion, including what I've already written.

[wrbt]

How is your writing?

As Obi-Wan said to Luke, your insight serves you well.

I can read okay but can't write at all, except the numbers 1-3 but even then I struggle with 3. I just never work on writing it seems the least likely skill that will come into play when using Chinese.

Sometimes I considering learning to write better but then it always seem to be time better spent working on tingli.

[chrix]

I think the opinions are quite divided on the issue of whether to learn how to write or not. It's true that in today's computer age you'll have few occasions to jot down anything on paper except for the occasional phone number and Advanced HSK exam , but I think learning how to write would also serve as a useful mnemonic for beginners that would help them a lot with their reading and remembering of characters in general? I can't speak from experience because I already knew kanji before I even started out learning Chinese....

[abcdefg]

My Chinese is a disorderly patchwork quilt and I would not propose it as a model for anyone. Have been studying off and on for about two and a half years.

Learned speaking and listening first, just sliding around with my tones until I achieved “comprehensibility,” just trying my best to mimic native speakers at every stage of the process.

I know a lot of words and phrases and can actually communicate passably in most daily life settings, albeit without the slightest trace of elegance. Learned grammar when it served meaning and never cared about it otherwise.

Became frustrated at not being able to read signs, menus and such, so tackled reading in search of basic peasant-level literacy. Can now read most text messages and simple e-mails as well.

Although I’ve done a writing course in the past, now I only practice writing the words I find difficult to recognize because it helps me remember them. I can also write my Chinese name when I drop off laundry.

I know enough stroke order to usually draw characters properly in search software such as Pablo or MDBG.

I will almost surely never achieve a balanced skill set and probably would tackle the project differently if I had the luxury of doing it over.