Hacking Chinese

A Practical Guide to Learning Mandarin

Olle Linge

© 2015-2016 Olle Linge

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

1.1 You can learn Chinese

1.2 What is language hacking?

1.3 Why use language hacking?

1.4 About myself and how I learnt Chinese

1.5 Hacking Chinese 101

2. Hacking Chinese

2.1 Learning a language is an adventure

2.2 The quest for a better way to learn

2.3 Improving your Chinese

2.4 Language input and output

2.5 Creating a good environment for learning Chinese

2.6 Recommended resources

3. Learning characters, words and grammar

3.1 Vocabulary is king

3.2 Learning vocabulary: Basic principles

3.3 Spaced repetition software

3.4 Learning characters and words

3.5 Learning Chinese grammar

3.6 Recommended resources

4. Improving listening and reading

4.1 Basic principles

4.2 Improving listening ability

4.3 Improving reading ability

4.4 Recommended resources

5. Improving speaking and writing

5.1 Basic principles

5.2 Improving speaking ability

5.3 Learning pronunciation

5.4 Improving writing ability

5.5 Recommended resources

6. Managing your studies

6.1 Getting things done

6.2 Keeping track of your learning

6.3 Time management and planning

6.4 Recommended resources

7. Epilogue

Guide

Begin Reading

1. Introduction

1.1 You can learn Chinese

Learning a language to a level where you can converse freely with natives is much easier than most people think. This is partly because many of us have had bad experiences of learning foreign languages in school. For instance, I studied French for seven years, and although I got good grades, I couldn’t really speak the language very well. If it’s so hard to learn French, it must surely be impossible to learn a language like Chinese?

I’m here to tell you that it’s definitely possible. I learnt Chinese much faster than I learnt French, and to a higher level, too. I have also taught several students who have been able to speak Chinese freely about most common topics after just a few months of studying. That requires complete dedication to learning, even though that path isn’t open for all. The point is that your performance in your high-school foreign language class is a bad indication of what it’s like learning a language with the right method.

I started learning Chinese when I was 24, and since then, I have learnt Chinese in a number of different situations, including traditional foreign language teaching, part-time studying on my own, intensive immersion courses and a graduate programme for teaching Chinese as a second language. I have also taught Chinese courses at university, as well as numerous private students.

Most students don’t want to teach Chinese, don’t need to listen to lectures in linguistics and write papers about Chinese phonetics; conversational fluency is a more common goal. That is within reach for all students, and it doesn’t take five years, but can be achieved in months. Naturally, it will take longer if you don’t study 100%, but the principles you need to succeed remain the same.

The main goal of this book is to help you learn how to learn Chinese. It’s an introduction to language hacking and studying Chinese. In a way, you can regard this book as a course in how to accelerate your own learning.

The book contains both an overview of strategies for learning languages in general, as well as more detailed discussions of specific topics related to learning Chinese in particular.

Since the book deals with methodology and strategy, it doesn’t really matter how much Chinese you know already; it’s written for complete beginners and experienced teachers alike.

You won’t learn Chinese simply by reading this book, though. It’s like when you buy a book with recipes for making delicious cakes: you won’t get to eat the cakes just by reading the book; you have to do the baking yourself. That’s true for this book as well. When you apply what you read here, it will boost your learning, making every hour you spend count for more, but you still have to do the learning yourself.

In Chinese, there is a saying that captures this spirit well:

授人以魚，不如授人以漁
shòu rén yǐ yú, bù rú shòu rén yǐ yú

This is usually translated as: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” In this book, I intend to teach you how to fish.

This book is based on the thousands of hours I’ve spent learning Chinese, as well as on my experience with teaching the language and years learning about and doing research into second language acquisition. It’s also based on more than three hundred articles I’ve written about learning Chinese and the comments and discussions with some of the two million people who have visited Hacking Chinese so far.

However, this book is more than a summary of what I have written before. My online articles are short and fragmentary, whereas this book will give you the bigger picture and help you connect the dots. If you only read this book, you will not miss anything truly essential, but if you only read the online articles, you risk missing the forest for the trees.

1.2 What is language hacking?

The “hacking” in “language hacking” is about understanding how language learning works and using that knowledge to your advantage. It’s about the constant search for a better way of learning. Language hacking is related to computer hacking in the shared values of resourcefulness, experimentation and optimisation, but of course involves nothing illegal or bad. Language hacking is good for everyone and completely safe, even if it might bring you into conflict with conservative teachers.

Teachers and textbooks often only provide their students with what to learn (characters, words, grammar and so on), but often neglect to talk about how the students should go about learning these things. This is what I will talk about in this book.

Language hacking is a skill that can be practised and perfected, so you shouldn’t learn Chinese using an ad hoc method. For example, when you learn pronunciation, you shouldn’t only use the first method that comes to mind. Instead, you should try different methods and compare them, because only then can you find a way that not only works, but is also optimal for you. In short, you need to learn how to learn.

Even if learning is individual to a certain extent, what works for other people is still likely to work for you as well. Thus, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time you need a solution to a problem; language hacking includes being inspired by other people and adapting their ideas to your needs.

In a similar manner, I haven’t invented or come up with all ideas in this book. I have learnt much through my education, as well as reading and discussing online and talking with other learners and teachers. I have then mixed this with my own ideas as well as plenty of experimentation to write this book.

1.3 Why use language hacking?

Can’t you just learn languages in a “natural” or “traditional” way? The answer is yes, you can, but it will take you much longer. The goal of language hacking is to increase the efficiency of your learning, so this book is both for those who study full-time and those who are busy with other things.

Regardless if you take evening classes once a week or are fully immersed in the language, you want to study as efficiently as possible. It’s always smart to have a good method, regardless of why you’re studying. In addition, language hacking makes learning a language more interesting, creative and fun!

1.4 About myself and how I learnt Chinese

I started learning Chinese in an intensive foreign language programme in Sweden. I then moved to Taiwan to continue studying. I remember that when I arrived in Taiwan, I found it hard to express myself in Chinese freely. I remember being able to ask questions, but rarely understanding the answers. I remember being the worst student in my class and understanding perhaps only 20% of what the teacher said.

Through hard work (mostly studying on my own combined with classes, language exchanges and conversations with friends in Chinese), I reached some kind of functional fluency in less than a year. I went from being a passive language student to an independent learner with a passion for improving the way I learnt.

I didn’t think a year in Taiwan was enough, so I decided to stay another year, which took me to a more advanced level where I could express myself freely and understand most Chinese spoken or written for an adult native audience.

Then I went back to Sweden for two years to finish a master’s degree in teaching English and Chinese. Apart from a few online courses, I had no formal instruction in Chinese during this time, but I kept learning on my own and with Chinese-speaking friends. During this period, Hacking Chinese was born.

In 2012, I felt ready to undertake my biggest challenge so far, a master’s degree programme in Chinese mainly for native speakers. I’m still enrolled in the graduate programme for teaching Chinese as a second language at the National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, and this book was written in between lectures, seminars and my own research.

Looking back at my own journey, I can clearly see many of the mistakes I’ve made and how lack of understanding made learning much harder. Alas, I can’t go back in time to help myself, but I can help you. This book is meant to tell you the things I wish I had known earlier, not only as a beginner, but all the way up to an advanced level and beyond.

1.5 Hacking Chinese 101

This book is divided into seven chapters, each focusing on different aspects of language learning. You don’t need to read all the chapters or read them in a certain order, so feel free to jump to chapters that interest you. However, I do suggest that you read the next chapter about general language hacking. If you want to find information about specific topics, please refer to the table of contents or simply search the text.

2. Hacking Chinese

In order to make learning Chinese and language hacking easier to grasp, I’m going to use an analogy. It’s a way of describing language learning that has great explanatory value, and is, in my opinion, much better than the often used “learning a language is a journey”.

Learning Chinese is like parachuting into a foreign land at night. When you wake up the next morning, you don’t really know anything about the alien landscape surrounding you. After establishing a base camp built out of your parachute and some sticks, you start to look around. Slowly, you get to know your immediate surroundings; you learn how to survive.

You start exploring the land in more detail. You don’t stick to the same paths all the time and even though you might get lost or even hurt at times, you keep exploring. Slowly, you get used to your new environment and it starts feeling a bit like home.

You soon learn that there are mountains with glittering peaks far to the west, a vast steaming jungle with strange creatures to the south and an emerald lake hiding a sunken temple to the east. The more you explore, the more you find that this country is not just exotic and fascinating, it’s also huge and contains more things than you will ever be able to explore.

2.1 Learning a language is an adventure

These few paragraphs describe the process of learning Chinese from scratch to an advanced level. I find this analogy very useful for several reasons:

Learning Chinese is like an expedition - With the right attitude, language learning should be like exploring a foreign land. There are so many new things to see and hear that are all different from what you call home. Curiosity and an open mind will take you far.

Learning Chinese isn’t like walking a straight path - Instead, it’s like exploring a landscape where you can move sideways and sometimes also up and down. If you’re not careful, you can end up walking in circles. Having reached a destination far from your base camp doesn’t mean you know everything closer to it.

Learning Chinese is an adventure - You might be after treasure or perhaps you’re just in it for the thrill, but learning Chinese is truly an adventure. As such, it also has its dangers, and success isn’t guaranteed.

You are not alone in this foreign land - Some people are born there and can show you around, even though they might not know the best way of explaining how it all works to you. There are also other people who have parachuted in just like you. Some of them have come farther than you; others may have just arrived. Still others have been here for a long time and enjoy staying behind, helping other people.

Staying in familiar areas won’t teach you much - You learn the most when you leave your comfort zone. If you only deal with the familiar, you will stagnate and stop learning. The reason why most people aren’t prepared to stray far from their comfort zone is because it’s more convenient to stay close to camp, and the unfamiliar territory might look scary. Yet it’s when you go out there that you learn the most!

Navigating the Chinese learning landscape

I could go on, but I think I have shown why I have chosen to base this chapter on this analogy. Now, we’re going to use it to look at a few basic questions that lie at the heart of language hacking:

What’s your destination? Having just landed in the Chinese learning landscape, it’s fine to spend some time simply looking around, but sooner or later, you need to think about what you’re doing here. Where do you want to go? What’s your destination? You need a concrete goal, because this will guide your learning. Defining a long-term goal is often just a question of explicitly stating something you already know, but not always. This first step requires no skill as such; it’s simply an introspective activity where you think about why you’re learning Chinese and what you want to achieve.

What do you need to reach your destination? In order to reach your destination and accomplish your long-term goal, there’s skill to acquire and knowledge to gain. If your goal is mostly focused on spoken Chinese, perhaps you don’t need to learn how to handwrite two thousand characters. If your goal is to be able to read wuxia novels, you’ll be okay even if you don’t know lots of internet slang. Defining your key areas of interest is important and requires some analytical thinking. One basic way of dealing with this is to grade the importance of the four skills listening, speaking, reading and writing. Which one is the most important for you?

Where are you now? This might sound silly, but it’s not a trivial question when it comes to language learning. Look at the long-term goal you specified above. Where are you right now in terms of those skills you think are necessary? In some cases, this is easy to figure out, but at times it’s far from obvious. For instance, students often overestimate their abilities, especially when it comes to pronunciation. The purpose of figuring out where you are now is to allow you to get a clearer picture of what you need to do to reach your destination.

What are some important milestones? The problem with long-term goals is that they might take years to reach and the human mind isn’t really constructed for rewarding behaviour which only bears fruit in the distant future. Walking to a remote mountain range might feel impossible, but reaching the top of next hill feels less daunting. Breaking language learning down into manageable chunks is key for avoiding despair. Knowing your next milestone is enough, trying to plot further into the future than that is just unrealistic. Set several different goals that you think will take you in the right direction. These should be achievable in the foreseeable future, perhaps in a few months from now or at the most one semester.

