If you had to relearn Mandarin Chinese from scratch, what advice would you give yourself?

[lechuan]

Knowing what you now know about learning Mandarin Chinese, what advice would you give yourself if had to go back in time and start over from scratch?

I initially posted this here, but though it would be an interesting topic of it's own. Would love to hear everyone else's specific advice, as well as feedback. Would also like to know the reasons behind a recommendation (ie. if you're going to say "blah blah is a waste of time", would be niced to know why you think it's a waste of time, and why your suggested method is an improvement).

Here's the advice I'd give to myself if I started learning from scratch again:

I'm a big fan of Zhang Peng Peng's approach to learning Chinese. Start by using pinyin only for conversation, in parallel start learning all the radicals, then characters. Keep character learning independent so that it doesn't slow down acquisition of conversation skills. Later on when you have a sufficient foundation of characters and conversation, start to go character only. Thus, I tend to steer away from textbooks in the early stages since textbooks tend to require you to learn to read/write what you're learning to speak; that and I find the student-life dialogs somewhat less relevant/interesting than the selection available in podcast dialogs.

BUY SOME STUDY TOOLS:

1) Refurbished iPad Mini 16GB Retina or an Android tablet, (for Pleco, Skritter, MP3 Player, Reading, etc.)
2) Pleco Pro Bundle Awesome dictionary. Definitely get the Tuttle Learner's dictionary if you're a beginner (either the paper or Pleco version).
3) Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar. A great grammar reference that will serve you well through the elementary/intermediate level.

LEVEL 1

1) Concentrate almost exclusively on pronunciation at the beginning. The quicker you have done your phonetics and tones, they less time you'll spend undoing mistakes later on. One good resource is McGraw Hill's Chinese Pronunciation with CD-Rom. Book is okay, but the CD-ROM is great. Lots of audio, sammy diagrams, and video of chinese people's mouths.

2) Start learning from audio-based dialogs. This will help develop listening skills (as opposed to books which are usually reading based) Chinese Learn Online Subscription. I prefer CLO for beginners because it is progressive. Each lesson builds on the last, introducing a few new words per lesson, while continuing to use previously learned vocabulary. Pimsleur also very good, but much less "bang for the buck". Look up grammar in your grammar book. Use Pleco SRS flashcards to review vocabulary.

3) Learn your character components! Concentrate on the most common components (such as Olle Ling's list of the top 100 most common radicals) Don't necessarily need to worry about pronunciations. It's going to be much easier to learn characters if you already recognize the individual components that they're made up of.

4) Learn the most basic patterns of grammar. Learning a few basic patterns that you can substitute new vocabulary into will prevent from falling onto speaking Mandarin with English grammar patterns. Basic Patterns of Chinese Grammar is a good choice in this regards.

LEVEL 2

1) Continue learning primarily from dialogs/podcasts. Switch to Chinesepod, or similar, once you're done with CLO. Concentrate on listening and speaking Skills. Repeat/mimic dialogs. Look up grammar points.

 

2) Start learning chinese characters. Goal of 1000+ characters. I personally used Heisig's Remembering Simplified/Traditional Hanzi, which I like because it has a complete roadmap for 3000 characters, and always teaches a character's components before teaching the character. Character recognition will probably be slow at this point, but that will be improved in the next step when we do more reading. Use Skritter to review the reading/writing of characters.

 

3) Continue to rely on pinyin-only for learning to speak, and treat character-learning as it's own separate exercise. At this point we don't want characters to slow down conversation/speaking skills.

LEVEL 3

1) OPTIONAL(?) Introduce a (character-heavy, or at least one that puts the pinyin separately from the characters) textbook now if you wish. I chose the Integrated Chinese series for iPad, mainly to practice reading and go over grammar points. It includes audio of dialogs/vocab, has character-only dialogs (with optional pop-up pinyin dialogs). I mainly wanted to see what I was missing by not going through a textbook.

2) Continue podcasts/dialogs.

3) Chinese Readers (ie. Chinese Breeze, Mandarin Companion). Reading will be your "real world SRS" for reviewing vocabulary.

4) Continue learning characters. Either as encountered, or with Remembering Simplified/Traditional Hanzi 2, if you still like it. Continue reviewing with Skritter

LEVEL 4

I haven't got here yet, so don't know exactly what to recommend. Probably more real-world listening, reading and mimicking. I'd probably discontinue Skritter at this point, maybe continue with upper-intermediate/advanced Chinesepod podcasts, and watching native shows. I'd probably go through more thorough grammar/pattern books, such as Chinese, A comprehensive Grammar, 330 Common Chinese Patterns, Using Chinese: A Guide to Contemporary Usage, Using Chinese Synonyms, etc

[xiaokaka]

Just one question. What do you mean by learning all the radicals? All the Kangxi radicals including extremely rare ones? Or just common components (some of which are defined as radicals and some which are not – including semantic components – as the Kangxi radicals are quite arbitrary).

