12 Months of Mandarin -- My Experience and Methods

[Isaak]

(This is a summarized version of a longer essay on my personal website)

 

Inspired by Scott Young and the legendary Tamu post on here, I decided to go full-speed at Mandarin. This is my report back to the community of an intense 1-year studying protocol, and share my methods. I also compiled some of the best anki decks into a single mega-deck, which some might find useful. 

 

TLDR: Over the last 365 days, I studied Mandarin for fun at an intense pace. With anki, tutors, and traveling accelerating my learning, I ended up getting to the level of comfortable conversational fluency. My Mandarin isn't perfect nor perfectly fluent, but I can now handle everything up to technical conversations in the area of my PhD.

 

Month 1: I happened to watch a snippet of the anime Demon Slayer in an obscure Chinese fan dub. Ironically, this caught my attention. I also had lots of Chinese friends, so why not learn a little Mandarin? Oh my, I had no idea how obsessed I'd end up with this "little" side project.

 

My school had a breakneck-speed Mandarin beginner class. I loved it. Within a week, we learned pinyin. We learned the tones. We learned to read. We learned to write. Then started talking immediately, every single day. Talking in horribly horribly broken Chinese, but nevertheless having conversations.

 

The beginning was by far the hardest time, and many tuned out or dropped out. But I had lots of fun. I played a lot. I wrote a horrible poem about humanity colonizing Mars. My Chinese was absolute crap, but I was improving fast. Chinese is my fifth language, and I had a few tricks up my sleeve.

 

Month 3: Spaced repetition is a superweapon. Anki is the core reason why I was able to study Chinese efficiently. Alongside Anki, I adopted other methods to learn faster: Frequency-based learning. Comprehensible input. Reading lots as soon as I could, especially graded readers. Buying a calligraphy pen-brush and learned how to write the 600 Chinese characters. FSRS. Creating a 100,000-card Anki megadeck.

 

The other superweapon I implemented was personalized tutoring. My first month studying Chinese was mostly in a 20-people class. But then, I took Bloom's Two-Sigma effect to heart and got myself lots of 1-1 tutoring. The more time I spent on tutoring, the more it accelerated my studies.

There’s legends like Tamu spending dozens of hours with tutors, but I’d mostly spend up to six hours a week. More would start to detract from my main focus, which were still my math studies. My default for working with tutors was to lead a "normal" conversation. I had two strict rules for conversations with tutors: 1. Only Chinese, no English. 2. Correct every single mistake I make.

 

At the start, this tutoring was excruciatingly slow. But it was very worth it. After the chat, I’d ask them to send me a summary of my key mistakes and newly learned vocabulary. It’d add that to my Anki. 

 

I made lots of mistakes. I still do. Tutoring gives me a tight and fast feedback loop on fixing my mistakes.

 

Month 6: My Chinese still had far to go. Apart from the study sprints while traveling, I tried to keep up a consistently high pace back at home. Chinese wasn’t my focus then — math and neuro were. Chinese was consistently the largest side project, clocking some 15 hours a week.

Consistency was the most important part to keep a high pace of progress. Here’s what a typical focused day might’ve looked like:

• Wake up, 1 hour of Anki
• Do my main thing for 8-9 hours (math undergrad, neuro grad school, …)
• 1 hour tutoring call before dinner some days
• 1 hour of Chinese content before sleep, e.g. anime dubs or books

 

Month 12: Exactly 365 days after I started, I reached a vocabulary of 8000 words and characters in my Anki. 8000 words and characters makes most content I encounter relatively understandable. My vocabulary is a weird personal mix: Basics including everything up to HSK5, anime vocabulary, biology, mathematics, and random everyday stuff from travelling.

 

Vocabulary is only one part of fluency. It's important to keep eyes on the goal: The goal of any language is to communicate effectively. Prompted for feedback on my progress, my usually reserved tutor recently commented: “This was the fastest learning pace from zero to advanced conversational fluency I have ever seen."

 

That's kind, but being fluent feels like it’ll always be an overstatement. Especially for Chinese. I’m definitely not Fluent™. If there's demand, I might post an interview with my tutor here.

 

I sometimes still get my tones wrong. Full-speed native speech is sometimes still tough. Local dialects remain a complete mystery to me.

 

I’d say I’m comfortable with Chinese. I can comfortably travel in any Mandarin-speaking place. I can comfortably hold long conversations. I can comfortably watch most content. I can comfortably build relationships entirely in Mandarin.

This an excerpt of my full experience write-up, you can check it out here: isaak.net/mandarin

I also listed out 60 pages of methods which where useful, from beginner to advanced. That includes my personal anki deck, and much more. isaak.net/mandarinmethods

 

I'm grateful for this forum and r/Chinese for helping me, even though I was lurking for most of that time. I'm not sure what happened to Tamu, who's been away for a while. It's been a decade since his post, but it was life-changing for me.

 

Tamu, if you're out there — huge thank you for the inspiration. What a legend.

[becky82]

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That's kind, but being fluent feels like it’ll always be an overstatement. Especially for Chinese. I’m definitely not Fluent™. I sometimes still get my tones wrong. Full-speed native speech is sometimes still tough. Local dialects remain a complete mystery to me.

 

That certainly reflects my opinion on "fluency".  The more fluent I get, the more aware I am of how much room for improvement there is, and the less likely I am to consider myself fluent.  Do you sometimes get your tones wrong because you don't know (or have forgotten) what the correct tones are, or is it more like you know the correct tones but they come out incorrectly?

 

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The goal? I want to reach a level where the legendary Three-Body Problem will be comfortably readable.

 

I have it (well, the first book) on my desk right now; it's not the most difficult reading material.  Have you read e.g. Roald Dahl books translated into Chinese?  That gave me a big boost in reading proficiency (and confidence).

[Jan Finster]

Sounds like awefully little listening practice. Maybe you are a natural, but the few people who go from zero to HSK 5 or even 6 in a year, have invested way way more. 

Not sure how 8K words based on Anki memorisation allows you to follow most content. What does that even mean? 

 

Care to share some YT channels that you can comfortably folllow at 8K?

 

[Flickserve]

Enjoyed reading about your experience.