What can you do right now to get closer to the next milestone? In order to get something done, you need to know what you’re supposed to do. Much procrastination and inactivity come from uncertainty about what to do next, so knowing what’s the next step on your language-learning journey is important. These micro goals shouldn’t be abstract or vague at all, they should be concrete tasks that have measurable outcomes. They should also be achievable, or if you see them as challenges or games, they should be winnable.

I will return to goal management in the chapter about managing your studies; now it’s time to look closer at skill development. What exactly should you do to improve a certain skill to reach your next milestone or improve the weakest of the abilities you need to succeed?

This is where language hacking comes in. The question is very complex and, in a sense, this entire book tries to teach you how to answer it. There is no simple answer because it varies a lot depending on who you are, the situation you’re in and what you want to achieve. We’re going to start by looking at what you need to succeed.

Plotting your path

Why do you want to learn Chinese? What good things will reaching your goal bring? Write down your long-term goal and put it somewhere visible. This should remind you about why you’re spending all this time and effort, but is probably too vague to guide you. For that, you need a few milestones, goals that take a month or two to reach. Write down at least one for each relevant skill: listening, speaking, reading, writing and vocabulary. They should all be steps that are necessary to take before reaching your long-term goal.

For day-to-day learning you need more bite-sized chunks, which involves breaking down your milestones into yet smaller pieces that can be completed with one burst of studying. Let’s leave that for chapter six, though, writing down your long-term goal and some milestones is enough for now.

Five pillars of successful language exploring

Most of the discussion above has been about how to learn, but there are several things about yourself as a learner you also need to be aware of. These pillars will appear again several times throughout this book; this is just an overview.

Attitude - In my opinion, attitude is the key to everything. Try to develop a healthy, positive attitude towards Chinese. Do things that make you feel good about learning and avoid things that make learning feel like a chore. Avoid hanging out with people with a negative attitude; seek out people who inspire you and make you want to study more. Attitude is important because if you dislike learning Chinese, it will be hard to invest the time needed to learn and you will most likely fail.

Motivation - This is the holy grail of language learning. Why do people say that finding a local boyfriend or girlfriend is the most efficient way of learning a second language? Motivation. Why is it that many people learn second language simply through consuming books or films they really enjoy in the target language? Again, motivation. Naturally, motivation alone won’t teach you Chinese, it’s just the starting point, it’s what makes you do all the other things. It’s hard for me to say what motivates you to learn, but finding and maintaining motivation is key, especially if you study on your own.

Cooperation - You don’t have to explore the Chinese landscape alone, there are plenty of people who can help you. Some are fellow travellers who you can team up with for mutual accountability and encouragement, others are professional guides, such as teachers and language coaches, who can provide you with specific help as well as general guidance. Lastly, don’t forget that there are lots of natives around who are usually more than willing to share their native language with you.

Organisation - As with any major project, organisation is important. How do you record words you encounter and want to learn? Keep a notebook with you at all times. How do you review vocabulary? Read and listen a lot, use spaced repetition software. How do you keep track of your progress? Benchmark your proficiency regularly. How do you make sure you never run out of suitable learning materials? Save all useful resources, even if you don’t need them right now, or visit Hacking Chinese Resources.

Reflection - Thinking about the learning process is essential. Reading this book is a good start and it will contribute towards making you more aware of how you learn. I can offer information and inspiration, but the actual doing is of course up to you.

Language hackers are active and independent

Most language learners over the world are passive. They follow a curriculum set by an institution, the instructions from a teacher or the guidance of a textbook. They do what is required of them, nothing more. They stay close to the path someone else has laid out for them through the landscape. They stay in the tour bus. They might have higher ambitions than merely passing courses, but let’s admit it, it’s very easy to just relax and think that if you do what’s asked of you, everything will be fine.

The problem with this approach is twofold. First, you need to adopt an active attitude because no curriculum, teacher or textbook is perfect; they are all flawed in some way, sometimes deeply so. The shortcomings of curricula, teachers and textbooks are what spawned Hacking Chinese in the first place.

Trusting that you will be fine as long as you follow along is perhaps the most serious mistake a language learner can make. You are responsible for your own learning. You can blame a bad teacher or textbook all you want, but you’re the one who will suffer the consequences.

Second, an active attitude is necessary because regardless how good the curriculum, teacher or textbook is, they will not have been designed specifically for you. This means that they haven’t been optimised for your current situation and your current goals. The Chinese you learn will always be a compromise between what you want and what somebody else thinks you ought to learn. It will be up to you to add the bits your teacher or course won’t teach you. Naturally, it goes without saying that if you learn Chinese entirely on your own, you have to be even more active.

Do you take responsibility?

Take a moment to think about your learning situation. First look at the things you’re required to do (if any). What skills are covered? Which skills are left out? Then compare this with your goal for learning Chinese. If you find anything that you need to learn, but which isn’t covered by your course or teacher, you need to address this skill on your own. There will be plenty of help for how to do so in the following chapters.

2.2 The quest for a better way to learn

In this section, we’re going to look at how to improve the way you learn Chinese. Before we get to the practical details, though, I want to say a few things in general about learning methods and efficiency.

Motivation, method and time

There is a huge body of research discussing various factors and their impact on your ability to learn a second language, but most of it is not relevant simply because they are beyond your control. If you can’t change or influence a factor, it is almost meaningless to discuss it for any given individual (although the overall research on a large population is of course still interesting).

Here are two examples:

Age - The influence of age on language learning is a widely and hotly debated topic that I won’t talk much about in this book, not because I don’t think it’s important, but because there’s nothing you can do about it. You are as old as you are, and the only way that changes is minute by minute, hour by hour.

Talent - This word covers a whole range of other, more professional competencies, including phonemic coding, grammatical sensitivity, inductive language learning ability and general memory functions (both working memory and long-term memory). Even if there are studies that show that it is possible to train several of these subsystems, the very word “talent” suggests that it’s something innate and permanent. Talent is only interesting to discuss insofar as it’s possible to influence.

There is another reason that research into language learning isn’t always helpful, namely that it almost exclusively focuses on efficiency. In almost all studies that compare methods, time is kept constant. This is of course necessary; otherwise some people simply spend more time and therefore learn more, regardless of the efficiency of the method.

The point is that in the real world, you are under no obligation to spend a fixed amount of time. If the two methods are identical in terms of how much time you want to spend doing them, then it certainly makes sense to keep time constant when comparing methods, but what if one method bores you to death and the other is so entertaining you find it difficult to stop?

In the world of pure efficiency, these methods would be treated equally. However, since the amount of time you spend is one of the major factors determining how much you learn, it should be obvious that your motivation to use a method is important. This leads us to a very simple formula for learning Chinese:

Time spent learning x Efficiency of method = Chinese learnt

Since this is a multiplication, if you spend no time, it doesn’t matter how good your method is; anything multiplied by zero is zero. But doesn’t that go against what I said above about efficiency being the main concern of this book?

No it doesn’t, because these aren’t mutually exclusive. There’s nothing that says that you can’t spend a lot of time and use an efficient method at the same time. In the following sections, we’re going to look at just that, how to spend more time and how to find a more efficient method.

There are two ways you can increase the time you spend learning Chinese: motivation and management.

Motivation is about anything that makes you want to study more and is crucial for all learners. Humans aren’t machines and you can’t simply program yourself to study for a certain number of hours per day. Motivation is sometimes divided into internal and external motivation. The first deals with your own interests and preferences, what you think is fun and what you like doing. The second deals with your environment, such as a need to be able to use Chinese for integration, education or work.

Management is necessary for all learners, especially for people who lead busy lives and still want to learn Chinese. Since time management is a skill, it’s much easier to practise, learn and improve compared with motivation, which is a tricky beast.

Since time management will be dealt with in great detail in chapter six, I will only discuss motivation in the following section.

Do you spend enough time?

Learning Chinese requires a lot of time, regardless of how good your method is. How much time do you spend on learning Chinese right now? It’s very hard to make an accurate estimate, so I want you to write down how much you study for one week and see how that compares to your expectations. If you study less than you want to, you need to find ways of increasing the time, preferably outside the classroom.

Study more by increasing motivation

As mentioned above, there are at least two kinds of motivation: internal and external. Let’s start with internal motivation. The goal here is to make learning Chinese as enjoyable and interesting as possible. The best way of formulating this into a rule of thumb is to approach it from the opposite direction:

Always strive to reduce the negative feelings associated with learning Chinese.

As we have already discussed above, if you don’t spend enough time using a method, it doesn’t matter how good it is. Therefore, changing elements of your study routine that you dislike is more important than trying to make them more efficient. That comes later.

If you don’t like one particular way of writing characters, try another and see if it works better. If I tell you that spaced repetition software is the best thing since sliced bread (I will later), but you hate it, you should find some other way of achieving the same thing. Of course, you can’t just skip vocabulary because you don’t like to review things, but you can make it suck as little as possible.

There are many ways you can make learning Chinese more fun. The best way is to look at what you normally like doing regardless of language, and then find ways of doing that in Chinese. In this way, your Chinese learning piggybacks on something you already love doing.

The most obvious way is to speak with real people. Humans are social creatures, so just the fact that you’re communicating with someone usually makes it more fun. Being able to communicate is also the main goal of most students, so learning a language by using it is a great idea in general.

Let’s look at a few other examples: If you love…

…music, focus on learning Chinese songs and study the lyrics

…games, play games in Chinese and pay extra attention to language

…travelling, travel in China or read travel blogs

…manga, read comics and watch films, pick a genre you like

…sports, watch broadcasts in Chinese or practice sports in China

…TV shows or movies, watch them in Chinese (with subtitles)

There are also many indirect ways you can use passions, hobbies or interests, such as using them as topics for conversations or articles you write. If you share a common interest with a native speakers, that’s also a very powerful way of learning. The general principle I try to follow as much as possible is this:

Engage in activities that would be interesting in your native language.

This is one of the cornerstones of task-based learning and teaching. Instead of putting language form in focus, language function is what matters and through accomplishing tasks that are in themselves meaningful, students learn to use the language. Obviously, you need to focus on form as well, but that should come afterwards.

Now we’re also very close to external or instrumental motivation, which basically means learning Chinese because it is necessary or useful. It can be to integrate socially or because you speak Chinese at work or in class. Instrumental motivation can be very powerful so try to put yourself in situations where taking your Chinese to the next level isn’t optional but a requirement.

For instance, my Chinese learning since 2012 has been about surviving my master’s programme. Of course, I still study because I enjoy it, but most of my learning has been done in order to pass courses, stay afloat in the programme and fit in with native speakers in an academic setting.

Another example of this would be moving to a Chinese-speaking environment, which requires you to learn the language to lead a normal life. This is provided that you don’t find an expatriate bubble, but that’s not something I will discuss further here.

Do you enjoy learning Chinese?

Write down a list of things you really enjoy doing, regardless of language, then go through the list and think about how you can use each to learn Chinese. It differs greatly between activities, but there’s always something you can do. Some activities can be completely converted, others need to be approached indirectly, such as when choosing reading or listening topics matching your interests.

Improving the method with the language hacking cycle

Improving how you learn Chinese is mostly about trying new methods and evaluating how they work for you. Rather than sitting back and letting someone force-feed you information, go out there and explore on your own! The likelihood is that you’re the only one who really cares about your own learning. Do the following:

Select a milestone - The milestone should be clearly defined and you should make an effort to analyse what skills are involved and what you need to reach it. You could also make a list of things you need to be able to do, but which you can’t do at the moment. That will leave you with a list of concrete problems to be solved. Solving such problems is what language hacking is about.