Now in the day of smartphones and electronic dictionaries (e.g., Pleco and Wenlin), I think learning radicals just because they are radicals is quite overrated. However, I do agree with that you should learn components—semantic and phonetic—from an early stage!

[Nathan Mao]

I would have sought out/found this site much earlier.

...although the internet wasn't really available when I started studying Chinese...at least, I didn't have internet access until after I graduated from DLI....mp3s didn't show up until years later, and even being able to read/write Chinese on the internet also took 3-4 years, to the best of my memory.

 

Other than that, I am pretty pleased with my method:

hand-written flashcards early while studying with native speakers, then after achieving basic fluency, transitioning away from "study" to directly using the language via music, movies, television shows, news articles, books, and news programs.

[lechuan]

Just one question. What do you mean by learning all the radicals?

 

Good point, xiaokaka. "components" is a better way to describe my intention (and I have updated my post above). Thanks!

[hedwards]

I'd recommend that I focus primarily on the first 100 or so radicals and really learn them, then just expose myself to the remaining ones, but not as much as the more common ones.

 

I'd also recommend that I not try to learn the meaning, reading and writing of words all at once, that I focus on the recognition skills first and then in the next sweep worry about production.

 

Getting good software like Pleco and Chinese Text Analyzer to make it more efficient to pick up language from signs and books is another thing that I should have done. With all the language I was exposed to, it would have been nice to have been able to read at least some of it.

 

I think lastly, I would encourage myself to find some hobbies that I could engage in using Chinese.

[icebear]

I'd recommend trying to go through as much material with as little review as possible. I used to take the approach of limiting exposure and really focusing on what I was seeing - i.e. reading a chapter of a book and rereading it until it was perfect. I now think its better read/review a reasonable amount, but then quickly move forward (or sideways!). I think its better to read a similar chapter of a different text book series than to reread the same chapter of NPCR (or others) for the nth time, which many people get stuck with. That makes learning boring and discourages more reading. 

 

I feel pretty happy about how I pursued listening and speaking - my main gripe is how long it took me to buckle down on characters and reading, and how timid I was then even once I resolved to start them. 

[Bad Cao Cao]

关注较少初级学生的看法,多听经验丰富的人,比如:

 

Gaudfroy : http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/12767-laowai-on-chinese-radio/?p=120030

Mair : http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11580

Kaufmann : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPhmTOmB26E

[abcdefg]

Knowing what you now know about learning Mandarin Chinese, what advice would you give yourself if had to go back in time and start over from scratch?

 

Simple.

 

I would learn to read and write along with learning conversation, instead of planning to go back and deal with those issues later. Even if it slowed my progress.

 

As it is, I will never have a balanced skill set. I will always be someone who is conversationally fluent, albeit with mistakes, but is only marginally literate.

[lechuan]

 

 

Bad Cao Cao: 关注较少初级学生的看法,多听经验丰富的人,比如:

 

Bad Cao Cao, you have advised beginners not to listen to the views (expressed in this post, I assume), but rather to listen to experienced people in the links you provided (which are very interesting by the way, thanks!, I'll look through them in detail later).

 

Would you care to tell us why, in detail, you believe the methods in the links you provided are better than the views expressed here?. I'm perfectly happy to be wrong, and would love to learn more effective learning methods. But I would appreciate knowing why I'm wrong.

[lechuan]

 

hedwards: I think lastly, I would encourage myself to find some hobbies that I could engage in using Chinese.

 

That sounds like a great idea. What kind of hobbies do you think would work well for a language learner?

[Nathan Mao]

Well, it's not for everyone, but I learned a good deal of interesting new vocabulary when I took up assassination as a hobby.

[hedwards]

@lechuan, I think the easiest one would be cards. Cooking is another good one, there's language involved, but most of the language involves physical actions or senses that you can stimulate with the food. Ping Pong was another one that I took up while I was over there. I'm definitely not as good as the kids I was playing with, but by the end of my year I was respectable. Respectable as in they weren't as concerned with helping me save face and were playing a little more aggressively.

 

Perhaps this is a topic for its own thread, because I'm sure there's a lot more possibilities, I'm just drawing a blank on other things.

