Advice for Learning Chinese

[Nathan Mao]

Maybe this is obvious, or has already been talked to death, dunno.

 

I picked up significant speed in learning Chinese when I started whispering to myself as I read Chinese.

 

How this helps:

1) When reading, you pick up meanings from context, or you recognize words (character combinations) without necessarily remembering the pronunciation of all characters in the word. If you read silently, you might not recognize that you slipped over that word, and you might erroneously think your reading level is better than it is. If you read aloud, you will hear yourself stumble on those less-familiar characters, highlighting your need to review.

2) When reading aloud, you get to hear how you pronounce the words and whether the stress flow (tones) are similar to how you've heard Chinese people speak.  The more you read aloud, the more you can practice making yourself sound like a Chinese speaker.

3) By listening to yourself read aloud, you have engaged a second section of your brain, the listening part in addition to the reading part.  This increases the number of connections/synapses in your memory, and increases the chance that you will recognize characters by hearing them in Chinese words.

4) By speaking aloud, you are increasing the number of times your mouth shapes the Chinese pronunciation. You are practicing combining different tones together. You are practicing the retroflex and other sounds that are more common in Chinese than in English. Like martial arts, or any other physical discipline (like sports or music), the repetition increases the likelihood your muscles will reflexively do everything right in a stressful situation that obstructs conscious control of your muscles.

5) By speaking aloud, you are engaging a third part of the brain. The more parts of your brain that are engaged simultaneously, the more effective and faster your learning is.

 

The reason I whisper is to not disturb anyone else around me when I'm reading.  Feel free to not whisper if you are alone.

[abcdefg]

2) When reading aloud, you get to hear how you pronounce the words and whether the stress flow (tones) are similar to how you've heard Chinese people speak.

I agree with most of what you've said and think that your technique is good as far as it goes. But it's easy to fool yourself into thinking your pronunciation is OK when it's really not.

 

I recently started working with a new teacher who has convinced me, to my dismay, that my elocution is actually crap. Before she came along, I would have bet a paycheck that I was reading and speaking decently, albeit not perfectly; sort of "good enough."

 

My point is that you need a teacher or a native speaker who is absolutely ruthless, not a friend or someone overly eager to please, to listen to you read and talk, at least from time to time, whether you are whispering or doing it out loud.

[Nathan Mao]

You should be ruthless to yourself, too.  It helps to have a good ear to be ruthless with, for that matter, but I don't have any advice on how to develop one...

[abcdefg]

You are fortunate to be so talented.

[Nathan Mao]

Just a long, long background in music.

 

I struggled with Chinese for years. Graduated bottom third in my class at DLI.  But I've kept at it. 瞎猫抓死耗子