Gather intelligence - Before you can take action, you need to know more about the situation, including the nature of the goal, your own strengths and weaknesses and what other people have to say about the problem you face. You’re very unlikely to be the first learner in a similar situation. Read, observe, discuss!

Choose a method - Once you know roughly what’s going on, you need to choose a method to try. Evaluating what works without trying it first is hard, especially if you haven’t learnt many languages before. Simply trusting someone who seems to know what he’s talking about is fine before you learn more about how you prefer to learn languages. Don’t be afraid of discarding methods you don’t feel apply to you, but don’t be afraid of copying what seems to work for other people either.

Apply the method - This is a step which is sometimes overlooked by armchair language learners who theorise too much and put too little into practice. If you see something that seems to make sense, try it! Even if your current method feels okay, there might be other ways of learning that are even better.

Tweak your method - Finding something that (just barely) works and stopping there is what normal learners do. What I want you to do instead is to keep on adjusting and changing your method according to what you learn about yourself and language learning. Save anything you come across that is interesting, then combine, tweak and configure these methods to match your specific situation.

Bleed, toil, cry and sweat - Even if you have a good method, learning a language takes a lot of effort and persistence. There is no silver bullet and there is no substitute for spending hundreds upon hundreds of hours. Passive skills (listening and reading) take a huge amount of time to get used to and active skills (speaking and writing) require practice.

Look at the view, enjoy the journey - Learning a language certainly involves blood, toil, tears and sweat, but don’t forget that having fun and enjoying the journey is important, too. Sure, you need to work hard to succeed, but there’s nothing that says you can’t work hard in an agreeable or even enjoyable way. Always strive to maximise the fun factor when learning, or at the very least, minimise the amount of blood and tears.

From this it follows that this book can’t be about showing you the Golden Path® to Instant Success™. Your situation is unique to you, and I can’t tell you the best way to achieve your goals without knowing you and your learning situation.

However, I can help you devise your own method and guide you on your road to a deeper understanding of how to learn Chinese as efficiently as possible. I can also show you what seems to work well for a large number of other learners and is therefore likely to work for you too.

Use the language hacking cycle

The language hacking cycle looks abstract, but it’s meant to be used. Select one problem you’re facing right now or one area you need to improve. Then go through each step of the cycle: gather intelligence, choose a method, apply it and finally tweak it. When you’ve done this once, it will feel more natural. Don’t forget that this book contains many suggestions for how to learn, so you can start the intelligence gathering in the appropriate chapter!

Self-experimentation

The approach described above is similar to the scientific method. Instead of trusting received wisdom handed down from a higher authority, you investigate and find the truth yourself.

You should of course listen to what other people say, especially if they are backed up by research or have broad experience of language learning or teaching, but considering how many weird things I’ve heard from other students and teachers, I think it’s healthy to always maintain a critical but open attitude.

One main advantage with self-experimentation over normal research is that you’re only interested in what works for you. If I did a study that showed that method A is better than method B for learning vocabulary, but only had one person in the study, I would be ignored (and rightly so). However, if you happen to be that individual, the results are highly relevant for you!

Individual differences, learning styles and general truths

One of the reasons I place so much importance on the process is that I want you to understand the principles so that you can employ them on your own.

This book is written for a large and diverse readership and there’s no way I can predict who’s going to read it and what kind of situation you’re in. In my opinion, the are two main difference between learners:

Different goals - You and I are probably learning Chinese with different goals. I have already discussed why it’s essential to know where you’re going on your Chinese learning expedition and it follows that if you’re heading in a completely different direction, you might need another method. My mission here is to provide you with information and inspiration to find that method.

Different preferences - The second difference is that we like different things. I find some ways of learning really interesting and they can keep me focused for hours, other methods just make me frustrated and I lose interest almost immediately. However, the very method I despise might be your favourite and vice versa.

That being said, I think there are more general truths than there are individual differences when it comes to language learning. We are, after all, carrying around the same kind of brain and even if our final destinations might be different, we’re still mostly going in the same direction. There are two lessons to learn from this.

What works well for other people is likely to work for you as well. Start with trying what other people suggest before you invent your own method. Don’t reinvent the wheel.

Language learners are more homogeneous than most people think. You might have heard that some people prefer visual learning, others aural and so on, but this idea is mostly found in popular science books and blogs, and has little foundation in real science. In reality, all learners benefit from variation.

This is why I think it’s meaningful to write this book and the articles on Hacking Chinese. I also think this is the reason many people find what I write helpful. Of course, I can’t promise that everything in this book will work flawlessly for you, but the likelihood is that if it works well for me and other people who have used the same methods, it will work for you as well.

2.3 Improving your Chinese

When filling in an application form or writing a CV, language skills are often represented using only one measurement. My English is C2, I have achieved professional fluency in Chinese and so on. This is obviously a gross oversimplification since language proficiency is complex and can be divided into any number of smaller skills.

This brings us to the main point of this section, namely how to figure out what to focus on next. If there are so many different things you can and need to improve, how do you choose what you should focus on?

To find the answer, we need to return to the expedition-in-a-foreign-land analogy. As we have already seen, any analysis must start from the questions “Where are you now?” and “Where do you want to go?” To get from the former to the latter, you need to improve several skills; your task is to figure out which one is currently having the biggest negative influence on your progress towards your goal. In other words, focus on the weakest link in the chain.

Weak links and the convenience trap

The reasoning behind this is very simple: the better you become at something, the more time it takes you to make significant progress. Time invested in strengthening the weakest link in the chain will make the whole chain stronger compared with further strengthening the already sufficiently strong links.

Here are a few typical examples where you should focus on improving your weakest link, but where many do the exact opposite:

Group work - Since people generally care more about the final product than learning, most groups allocate tasks based on who’s best suited. If you wanted to learn as much as possible, you should be assigned the task you’re worst at.

Practising sports - I’ve practised several sports such as gymnastics that include flexibility, and it has occurred to me that many people, including myself, tend to spend more time doing stretches they are already good at. I’ve also noticed that if one side is better than the other, I tend to stretch that side more.

Language learning - Students who are already good at reading spend even more time reading, whereas students who are good at speaking tend to speak more. If you really care about your learning you should do the exact opposite. Always playing to your strong sides leads to short-term success but long-term stagnation.

The reason we focus on what we already know is because it requires less effort. Humans are lazy and doing something you have done before is associated with cognitive ease, doing something new is correlated with cognitive strain. I call this “the convenience trap”.

Escaping the convenience trap is more easily said than done, but I think that being aware of the problem helps a great deal. Next time you set priorities or choose what you should focus on, don’t go for the easy option. Leave your comfort zone!

Finding the weakest link

You probably already know what your weakest link is. If you don’t, think back to various situations where you have used Chinese and try to identify what limited you the most. Was it hard to find the right words when speaking? Did you have troubles with tones when listening? And so on. Select one of your weakest links and go back and apply the language hacking cycle to it!

Leaving your comfort zone

You learn when you expose yourselves to new things. You learn when you try to adapt to new situations. Therefore, if you constantly encounter new challenging situations, you learn much more quickly than if you stay with the old and familiar. In short, staying in your comfort zone is bad for learning, leaving it is good.

There is a problem, however. It’s called ”comfort zone” for a reason. To deliberately choose something uncomfortable over something comfortable requires force of will and mental energy. It may also involve taking social risks or do other things that might make you feel uneasy. You might also be too tired to leave the comfort zone, a problem I will talk more about in chapter six.

If you want to learn Chinese efficiently, though, leaving your comfort zone is essential. You can do this in a number of different ways and to different degrees depending on how brave you are, how much energy you have and what the situation is like.

If you like conversing with strangers, you probably need no encouragement; given the opportunity you should use Chinese as much as possible. The different situations you use Chinese in will gradually build up your proficiency and enable you to cope with most situations.

Personally, I’m not an extrovert and I don’t feel comfortable with chatting up random strangers in a foreign language, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t leave my comfort zone, it just means I need to figure out ways of doing it that I’m okay with.

Before I enrolled in a master’s degree program, I spent around two years learning Chinese at various language centres in Taiwan. I always tried to find the most difficult class they allowed me to join. If they didn’t allow me in, I insisted. It usually worked, at least at smaller schools.

How comfortable are you?

You should be facing new situations and challenges as much as possible, but not so much that you burn out. If you’re a beginner, pretty much everything is challenging, but if you feel that learning Chinese is not as hard as it used to be as an intermediate or advanced learner, you’re too comfortable. Find new situations to challenge your knowledge and leave your comfort zone!

The kamikaze approach to learning Chinese

Let’s call this the kamikaze approach. You deliberately place yourself in environments where mere survival requires your utmost effort. You might spend three times as much time as your classmates to achieve the same things, because you’re starting off a lower base. It’s not merely immersion; it’s immersion where you’re supposed to sink an enemy attack ship while underwater. Equipped only with a spoon. It definitely sounds like a suicide mission. Your goal is to not die.

I have done this several times and it requires a huge amount of time and effort. I probably spent three hours preparing for each lesson and three hours dealing with homework. Every day. I have never learnt more Chinese than during these periods. I learnt from my teacher, I learnt from my classmates, I learnt from the textbook. I also lived in a Chinese-speaking environment at the time, so I also learnt to apply my knowledge in real-life situations and in conversations with native speakers, often through language exchanges, which felt less scary.

You don’t need to be so extreme, but I think most people are too cautious rather than too bold. When you start your kamikaze attack, it really feels like you’re going to die; there’s no way you can make it through.

Then you survive the first few days, the first week. Weeks turn into months and you will have learnt how to survive in this new environment. This is the very definition of improvement; you have learnt to cope with a new situation in Chinese. You have expanded your comfort zone, congratulations!

Now do it again.

I’m fully convinced that leaving your comfort zone is essential for learning Chinese, but the question remains how far you should go. I won’t deny that there is a risk that you fail. The old advice from Delphi comes in handy here: know yourself.

I can’t tell you what you can cope with, other than that it’s probably more than you think. Try and see. Give it a few weeks; never give up because of first impressions (it’s always rough in the beginning). You don’t need to choose the hardest course available, but if you have a choice between two courses and one is harder than the other, always choose the harder one.

When you estimate your potential, there are two very important factors you need to take into account.

How much time do you have available? If you’re learning Chinese on a scholarship and have no other obligations, you have plenty of time. If you’re teaching English eight hours a day and have two kids, you probably shouldn’t go on a kamikaze raid.

How much energy can you invest? If mere survival will be a problem, you need determination and energy. If you have many other things going on or simply don’t feel all that motivated, don’t risk burning yourself out by overreaching.

I will return to managing your studies again in chapter six, but now it’s time to turn to different aspects of language learning, starting with input and output.

2.4 Language input and output

The next two chapters in this book are divided into input (listening and reading) and output (speaking and writing). Before we start looking into those topics, I want to say a few words about this division. Why is it useful to look at language proficiency in terms of input and output? What’s the relationship between the two?

Learning Chinese is not like learning to play the violin

When thinking about language learning, it helps to think of an intensity spectrum, ranging from low-intensity, passive practice to high-intensity, active practice.

In this context, passive practice means that a relatively small amount of energy is spent on learning. For instance, listening to a text in Chinese you know well is passive, as is using words you know well when you chat with a friend.

At the other end of the spectrum is high-intensity, active practice, which is sometimes called deliberate practice. This refers to practice where you are employing all your faculties to improve in some area.

The most important thing is that practice of all kinds of intensity is useful, indeed necessary. It’s tempting to think that deliberate practice is the only thing that counts, but this approach is bound to fail or at least severely limit your progress.