[Bad Cao Cao]

不是批评你就是我的想法而已我觉得你的办法除了浪费时间以外没有什么好效果. 看你这样的样子吧--还在写英文--为什么错过一个接触中文的机会？一定要多听朱力安吧

 

http://tv.cntv.cn/video/C39192/f0ca8aadbba2406a82212f19da908785

[renzhe]

看你这样的样子吧--还在写英文--为什么错过一个接触中文的机会？

应该是为了守这个论坛的规矩:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/1959-terms-and-conditions/

• This is an English-language forum about Chinese. Posts and their titles should be mostly in English, except in sections specifically for practicing Chinese. Obviously the use of some Chinese is necessary for examples, etc, but a non-speaker of Chinese should still be able to understand the purpose of your post.

[Ruben von Zwack]

I feel an "ignore" button coming ... or do we have one somewhere already?

[imron]

Bad Cao Cao, you have advised beginners not to listen to the views (expressed in this post, I assume)

I read his advice as "don't pay so much attention to the opinions of beginners, and pay more attention to those with have learnt the language to a high level".

 

I think that there's nothing wrong with that core sentiment - it makes sense to seek the opinions of those who are at where you would like to be rather than people still trying to figure out what works or doesn't (otherwise it's the blind leading the blind).   I do however think this sentiment was perhaps expressed clumsily - and perhaps unintentionally, a little rudely in his follow up post.

[renzhe]

I would appreciate it if Bad Cao Cao actually explained what exactly his advice is.

I would suggest a new thread with a short, general overview of what he thinks a beginner should do, and how exactly it would help. Then we can have a discussion, exchange experiences, and generally do things that you're supposed to do on a forum. It is likely that we'd agree on some things, like the importance of listening to native materials.

This parachute stealth commando approach of snarky comments in random threads is not really helping anyone learn.

[hedwards]

@imron, I don't think that it's a good idea to write off people that are relative beginners, but how long one has been working is worth considering. The problem with writing off beginners is that the people who have succeeded have succeeded in part because the advice out there worked for them. I'd wager that most of the successful language learners are following the orthodox methods and the beginners are much more likely to need methods that the successful folks never needed. Or at least are in need of encouragement and advice about how to actually use the advice.

 

Also people who have successfully learned are less likely to remember the just how awkward and messy things were early on.

 

Obviously, it would be foolish to assume that beginners are always right, but I'd tend to trust them more to know what the state of affairs was during the early period more as they don't have the later success clouding their judgment about what it's really like to be at that stage.

[Nathan Mao]

Slight digression to help make my point:

In the US, the education system has made what some critics contend are significant miss-steps:

They replaced phonics with "whole word" reading techniques.

They replaced rote multiplication/addition table drills with number sense tricks.

 

In both cases, the notion grew from the observation of techniques that advanced students used.

 

The thinking was that if the advanced students used those techniques, then it would help the beginning users.

 

Reynolds' Law states that "Subsidizing the markers of status doesn't produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them."  This is directed at US policies that attempt to expand the middle class, but I think it applies well here, too.

 

Another way of putting it is, "You have to learn to walk before you can run."

 

We wouldn't look at the fitness of marathon runners and then expect a 300-lb couch potato to immediately adopt the marathon runner's training regimen.

 

So my take on this debate is:

If someone asks for advice, give them options.  Tell them what you do, why, and how.  But don't pressure the seeker into any specific methods, because:

1) what works for you might not work for them

2) if it works for you, you don't need validation by having someone else adopt the same method

 

Okay, that wasn't really very profound, I know.  

 

[shrug]

 

That's the best I got today.

[xuefang]

I would absolutely spend more time and effort to learn correct pronunciation.

 

I started learning Chinese in Finland where we covered the pinyin and pronunciation, but without putting in the hours of practising I didn't learn a good foundation for my pronunciation. Then when I moved to Guangzhou I dated a Cantonese guy with terrible Mandarin for two years which helped me to learn how to speak more fluently, but did terrible for my pronunciation. I also continued to ignore improving my tones.

 

Now after four years in China and being together with my husband for over a year (his putonghua is quite good), my pronunciation have improved a lot, but still I think that putting the effort in the beginning would save me a lot of head ache later on.

 

Chinese people are great at complementing us foreingers and I hear "You're pronunciation is more standard than ours" all the time from non-native Mandarin speakers (Cantonese for example). But I know I still have a lot of work in front of me.

 

So if I were to start from the beginning I would work more with my tones. Listen more, have a tutor to listen me speak and read out loud, do exercises to help me regongnice different tones from audio etc. I would also pay more attention to pronouncing zh ch sh and the differen between -n and -ng. I think I know how to pronounce them, but I've been a lazy speaker.

 

Now more than 5 years in learning Mandarin, I want to finally fix this problem and take up a challenge to take the 普通话水平测试 in October. Exams seem to motivate me the best.