The crux is that deliberate practice leaves you exhausted and it’s impossible to do it for more than a few hours per day. If you’ve just started learning Chinese and feel tired after speaking Chinese with a native speaker for just a short while, you know what I’m talking about.

If you feel completely drained after attending a lesson where you had to do your best and stay completely focused to understand, you also know what deliberate practice feels like.

If you study Chinese full-time, you can’t do that kind of practice ten hours per day. If you’re only studying part time, you might have other things to do that are also very demanding, leaving less room for deliberately practising your Chinese. The general principle is this:

Practice as actively as you are capable of in any given situation.

This might sound self-evident, but it has some very important implications. The key lies in the second part of the sentence, what “you are capable of in any given situation”. If you have the energy, you should definitely spend as much time as you can actively improving your Chinese, but the important thing is what you do with the rest of the time.

Malcolm Gladwell has popularised a concept called the 10,000-hour rule, which basically says that you need ten thousand hours to master a subject, such as playing the violin or becoming an expert on the history of China.

This means roughly 20 hours per week for ten years. Gladwell found ten thousand to be a reasonably coherent answer from different experts when asked the question how long it took them to reach mastery of their current field.

Is that what it takes to master Chinese? Well, the question is completely meaningless unless we define what “master” means and I’m not going to go into that quagmire here.

The exact number of hours isn’t the point, though. If you want to learn something, you need to spend a lot of time. Chinese is no exception. The more time you spend, the more you learn. The reason I like the 10,000-hour rule is that it places the focus on a very large number rather than talent.

If you want to accumulate as much time as possible, you can’t rely only on deliberate practice, because you can only cope with a few hours per day of that. It will take you a decade to reach your goal. You need less intense ways of learning, too.

This is why learning Chinese isn’t like learning to play the violin or learning Chinese history. Language proficiency is neither pure knowledge nor pure skill; it’s both.

The knowledge component includes vocabulary, familiarity with the language in general and everything you can gain from listening and reading. However, as we all know, this isn’t enough to learn a language, you also need to be able to use this knowledge yourself in speaking and writing.

Using the language is a skill. You might know exactly what a certain word sounds like without being able to say it, you might know everything about grammar and still fail to construct good sentences; recognising a word is not the same as being able to write it.

Thus, language learning is different from both playing the violin and learning Chinese history. Of course it might pay off for a beginner violin player to listen to violin records and there certainly is a skill component to studying history as well, but it’s not the primary focus.

When learning a language, you definitely need both.

You need both active and passive practice

Write down what you study and how for a week (you should have already done this if you’ve followed my earlier advice). How much of it is active, deliberate practice? Judge by how demanding it is. Could you add more deliberate practice without becoming exhausted? Do you have enough passive practice to fall back to when your energy levels drop?

The importance of input

It’s not uncommon to hear people say that if you want to be a better writer, you need to read more. I agree with this 100%. Listening and reading helps your speaking and writing tremendously.

It seems like the knowledge component of language learning can be mostly built up through input (listening and reading), but that the skill component is mostly practised through output (speaking and writing).

I have taught and talked to hundreds of students of Chinese and most of them spend too little time on input. They go to lessons, they do their homework and they use Chinese when required of them, but they don’t spend enough time on listening and reading. The homework they receive is far from enough in this regard.

I’m not talking about studying here, I don’t want you to learn more words or grammar, I simply want you to read and listen to as much Chinese as possible, preferably from different sources. The more of it you understand, the better, so choose something you can at least get the gist of.

If you don’t do this, you will suffer from one-way communication disorder for a long time, meaning that you will be able to express yourself, but since your listening and reading skills are limited, you won’t understand what people reply.

There are many ways of expressing the same thing in Chinese and as a beginner or intermediate learner, you don’t need to know how to use all of these, but you do need to understand them. If you don’t, you’re missing out on a lot of free learning opportunities. Why?

Because the more you understand of the Chinese around you the more you learn. Increasing listening and reading ability is a booster that makes everything else easier. Therefore, improving your passive language proficiency (input) is never a bad idea.

Balancing the input and output scales

Language proficiency consists of both passive and active components. In order to acquire a healthy, balanced language proficiency, you need to focus on both the active and the passive side of language learning. Let’s look at the two extremes:

Output-heavy skill - You can speak with a semblance of fluency, but you find it hard to understand what people say to you. Reading is slow and difficult, watching TV shows and listening to the radio is hard. This extreme case is quite rare, but people who learn a language through travelling or other very practical situations without backing it up with any studying or passive learning might find themselves in this situation.

Input-heavy skill - You can understand most of what people say to you. Understanding spoken and written Chinese isn’t a big problem because most of your study time has been focused on these skills. However, when you speak it’s hard to find the right words and it takes a long time to get your meaning across in both speaking and writing. The extreme case is common among Chinese people learning English, but not so common among students learning Chinese.

Based on my experience both as a student and teacher, I would say that it’s very likely that you don’t focus enough on listening and reading. If you listen and read only to what’s in your textbook, you definitely belong to this category.

Balancing input and output

Based on experience, does listening and reading cause you more trouble than speaking or writing? If so, find an interesting podcast, radio show or start reading comics in Chinese. Or does speaking and writing cause more problems? Then find native speakers to talk with locally or online, travel to China or start chatting in Chinese.

Case in point: Travelling to learn a language

To illustrate my point, let’s look at using travelling to learn a language. I have heard many people say that this is the best way to learn, but I strongly disagree. It depends on which of the two extremes above you are closest to.

If your passive proficiency is very good, travelling is an excellent idea. It will force you into situations where you have to use the language and what used to be passive skill will be activated so that you can use it to interact with people around you.

If your passive skills aren’t very good, however, travelling won’t help much. Sure, you will learn new words you encounter and will pick other odd bits and pieces of language, but the likelihood is that you would have learnt more if you focused on listening and reading instead.

It’s also the case that it’s hard to learn how to use words you have never encountered before. If you ask someone how to say something, then use it once and don’t review it, you’re unlikely to remember that word next time you need it. If you already knew that word passively, though, the situation is completely different.

Thus, travelling to learn a language is really good if you’re the kind of foreign language student who focuses mainly on nailing exams without actually using the language to communicate much, but if you don’t have all that passive knowledge waiting to be activated, you can find better ways of investing your time and money than travelling. Please note that I’m only talking about travelling from an input/output perspective, you might want to go travel for other reasons, such as getting to know the culture or because it’s fun.

2.5 Creating a good environment for learning Chinese

Now that we have looked at the basic relationship between language input and output, I want to turn to the learning environment. Do you have to live in China to learn Chinese? Will you learn Chinese simply by moving there? Apart from answering these questions, I also want to say a few words about language learning inside and outside the classroom.

Learning Chinese at home and abroad

It’s common to hear people say that in order to learn a language, you have to live in an environment where it’s spoken, or that it’s impossible to learn Chinese without going to China.

While it is true that it helps to live in a Chinese-speaking environment, it’s definitely wrong that this is a requirement. Just to give you an example, I started learning English roughly at the age of ten, using only non-native teachers and traditional foreign language teaching methods. I have never lived in an English-speaking country and had no native speaking friends until I was 28. I know numerous people who have learnt Chinese or Japanese to a very advanced level without spending much time abroad.

Another reason I don’t like placing too much importance on location is that it gives the false impression that you will be able to magically learn Chinese by living in China. This is also patently wrong, there are large numbers of foreigners who have spent years there but still can’t speak the language.

So what it boils down to isn’t your global position, instead the key is your immediate environment. You can learn Chinese really well by living in Sweden if you surround yourself with Chinese media, find Chinese friends, take lessons over the internet and generally do what you can to create an immersion environment for yourself.

Conversely, it doesn’t help much living in China if you only hang out with other foreigners, always eat at McDonald’s and never leave the expatriate bubble.

The important thing is how much time you spend with Chinese, passively and actively. The difference between staying at home and living abroad is that it requires less effort to immerse yourself if you go to China. There are Chinese people everywhere on the street, you will hear Chinese when you take the bus simply by taking off your earphones, and finding a teacher or language program is easy.

If you stay in your own country, you can still achieve almost the same learning situation, but it requires effort. Instead of being surrounded by Chinese people whether you like it or not, you have to go looking for them (they are there, though, believe me), instead of hearing Chinese everywhere around you, you need to bring it with you on your phone, and finding a teacher or a language program might require you to go online.

Still, there are few things you can’t achieve with an internet connection and some persistence. Coupling this with whatever you can find locally is likely to give you a good immersion environment.

Creating an immersion environment at home

Creating an immersion environment at home is more easily said than done. Most learners (myself included) can’t just say “oh, well, I’ll just listen to Chinese 50 hours a week then” and go ahead and do it. If you actually can do that, just skip this section.

You already have well-established habits in your life. If you want to make Chinese a part of your life, you will need to get rid of some old habits, change others as well as create new ones. I will discuss habit hacking for language learners more in chapter six; here I’m going to talk specifically about creating an immersion environment.

Habits are most easily formed by controlling your environment. Your goal is to make sure that Chinese is the default option in as many situations as possible. In other words, to do something that isn’t related to Chinese should require more effort than doing it in Chinese

Here are a few examples:

Have only Chinese music on your phone - Remove your old music and replace it with Chinese music. It might be difficult to find good songs in the beginning, but if you spend some time searching, I’m sure you can find something you like. You can start by checking out my song recommendations here.

Have Chinese text next to your bed and in the bathroom - Just put any text you’re interested in reading wherever you happen to have time to spare. In my case, this is usually next to my bed and in the bathroom. This means that if you feel like reading something, it will be in Chinese. Put any books in English beyond reach.

Switch devices and programs to Chinese - This trick is perhaps as old as Chinese language support for devices, but changing interfaces to Chinese makes Chinese the default option. You can always change back if you really need to.

Set Chinese radio on autostart - Find a Chinese radio station suitable to your level and set it on autostart on your computer. This means that you actually have to make an effort to turn it off. There are numerous programs online that allow you to schedule when programs start or close. You can also create your own radio with sound from your textbook or other sources suitable to your level.

Make sure you always have audio available - This sounds very easy, but it isn’t, at least not for me. You should never run out of things to listen to. Possible reasons for failure include: forgetting your earphones, phone out of batteries and no suitable material on your phone. I usually solve this by overkill, i.e. instead of downloading one podcast file to my phone, I grab twenty.

As you can see, all these things require some kind of sacrifice. You can’t simply add things to your life without removing something. If you’re going to listen to more Chinese music, you need to listen less to music in other languages. If you want to read more in Chinese, you probably need to read less in English. If you only meet with Chinese people, your old friends and your family might complain.

This is one of the core problems with immersion. In the interconnected modern global world, creating an immersion environment isn’t very hard in theory. The problem is how to survive in it and whether or not it’s worth it. If Chinese is the only important thing in your life, then you should be fine, but most of us try to combine Chinese with a normal life.

Still, immersion isn’t binary, so just try to immerse as much as you can. Here are some more things you can do to create an immersion environment at home:

Listening

Listen to music in Chinese

Listen to radio in Chinese, focus on what you understand

Watch Chinese films, TV series and cartoons

Listen to podcasts teaching you Chinese

Watch Chinese videos (check out FluentU, for example)

Speaking

Find Chinese-speaking people where you live

Find language exchange partners online

Pay for online tutoring

Mimic recorded voices

Talk to your pet or yourself (I’m serious)

Reading

Watch Chinese films with subtitles

Read easy comics in Chinese

Get hold of a few good textbooks

Use graded readers

Switch user interfaces to Chinese

Writing

Chat with Chinese people online

Use free services such as Lang-8

Transcribe audio you already know

Write notes, shopping lists and so on in Chinese

Use programs like Skritter for handwriting

Vocabulary

Use spaced repetition software (with audio)

Read extensively, learn only key vocabulary

Listen extensively, also focusing on key vocabulary

Label things in your apartment in Chinese

Always have flashcards with you (apps)

Culture

Interact with Chinese people where you live

Watch Chinese TV dramas set in modern China

Note culture-specific phrases and ask native speakers

Watch cartoons of famous stories online

Read fables and idiom stories for foreigners

Classrooms, courses and teachers

Have you ever had a teacher who focuses on memorising meaningless facts, who over-emphasise hypercorrect character writing or who seems interested in only a very small part of language learning?

The sad thing is that it’s likely that you have had such a teacher or that you will have one in the future. This is why you need language hacking, even if you’re enrolled in a serious language program.

Learning inside and outside the classroom

Contrary to most hip language learning bloggers out there, I don’t think that learning languages in class sucks. Sure, if that’s the only thing you do, you won’t learn very much (depending on the institution), but with the right attitude, formal education still has a lot to offer.

Classroom learning is a tool just like any other, it’s not good or bad in itself, it all depends on how you use it. Let’s look at a few pros and cons with classroom learning:

Classes offer structure and guidance - This is good because you don’t need to do everything yourself. Someone will point the way forward. The problem is of course that they will sometimes point you in the wrong direction and that the structure offered might not be ideal for learning.

Classes increases your minimum effort level - By being enrolled in a course, you have to study and you have to learn. This is similar to buying a gym card. You could easily do bodyweight exercises at home everyday for free, but many still find it worthwhile to spend lots of money to go to the gym.

Classes are not aligned with your personal goals - Each institution has its own curriculum, but regardless what it looks like, it’s not likely to match your own personal goals perfectly. This means that you will be learning some things you don’t want to learn and, and if you don’t study on your own, you will also miss some thing you really should learn.

In order to learn optimally, you should compare your school’s curriculum and your teacher’s method with your own agenda for learning Chinese. You need to identify the differences between them and address them somehow.

If your teacher doesn’t include large volumes of listening practice, you need to do that yourself. If she doesn’t stress expanding your vocabulary, you need do that on your own.

Escaping things that you find unnecessary might be harder, especially if you care about your grades, but do at least try to reason with your teacher. If you don’t think handwriting is very important, see if you can write your homework on your computer instead.

Here are some more hands-on tips for how to make your classroom learning more efficient:

Find extra-curricular learning material to increase the volume of passive learning. Use other textbooks at the same or lower level, use graded readers, use podcasts. Don’t try to learn everything, just read/listen a lot.

Supplement with a private tutor and/or language exchange partner. If you’re in a small class, you will be able to improve your active skills in class, but if you have a dozen classmates or more, you probably won’t. Find outside help to target these skills, especially pronunciation.

Join forces with other students. Find other students in your class with similar goals and push each other with friendly competitions and challenges. Speak Chinese with each other, share resources and learning tips.

Attend class without enrolling. If you want the structure that a course offers without the extra pressure it means to enrol, see if you can attend class without formally signing up for the course. Some universities and some teachers will accept this, others not, but it doesn’t hurt to check.

Create your own environment

Regardless where you live, you need to make sure that you’re not missing something important. Do not trust your teacher or course. Start with the four basic skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) plus vocabulary, and carefully think through what resources you’re going to use for each and how you’re going to study. Remember that textbooks and courses are good because they cover many areas. Fill the gaps with resources from later chapters in this book.

2.6 Recommended resources

Below, I present some carefully selected resources that are meant to help you with the learning process. Note that I only list general resources here. For more about listening, speaking, reading, writing and vocabulary, please refer to the resource sections of the relevant chapters. If you want more resources, please visit Hacking Chinese Resources, where you can find more than 300 links, all tagged and sorted by proficiency level, topic and type.

Where to get your questions answered

Chinese Forums has been running for a long time and has gathered a respectable number of knowledgeable second language learners as well as native speakers. The forums cover almost everything related to Chinese or China. The archives are huge, so the likelihood is that your question has already been answered before. Chinese Forums is best suited for discussions, but work well for direct questions as well. This is the most versatile tool available. Be polite and people will be polite to you.

Stack Chinese is fairly new, but still very useful. Unlike Chinese Forums, this isn’t a forum at all, but rather a place where you can ask direct and specific questions. The other users then try to provide the best answer to your question, adding and editing each other’s answers. Users then vote for different answers and add comments. This is the place I go for tricky questions, but do be sure to show the others that you have tried to solve your problem on your own before posting. Stack Chinese is only about Chinese language usage.

LinqApp is a mobile app available both for Android and iOS. It allows you to ask native speakers questions of various kinds, using text, photos or recorded audio. They then reply and you can grade their answers as helpful or not. In return, you help other people with questions in your native language. There is also an option to pay if you don’t have time to help others. You can ask anything here, from questions about a text your reading to whether or not you pronounce a word correctly. Also excellent when travelling since you can take photos of signs, time tables and menus, and ask for help!

Reddit is a social news and entertainment site where people post links, pictures or short posts that other users can vote up or down. Even though you can ask any kind of question, it’s fairly clear that most users lean towards the lightweight end of the spectrum (entertainment). For instance, funny questions, links or answers typically receive more attention than interesting or good alternatives. Reddit is still a good place to hang out for some cool links and for posting occasional questions too, especially if you want a quick answer. The relevant subreddit is called Chinese language and is linked to above.

Quora is quite similar to Stack Exchange, but is more chaotic. I spent quite a lot of time reading on Quora a while back, but I gave up because it just felt like a sloppier version of Stack Chinese. However, they aren’t quite the same, since Stack Chinese has strict rules about posting and Quora allows almost anything. Therefore, if you want to ask wider questions about language learning, Chinese society or anything else, Quora is worth checking out. If you don’t know where to start, check Mandarin Chinese and Learning Languages.

Language question triage is an article I’ve written about how to ask for help when learning Chinese. If your resources are limited, you want to manage them carefully. In essence, language question triage is about being responsible and not imposing yourself too much on others.

Information and inspiration about language learning

The online world of language learning is enormous, so this is no attempt at summarising it. Instead, I have chosen to list a few websites I think well worth visiting. I read some of them regularly, others only when I want to read about a specific issue:

Sinosplice

Forever a Student

En Route to Fluency

Chinese Hacks

Study Hacks Blog

Scott H. Young

I will teach you a language

The Mezzofanti Guild

The Polyglot Dream

Fluent in Three Months

All Japanese All the Time

3. Learning characters, words and grammar

This chapter is about learning characters, words and grammar. The first two parts can largely be discussed together, whereas grammar requires separate treatment.

When learning Chinese, expanding vocabulary is essential while grammar is considerably easier than in many other languages, at least if we’re talking about basic communication. Because of this, I will focus much more on how to expand your vocabulary than on how to learn grammar.

3.1 Vocabulary is king

I consider vocabulary to be by far the most important part when learning Chinese. Typically, language learning is divided into listening, speaking, reading and writing, but I prefer to discuss the role of vocabulary separately.

Why? Because vocabulary isn’t merely king, it’s god emperor of the language learning universe! Before we delve deeper into how to learn words, let’s look closer at why vocabulary is so important.

Comprehensible input

The main reason is what’s called comprehensible input and, by extension, incidental learning. Comprehensible input is just what it sounds like, input that you can make sense of. I will return to this in chapter four, but let’s take a quick look now.

If you listen to news broadcasts in Chinese as a beginner, you might not understand anything except the ”good morning” at the beginning. Listening to or reading Chinese that is way above your level is not ideal.

Research suggests that you need to understand a high percentage of what you listen to or read before you can learn from input without actually studying. The exact number varies, but it’s at least 90%, probably even higher.

Learning without specifically trying to in this way is called incidental learning and is wonderful. It happens all the time and the more comprehensible your input is, the more often it will happen.

Even though the name suggests that you learn things without planning to do so, increasing the amount of incidental learning that takes place is important and part of the reason why having a large vocabulary is so useful.

Naturally, you can learn from input even if you understand less than 90%, but you probably need to make an effort to do so. This is cool as long as you have the energy to spend.

Both size and speed matter

Learning many words is the quickest way of making input comprehensible, meaning that it will boost incidental learning and accelerate your progress in general.

It isn’t always necessary to have deep understanding of nuances and subtle differences between words to understand spoken or written Chinese. You can understand a lot with just a few words and little grammar, but almost nothing with only grammar and no words. This is truer in Chinese than in any other language I have learnt. Focusing too much on detail will slow you down severely.

However, it’s important to understand that it’s not just the size of your vocabulary that matters, the speed at which you can connect words and meanings is also crucial. If it takes you three seconds to recall what a word means, you stand almost no chance of being able to follow a normal conversation.

Therefore, having a large passive vocabulary isn’t enough; you need to be able to access it quickly too. Naturally, if you want to speak Chinese, you also need active vocabulary, something we will look at again later.

Finally, it also matters which words you learn. Cramming rare or too formal words won’t help you understand spoken Chinese. You should always focus on learning the most useful and common words first. I will discuss how to do this more later.

3.2 Learning vocabulary: Basic principles

I will start from basic principles and then continue with more specific strategies to learn characters, words and then, at the very end, grammar.

Learning should be meaningful

Vocabulary is often described as being structured like a web. In Chinese, it’s easy to see that this web has two layers, one consisting of characters and one consisting of words. All words consist of characters, so words can be related to each other not only by what they mean and what they sound like, but also which characters are used to write them.

Learning something is largely the process of taking new information and linking it with something you already know, making it part of the web. This is the way memory works, too. Whether you can retrieve something from memory depends on how many links you have to it and how strong they are. The more interconnected the web is, the better.

If you treated Chinese characters like pictures, learning to read and write would probably be impossible. The reason Chinese characters are learnable is that they aren’t pictures. Instead, most characters are compounds that can be broken down. Some parts offer clues about meaning and others about pronunciation.

I will discuss this more when it’s time to discuss characters in particular, but right now, the central idea is that you need to make vocabulary meaningful in order to learn it. The opposite of meaningful learning is called rote learning and involves trying to learn something by repeating it a large number of times. This works, but is very inefficient.

Learning and reviewing are two different things

Learning is about connecting what you want to learn with something you already know, trying to leave as permanent a record as possible. Reviewing is about reinforcing connections that already exist. If you forget something, you will have to learn it anew.

The method you use for learning something needs to be more creative and powerful than those you use for repetition. In the coming sections, I will discuss various ways of acquiring vocabulary and then move on to reviewing characters and words.

What characters and words to learn

Before we continue the discussion how to learn, I need to say a few words about what characters and words you should learn. This is important, because if you learn infrequent characters and rare words, it won’t improve your Chinese at all.

In essence, you should try to learn the most useful words first. However, determining which words are the most useful without knowing the language first is hard. There are a few ways:

Use a textbook – This is obvious, but don’t overlook the importance of a good textbook. The authors will have chosen words that they think you ought to know. Textbooks are necessary for beginners, but textbooks become less reliable in their choice of vocabulary the more advanced they get.

Use another textbook – Rather than using ever-harder textbooks in the same series, use a different series in parallel. You should learn as many common words as possible rather than more difficult ones. Textbook authors tend to start using difficult vocabulary much too early. You can of course use more than two textbooks.

Use graded readers – Graded readers are texts that are designed for a specific proficiency level, usually based on the number of characters you already know. These texts are great sources of vocabulary and are awesome learning materials in general.

Use conversations – It’s a good idea to learn vocabulary from your everyday communication, both in text and speech. These are often words that you really need for some reason (otherwise you wouldn’t encounter them). However, be strict and save rare words for later. Just because you need the word “dinosaur” in a sentence doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s worthwhile remembering that word as a beginner.

Use word lists – Word lists typically come in two flavours: lists associated with an exam and frequency lists. They are essentially the same for the purpose of this discussion. I advise against using word lists to expand vocabulary. The best use of word lists is to plug gaps left by the other methods. For instance, if you feel that you are leaving the beginner stage, go through a word list compiled for beginners and see which words you have missed.

Using the rule of three to select vocabulary to learn

The rule of three means that you only learn something when you have heard or seen it three times. If you need to look it up earlier to understand what you’re listening to or reading, fine, but you don’t need to actually add it to your vocabulary list until you’ve seen it three times.

This is true for character components, characters and words:

Component level – If you see the same unknown character component in three different characters, you should learn it. If it occurs in three characters, it’s likely that it appears in many more and learning it will boost your learning in the long run.

Character level – You can apply the rule of three even more strictly to characters. If you’re reading material slightly above your level, you shouldn’t learn all new characters you encounter. Wait until you’ve seen the same new character at least three times.

Word level – If you encounter a word three times, this should be an indication that that word is important and you might want to learn it. This is true for almost all words up to and including advanced material.

The main point here is that you should not learn all new words you encounter! Remember, your capacity to learn is limited, so adding one rare word entails removing a common one. Avoid difficult words until you really need them, i.e. until you’ve seen or heard them a few times.

Why perfectionism is bad for you

Continuing the above argument, I’d like to make a much broader observation. It seems natural for many to treat a perfect score as better than one that is merely good. 100% is better than 90%. It stands to reason.

In fact, it’s an illusion that will cost you a lot of progress if you study accordingly. Instead, you should aim for 80-90%. Adding those extra 10-20% to get to 100% doesn’t show that you’re ambitious, smart or whatever, it shows that you don’t know what you’re doing.

Here are some arguments to support this claim:

Substantial research into vocabulary acquisition shows that 80-90% is a good number to aim for - That means that if you want to learn as many words as possible, you should accept that you will forget around 10-20% of the words you have learnt. If you forget fewer than that, you’re spending too much time reviewing words you actually don’t need to review, just to make sure.

If you try to learn everything there is to learn about a specific area, you will neglect other areas - Learning a reasonable amount and then moving on is much more efficient. For instance, if you want to write every character perfectly, you won’t learn many characters. If you try to understand the exact meaning and usage of all words, you won’t learn enough words to be able to speak.

Trying to ace exams creates an efficiency problem - Let’s say that it takes 90 hours to achieve a 90% grade in a certain course. As I’m sure you’ll agree, it’s not true that it takes 100 hours to reach 100%. For each percentage point you want to add, you will have to spend more and more time. To achieve 100%, you might need to spend 150 hours. This time you could have spent covering 50% of the material in a parallel course.

The upshot of all this is that if you want to learn Chinese as efficiently as possible, you should seldom aim for 100%, but rather be satisfied with 80-90%. This doesn’t mean that you should study less; it just means you should spend the time you save from aiming at 80-90% for learning other things.

In my opinion, the only exception is pronunciation, because bad pronunciation cemented early on can be hard to change later. Still, you can’t aim for 100% here either since it would take you months to get past the first chapter in your book.

Words and sentences

Even though this chapter is about characters and words, I have to say a few words about sentences as well. The best way of learning how to use something is to learn them in context from the very start. You learn character components at the same time as common characters they occur in, you learn individual characters together with common words they form and you learn words in common expressions or phrases. For example, learn verbs and nouns in common combination (collocations).

Some people advocate focusing on sentences over words when learning Chinese. If you want to be able to speak quickly, this is a good idea. You will build up a mental library of phrases quickly and you will soon be able to select expressions from it to communicate yourself. You will also gain a better understanding of grammar because you learn grammatical sentences and not just isolated words.

That’s a good approach, but it’s not the only game in town. The alternative is to focus on words over sentences, but combine this with massive exposure (listening and reading). This means that the connection will come through passive understanding and then gradually shift to active knowledge. This takes longer and won’t work if you skimp on the input, but it has some advantages. Most importantly, it will boost your listening and reading much more quickly, which is very important.

Of course, you don’t need to choose one of these methods and stick with it. A sensible approach would be to use sentences for everything you think you will want to say yourself in the near future, and just the word itself for the rest, relying on listening and reading to learn how it’s used.

3.3 Spaced repetition software

Spaced repetition software is one of the most important tools technology has brought to us language learners, with the exception of the internet and the wealth of listening and reading resources available online.

Spaced repetition software is based on the thoroughly researched spacing effect, which states that repetition spread out over time is more efficient than repetition massed together.

Simply put, if you review a word ten times with intervals between each time, you will remember it much longer than if you look at it ten times in a row. This has been known for more than a hundred years, but massed repetition is still common in classrooms and is sometimes recommended by teachers. This is unforgivable.

Since the spacing effect was first discovered, psychologists have explored and mapped the intervals, and today there are advanced algorithms that predict roughly when you will forget something. This is of course based on statistics, so the computer program doesn’t really know, but it can make an educated guess. It can also adjust its future guesses based on your actual performance.

The best time to review something is just before you forget it. This means that you don’t waste time reviewing what you already know, but still remember most of the words you’ve studied (but not all, see the argument about aiming for 80-90% above).

Spaced repetition software keeps track of every word individually and calculates when you should review each. This is several times more efficient than traditional reviewing!

Looked at from another angle, spaced repetition software is truly indispensable. There is no other way you can review large amounts of vocabulary without collapsing under the workload.

Traditional methods are fine if you’re dealing with a subject that is clearly limited. If you only plan on learning the words in your first textbook, you can use any method you want. When you have an exam at the end of the semester, you can read through what you need to know and relearn what you have forgotten.

However, when you’ve studied for a year and have learnt thousands of words, this is no longer possible. If you look through ten thousand words in search for those words you need to review, you will waste a huge amount of time looking at vocabulary you don’t need to review.

If you use spaced repetition software to review vocabulary, the program will make sure that you spend most of your time reviewing the words you need to review.

If you have a smart phone, you can also keep vocabulary with you wherever you go, which means you can use the small pockets of time available during the day to keep your review queue down to a minimum and freeing up time to use the language.

The only reasonable alternative to spaced repetition software is complete immersion and huge amounts of listening and reading (which is a kind of analogue spaced repetition without the algorithms). However, this is extremely hard to do on a beginner or intermediate level, partly because it’s demanding psychologically and socially, but also because it’s hard to find suitable material that won’t bore you to death after the first week.

Spaced repetition offers a viable alternative for people who have other obligations or interests apart from learning Chinese. If I could introduce one tool to all language students in the world, it would be spaced repetition software.

What programs to use

There are many spaced repetition programs out there and this not the right time and place to write detailed reviews of them all, but I will point you in the general direction of some of the best ones for different purposes:

Anki – This program should be the standard choice for the serious language learner. It takes some time to get used to, but this program is powerful and allows you to do almost anything with text, audio, video, pictures, cloze tests, multiple review directions and a very potent browser where you can select and edit cards as you please.

Pleco - This app for iOS and Android combines spaced repetition flashcards with multiple dictionaries. You need to pay for the better dictionaries and the flashcard function, but since it’s a one-time purchase, this is probably the best investment you’ll ever make since Pleco also offers the best dictionary solutions for your smart phone. It is much less versatile than Anki, though.

Skritter - This is the only program that targets handwriting specifically and gives you corrective feedback. This makes it fun to learn to write characters by hand, and I think a Skritter subscription is essential for beginners and people who think character writing is important. I should mention that I work for Skritter, but also that I used the program long before I started to work for the company.

How to use spaced repetition software

Now that we know that spaced repetition software is really good, it’s time to say a few words about how to use it properly. I want to share several insights into spaced repetition that will make your Chinese learning smoother and more efficient.

Insight #1: Use it often. These programs estimate when you’re about to forget something and prompts you to review it. If you only review once a week, the system won’t work and you will forget too many words. Therefore, it’s important to form routines and ways of working with SRS that tally well with your life in general. Read more about this in chapter six.

Insight #2: Spread it out. Spaced repetition is about spreading reviews out and the program will do that for you, but I also think that you should spread the time out throughout the day. This is partly because learning becomes more effective, but also because it’s easier and less taxing to study in short bursts.

Insight #3: Familiarise yourself with the software. Each program has slightly different features and it’s important that you check them out. If you’re not very tech-savvy yourself, search online and you will find guides and discussions about how to use the programs.

Insight #4: Modify, delete. Your flashcard deck is not an inert pile you just add things to. Instead, a flashcard deck should be a living organism that keeps evolving and mutating. In the beginning, I was very reluctant to delete information from my deck, but I have long since realised that such a stance is stupid. The deck exists as a tool to help you learn Chinese. If there is a part of the deck that doesn’t do this, change it so that it does or delete it.

Insight #5: Think before you add. At first glance, adding a card to your deck is very easy and can be done with the click of a button. You can also easily find other people’s vocabulary lists and growing the number of cards in your deck is easy. Too easy, in fact. Don’t add words you don’t need. Add words from what you hear and read instead of downloading lists.

Insight #6: Add more than just words. Don’t forget what I said earlier about using sentences. Add grammar patterns, interesting sentences and anything else you want to be able to use. Not all programs allow you to do this, but Anki is excellent for creating advanced decks with cloze tests, custom audio and so on.

Insight #7: Don’t go on tilt. When you use SRS, it’s easy to just focus on getting through the number of repetitions you’re supposed to do that day. Of course, the real goal is to learn Chinese, but that’s not always in line with reaching a certain number. If you forget what a word means and just keep repeating it over and over (and still forget it), you’re doing something wrong.

Insight #8: It’s not a panacea. I think spaced repetition is one of the most important tools for learning vocabulary, but it’s not the only thing you should focus on. Learning a language is about much more than that, such as communicating with real people, listening, speaking, reading and writing.

I wish that I had known about spaced repetition software when I started learning English and French. It’s a powerful tool if used correctly, but don’t forget that learning Chinese is about more than reviewing!

Try spaced repetition software

Even if you ignore the advice offered so far in this chapter, do at least make sure you try spaced repetition. Choose the program that suits your goals best and start using it. Add phrases as well as character components and individual characters. Choose carefully what to add, though, base it mostly on what you encounter in your reading and listening.

3.4 Learning characters and words

Left to their own devices, most students develop a method for learning characters that allows them to pass tests and learn some Chinese. However, with the right method and the right tools, you can learn many times more than that. Now that we have looked at some general principles and tools, it’s time to look at how to learn Chinese characters and words.

Chinese characters are not pictures

As most teachers will tell you but won’t actually teach you thoroughly, most characters are combinations of other characters. While it’s true that Chinese characters originated as pictographs representing things in the natural world such as the sun, the moon and trees, characters like that are in fact very rare.

Chinese characters are not pictures. Instead, they are combinations of other characters and the way they are combined offers clues to what they mean and/or how they are pronounced.

Rather than learning the entire compound as a unit, you should also learn the components that make up the compound. The reason for this is that although you will need to learn many thousands of characters to become literate in Chinese, there aren’t that many building blocks; learning a few hundred will take you very far.

After that, it’s mostly a matter of combining what you already know to learn even more. You will start writing characters rather than drawing them. If you don’t know much about how characters are formed at all, I suggest watching this video.

Combining meaningful parts: Building a house

Even if you know the building blocks, you still need to remember how to combine these into characters. Sometimes there is a useful explanation behind the character (two trees 木 form forest 林 for example), but most Chinese compound characters were created by one character with the right meaning and then another with the right sound.

For instance, the character for ocean 洋 (yáng) has nothing to do with sheep 羊 (also pronounced yáng). Since they happen to be pronounced the same way and there already was a character for “sheep”, someone added water 氵 to indicate ”ocean”: “It’s that word which is pronounced like sheep, but is related to water”.

This kind of character is called a phonetic-semantic compound and makes up a huge majority of Chinese characters. I will talk more about phonetic-semantic compounds in a later section.

Now, some teachers will tell you that you shouldn’t confuse the phonetic (sound-bearing) component of such a character with its meaning. In other words, you shouldn’t think of actual sheep when you see the character 洋, because strictly speaking, it’s got nothing to do with sheep at all.

I strongly disagree. As I have argued before, learning needs to be meaningful. It doesn’t matter that 羊 only carries sound information in 洋, what matters is that using the idea or picture of a sheep makes it much easier to remember how to write the character! Naturally, it’s good to be aware of the fact that 羊 gives the pronunciation of the character.

If you want to remember how to write 洋 or remember what it means, just picture an enormous sheep making her way across the Atlantic ocean. In fact, the sheep is so big that you can see her on a world map, a little bit like monsters were drawn on maps in the old days. Here there be sheep!

What I just described was a mnemonic for remembering the word 洋 and later in this chapter we’re, going to look at mnemonics in more detail. To be able to use these techniques, you need to already know some building blocks (such as 氵 and 羊, which is the main reason it’s important to learn them. It also helps being aware of what role these building blocks play, which is what we’re going to look at next.

From character components to words

In the next few sections, we’re going to look at the structure of Chinese in order to be able to learn it better. The ultimate goal is of course to help you learn words in Chinese more efficiently, but in order to do so, there are a number of things you need know first.

These things can be found in any good introduction to Chinese, but rather than assuming that you know how Chinese works, I’ll explain it briefly here.

Character components and radicals

Before we get started, let’s get some basic definitions down. There seems to be a lot of confusion about what radicals are, so we need to straighten this out:

A character component is simply a part of a character and there is no exhaustive list of these. The term is vague, or can at least be interpreted in many different ways. Of course, a character can’t be arbitrarily broken down, each character has a finite number of possible decompositions, and there is sometimes more than one possibility. For practical purposes, a character component is a part of a character that is also used to construct other characters.

A radical is a character component that is used to index Chinese characters in dictionaries. They are usually associated with the meaning of the character (rather than the sound). Therefore, radicals are unique mostly because they happen to be part of the list of components used to classify Chinese characters. That makes them convenient to use and list, but they aren’t necessarily more important than other components.

These days, you never have to use a printed dictionary if you don’t want to, so the characters that appear on radical lists are interesting because they also happen to be common semantic components. This is true for the list I’m going to introduce in the next section as well.

The important thing is that some character components carry information about the pronunciation of the character (羊 in our earlier example) and some character components carry information about the meaning of the character (氵 in our example above). Knowing this makes it a lot easier to understand why characters look the way they do. Not all characters are constructed this way, but around 80% are.

Kickstarting your character learning

If you just started learning Chinese, I suggest that you look at a list of common semantic components and their meanings. Don’t learn how they are pronounced, because they carry information about meaning, not sound, remember? Instead, focus on what they look like, how they are written and what they mean, since this meaning is often lent to compound characters.

Following the principles laid down earlier in this chapter, you shouldn’t learn all character components. For your convenience, I have composed a list of the 100 most common radicals and learning these is never a bad idea. For other character components, simply follow the rule of three explained above.

Learn the semantic building blocks

If you haven’t learnt all the 100 characters in the list above, you should do so now. They are all very common and will help you understand how characters work. Most of them will appear in other words you want to learn for other reasons. You don’t need to learn all at once, spread them out. If you have 25 characters to learn this week, check which components are already in my list and learn them as separate characters. In a just one month, you will have learnt 100 of the most common semantic components!

The importance of understanding phonetic components

Let’s return to phonetic-semantic compounds. At least 80% of characters are combinations of one meaning component and one sound component. Knowing about phonetic-semantic compounds gives you clues about the pronunciation of characters or how to write them if you know how they are pronounced.

Thus, it’s not true that written and spoken Chinese are completely separate, because in most cases, there is a phonetic component in the character. Sometimes, it might have been corrupted over the centuries, perhaps beyond recognition, but most are still clearly discernible.

Let’s look at a beginner-friendly example:

马/馬 (mǎ) “horse”

吗/嗎 (ma) “particle indicating a question”

妈/媽 (mā) “mother”

骂/罵 (mà) “to scold”

码/碼 (mǎ) “number”

It should be obvious that something is going on with the sound here. The meanings of all these characters are completely unrelated, and yet all are pronounced “ma” with different tones and contain the character 马/馬 “horse”. Indeed, 马 is the phonetic component of these characters.

Here are some more examples of phonetic components and characters they appear in:

羊, yáng (sheep):

洋 (yáng) “ocean”

样樣 (yàng) “manner, appearance”

养/養 (yǎng) “to support, to raise”

氧 (yǎng) “oxygen”

**青, qīng (green/blue): **

请/請 (qǐng) “please, to ask”

清 (qīng) “clear”

情 (qíng) “emotion”

晴 (qíng) “clear, fine”

I have chosen particularly clear cases here to illustrate my point. In reality, the pronunciation is seldom identical. For instance, the characters might have different tones, initials, finals or any combination of these. Still, some phonetic components are extremely regular. Have a look at these (traditional) characters: 碟, 諜, 喋, 牒, 堞, 蝶, 蹀, 鰈. They are all pronounced “dié”!

Hacking Chinese characters

When you start learning Chinese and only need to remember a few characters, using a bad method will do the trick. As the number of character increases, though, you will soon run into a tricky problem: series of characters that look almost the same and only differ in one or two strokes.

If you try to learn these simply by writing them many times, you will probably fail, or at least waste a lot of time. Instead of doing that, there is a trick you can use. As we have seen, it’s hard to learn meaningless things, and what could be more meaningless than a single dot or the addition of a stroke?

The key to remembering such difference is to make the dot and the stroke meaningful! Let me give you an example with 良 (liáng) and 艮 (gèn). When you write characters with these two components, it’s extremely hard to remember if there should be a dot or not. What should you do?

If you know some twenty characters with these two components, it can be confusing, but only until you notice that all characters containing 良 (with the dot) are pronounced with ”-iang” and all characters with 艮 (without the dot) are pronounced with with ”-in” or ”-en”.

Like this (examples in simplified characters):

With dot (view all here): 娘, 浪, 狼, 莨, 阆, 琅, 稂, 锒, 粮, 蜋, 酿, 踉

Without dot (view all here): 艰, 限, 垦, 很, 恨, 狠, 退, 垠, 哏, 恳, 根, 痕, 眼, 银, 裉, 跟

This means that you can know if there should be a dot or not simply by knowing the pronunciation of the character! Conversely, you can sometimes guess the pronunciation of a new character if you know the phonetic component.

Any character containing 良 (liang) is likely to be pronounced either “liang” or “niang”, and characters with 艮 (gen) tend to be pronounced ”hen” or ”gen” (or sometimes ”yin”).

To hammer home my point, I’ll show you a few more examples of characters that might have been trolling you. Some of these are not relevant for simplified characters, but rather than caring too much about that, let’s focus on the principle.

延 (yan) vs. 廷 (ting)

Characters based on 延 (yan) are always pronounced -an…

诞/誕 (dàn)

蜒 (yán)

涎 (xián)

筵 (yán)

埏 (yán)

蜑 (dàn)

莚 (yán)

…and those with廷 (ting) are pronounced ting:

庭 (tíng)

艇 (tǐng)

挺 (tǐng)

霆 (tíng)

蜓 (tíng)

铤/鋌 (tǐng)

梃 (tǐng)

莛 (tíng)

鼮 (tíng)

令(ling) vs. 今 (jin)

Characters based on令 (ling) all start with l-…

领/領 (lǐng)

冷 (lěng)

零 (líng)

龄/齡 (líng)

怜 (lián)

邻 (lín)

玲 (líng)

铃/鈴 (líng)

岭 (lǐng)

伶 (lín)

拎 (līng)

翎 (líng)

聆 (líng)

羚 (líng)

…and those with 今 (jin) don’t start with l- but end with -n:

念 (niàn)

含(hán)

琴 (qín)

贪 (tān)

吟 (yín)

岑 (cén)

矜 (jīn)

黔 (qián)

芩 (qín)

I think this is enough to show you what I mean. If you want more examples, I suggest you head over to the list of phonetic sets at HanziCraft. I also recommend using Zhongwen.com, even though the interface is a bit tricky to use (hint: search for Pinyin and go from there).

Learn the phonetic building blocks

There are several lists of phonetic series available online, but there’s much less information about frequency. To my knowledge, there is no “the 100 most useful phonetic components”. Still, just knowing about phonetic components will help. When you see two characters sharing the same component and they also have similar pronunciation, look it up! The easiest way is to use the pronunciation clues found on HanziCraft.

Basic memory techniques

If you want to remember something, you need to associate it with something you already know. Starting to learn Chinese is therefore a lot about infrastructure.

As we saw in the previous section, when you already have the building blocks (such as 氵 and 羊), learning the new character 洋 becomes a matter of combining building blocks. There’s a lot of research about what works when it comes to associative memory, so let’s look at how you can combine parts in a way that’s easy to remember.

Your brain notices and remembers anything that stands out. Do you still have the picture of the sheep wading across the Atlantic in your head when you see the character 洋?

That’s because the picture I drew was exaggerated and bizarre. I also tried to make it vivid, although this is hard to put down in words, so whether you still remember it or not might depend on if you really imagined the big, beautiful sheep or just saw the words on the page.

Here are a few ways in which you can make a connection between two building blocks strong and healthy:

Absurd – The more exaggerated the picture you form for a certain connection is, the easier it will be to remember. Avoid normal things. The huge sheep above is a good example. I didn’t just picture a normal sheep and some water, I put them together in an absurd way.

Funny – Try to use humour as much as you can. Why? Because it’s fun, of course! On a more serious note, funny things are also easier to remember. Typically, funny associations are also absurd, but they don’t have to be.

Shameful – Any kind of embarrassing link is good, especially if it deals with taboos. Sex is awesome (from a pure linguistic perspective, of course). What is embarrassing for you might be different from what is for me, but I think you get the idea.

Scary – What are you afraid of? Using the answer to that question is also likely to enable you to form stronger connections between words. I’m not afraid of many concrete things (such as snakes or spiders), so I don’t really use this very often, but picturing scenes that are in some way scary is still possible.

Disgusting – Associations that are revolting are also likely to be stronger. Again, it differs what people think is disgusting, but you can probably come up with connections that involve all four points I’ve mentioned so far.

Please note that even if I use the word “picture”, mnemonics should be multi-modal, i.e. include different senses. However, it’s very hard to write about how something smells, tastes or feels, so I tend to describe pictures when writing about mnemonics.

Remembering is a skill you can learn

Creating mnemonics that work for you requires practice. You’re going to learn hundreds or even thousands of characters, so start practising with them immediately! Try the methods above on the characters in the next chapter of your book. Which helped you remember the characters? Which did not? Try to find patterns! Gradually, you will improve your understanding of what type of mnemonic that works best for you.

More about mnemonics

Mnemonics is a collective term for memory techniques. If you search for it online, you will find that people use these little tricks or hacks to learn everything from languages and geography to mathematics and chemistry. Some people even compete using their memories!

The cool thing about this is that it’s for everyone. Memory is a skill that can be trained! If you don’t believe me, I suggest you look at this TED talk by Joshua Foer. It’s about memory competitions and is a must if you’re new to memory training.

How to learn to write characters

When you first start learning Chinese characters, it’s very hard to know what to do. How do you practise? Here are eight crucial lessons about learning to write Chinese characters, gained both through learning to write Chinese myself and through teaching beginners:

Understand the character – As you know by now, most character components mean something. Before you approach writing a character, you should already have a passive understanding of it, even if it’s just cursory. Use a dictionary to look up what the components mean (I suggest HanziCraft and/or Zdic, please refer to the resource section at the end of this chapter). Do they offer clues about meaning or pronunciation? Don’t worry if you don’t find any obvious clues, they’re not always there, I just want you to start looking.

Study the character closely, including stroke order – Before you start to write, study the character you’re going to write carefully. How is it written? What does it look like? If your textbook or teacher didn’t provide you with information about stroke order, read this. If you need to look up specific stroke order, you can use MDBG (simplified) or the Taiwan MoE dictionary (traditional). Again, please refer to the resource section.

Write it until you get the feel for the character – Once you know (in theory) how to write the character, write it until you can write the entire character without stopping to think. This is just to familiarise yourself with the motions involved and will help improve your handwriting in general. This is very good for beginners, but not necessary for intermediate students and above.

Don’t copy characters stroke by stroke - Whenever you write characters, don’t copy them stroke by stroke. If you can remember the whole character at once, that’s very good, but if you can’t, break it down into its component parts and peek at the stroke order only between writing each part. Copying stroke by stroke is useless, because you’re not even trying to remember anything. Also, write the characters on a paper with squares of suitable size. Chinese characters are mostly as tall as they are broad.

Once you know the character, don’t mass your repetitions – As I have already explained in the section about spaced repetition, you should spread out your reviews. Once you have learnt a character, do something else before you write it again. You can start with very small intervals, so learning to write five other characters in between is good enough.

Practice pronunciation and meaning at the same time - You should learn pronunciation and meaning at the same time since most characters look the way they do because of their pronunciation rather than meaning. Write the pronunciation and meaning of the character next to it. If you know how the character is pronounced, read it aloud. If you don’t, look it up (for pronunciation resources, check the resource section in chapter five).

Include context - When you learn a character component, include information about the most common character it appears in. When you learn characters, include common word examples. When you learn words, include short phrases. This is essential, because it makes the information immediately useful.

There is of course much more to say about writing characters, but it doesn’t really fit into this book. If you want more hands-on ideas for what to look out for when it comes to strokes, check this article: Handwriting Chinese characters: The minimum requirements.

The write way

Select a character you want to learn and try the above method. Each step can be customised depending on your own preferences and what character you are learning, but start with following the recommendations here. Once you have learnt this method, feel free to use other dictionaries, skip or add steps as you see fit.

Different ways of practising handwriting

Once you know some characters, you need to practise writing them, both to retain the information and to get better at handwriting in general. There are many different ways you can practise and they all have their pros and cons.

Writing on paper – This is the most obvious way of writing and has been around since paper was invented (indeed paper was probably invented for this very purpose). The main advantage with this method is that if being able to write Chinese on paper is your goal, it makes sense to practise just that. Of course, you need paper and pencil to do this, so it’s a bit inconvenient. You also need a teacher to check your writing if you want feedback. Still, it’s hard to cheat with this method, if you don’t know how to write something, it will be obvious, at least to you.

Writing with your finger – This is the natural extension of the above method to be used whenever you don’t have paper and pencil around. For some people this becomes the main method, especially when combined with spaced repetition software. You skip the paper and pencil entirely and just write with your index finger on your palm, a flat surface or even in the air. This is obviously more practical because (hopefully) you always have your index finger with you. The drawback is that you don’t see the result, which comes with two problems. First, you don’t practise the actual strokes and your penmanship won’t improve. Second, it’s easier to cheat by being too quick and just saying to yourself that you actually knew that character. If you made a minor mistake, you’re less likely to notice, even if it’s an honest mistake.

Writing in your mind – This is the next step in the abstraction process and it works even if your nemesis cuts your hands off. Simply imagine writing the character on the canvas of your mind. If you’re not very familiar with character components, you might have to do this stroke by stroke, but as you learn more about characters, it works best with just imagining the different components being put into place. 禾, 火 makes 秋, add 心 and you get 愁. Since all these components are common, imagining the writing of this character is pretty easy. The downside is that you only practise structure, not actual writing. This method is good if your handwriting is already acceptable and your main goal is to expand vocabulary. The method is very quick and it’s probably the one I’ve used the most over the years.

Writing on screen without feedback – There are several programs for mobile phones and computers that allow you to write either directly on a touch screen or by using a stylus or writing tablet. Most of these programs don’t offer you any feedback, so in a sense, it’s just a very expensive kind of paper and pencil approach. However, this is not entirely true, because writing on the screen allows more direct comparisons to model characters and will thus improve the chances of spotting errors. A smart phone is also something most people carry around all the time, so I think these programs are useful. Since I have already suggested Pleco for other reasons, you might as well use it for this kind of writing as well.

Using handwriting input – This can be done either on your phone or your computer (although the latter is a lot harder to configure and has never really worked for me). Whenever you want to write Chinese, use handwriting recognition. This will take more time, but on the other hand, you will practise while doing something useful and/or interesting. Say good-bye to boring writing exercises and just use handwriting as your default input method. The disadvantage is that it takes more time and that you risk forgetting words you don’t use often. This might not be a problem, but if you think it is, you should pair this method with spaced repetition.

Writing on screen with feedback – This is an approach that has only been around for a few years and the only program I know that does this well is Skritter, which I have mentioned before in the section about spaced repetition software. Skritter is good because it gives you feedback on your writing, which makes it both fun and effective. The downside is that it costs money. Still, it is the best alternative for maintaining writing ability, save for having a teacher looking over your shoulder all the time, correcting your writing, but that’s bound to be prohibitively expensive and not very practical.

No writing, just looking – This isn’t a method as such, but it’s something many students, including myself, sometimes revert to when feeling tired. Instead of actively checking if you can write a character, you just look at the answer and try to answer the question: “Would I have been able to write this if asked to?” The problem with this approach is that it’s extremely hard to determine if you knew something after seeing the answer, so you’re likely to overestimate your ability to write the character. Don’t use this method! It has no advantages and it’s only mentioned here so that I can point out that if you want to remember the character, simply looking at it isn’t enough, you need to actively process how the character is structured and written. Use method three above instead.

Only reading and typing – Many native speakers read and type Chinese rather than write it by hand. Still, we shouldn’t compare ourselves with native speakers. They’ve had a lifetime to practise Chinese characters and even if they don’t practise much writing actively, they can still write most characters. There will of course be exceptions; native speakers forget characters all the time, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t write Chinese by hand if asked to. Even though I haven’t seen any research on this, my own experience tells me that as second language learners, simply reading and typing is not enough, you have to combine this with at least some writing practise.

Are you cheating?

What methods do you use to practise characters? Is there a risk of cheating? This is an honest question! It’s easy to cheat without being aware of it, even if you’re an upright person who would never cheat on an exam. It’s even more important to make sure you aren’t cheating in this case, because you are only cheating yourself. Even the best of methods can be misused.

3.5 Learning Chinese grammar

Chinese grammar is an interesting topic and learners approach it with different attitudes. To start with, many people have strong negative feelings about grammar and associate it with bad experiences from learning a foreign language in school.

In many classrooms, force-feeding conjugation rules and inflections seems to take precedence over learning to use the language. Still, I think what most people dislike is the way grammar was taught rather than grammar itself.

Learning grammar is essential when learning any language. Grammar is what turns a jumble of words into functional sentences. If you’ve heard someone tell you that Chinese has no grammar, they are wrong. Without grammar, it would be impossible to communicate in any language, including Chinese.

It’s true that Chinese has no inflections and no tenses in the way that many other languages have, but that doesn’t mean that Chinese has no grammar.

Grammar at different levels

I think the role of grammar varies at different proficiency levels. There is a general rule of thumb that the more advanced your Chinese is, the more you need to care about grammar. How much you want to study grammar also depends on what you prefer and what your goals are.

Let’s discuss learning grammar at different levels:

In the very beginning you don’t really need to focus on grammar separately because you will learn the basics from phrases and sentences. When you first learn these, it’s fine to learn them as chunks without understanding exactly how they work. For instance, you will probably learn to say 听不懂/聽不懂 (tīngbudǒng) “I don’t understand (what is said)” before you learn to handle verb complements in general. This is fine, you will slow yourself down if you strive to understand in detail every phrase you learn. Focusing on chunks will enable you to communicate in Chinese from the very start.

As a beginner you will need to break down the chunks into smaller units and get a basic understanding of the words involved. You don’t need to know exactly why they are ordered the way they are and how they interact, but you need to know roughly what they mean. This is because the number of things you can say with set phrases is limited and you need to be able to substitute words. For example, knowing how to say 听不懂/聽不懂 (tīngbudǒng) is not enough, you also need to be able to say看不懂 (kànbudǒng) if you don’t understand something you read. You still don’t need to really understand verb complements to do this, though, you just need to know that 听/聽 (tīng) means “listen” or” hear” and that 看 (kàn) means “read” or “see”. The same is of course true for pronouns, nouns and, to some extent, verbs. That being said, it doesn’t hurt to glance over grammar explanations in your book, but if you learn enough sentences, you will get the grammar you need from them.

As an intermediate learner, you will have a basic grasp of word order and word formation more or less intuitively based on the sentences you have heard or read. You will need to study grammar directly as well, but you can do that based on actual problems you face when using Chinese. If you find it hard to use adverbs, check the related grammar. If you don’t understand 以 in the texts you read, study how that character is used. In any case, grammar learning should be driven by your interest, your need to express yourself or to understand others, not by cramming sentence patterns.

As an advanced learner, you need to start really understanding more subtle differences between similar words and patterns. You can achieve this by enough exposure, but it’s really hard because we’re talking about thousands of hours over a long time. A more efficient way of doing this is to add explicit study to the mix, but still keep a high volume of exposure. I will talk more about explicit focus in the next section.

Grammar in focus

Even though I’ve said that you can get away without spending too much time on grammar at the beginner levels, there are several reasons why you would want to focus on grammar now and then. It might be because your teacher requires you to do so or because you realise that you need to understand something in more detail to increase your proficiency in general.

The traditional approach to this tends to lack in two areas. First, teachers often expect students to actively use grammar points the first time they appear in the textbook, without having had a chance to get to know them. It’s exceedingly hard to use a grammar point you aren’t already passively familiar with, which is shown by the strange sentences usually produced by students in this situation.

Second, most textbooks don’t offer enough examples of how a grammar point or sentence pattern is used. This is related to the mental models I’ve talked about earlier. It’s impossible to form an accurate mental model based on just a couple of examples, you need much more than that!

When I teach how to use a grammatically important word, I start by identifying the key function of that word. This is easy in most cases, but can be almost impossible in some (it took me a long time to figure out a good way of summarising 了 for instance).

With this key function in mind, I then try to find perhaps a dozen sentences that show how this pattern is used. I avoid rare exceptions. As a student, you’re not supposed to learn all these sentences, but reading them will give you a more accurate mental model of the word. Memorising at least one of the sentences is useful, though, because that makes the step to active use much shorter.

The reason I start with the key function of the word is that it helps focus attention. Without any guidance, it will take too long to form an accurate mental model. If you have a rough idea when you start, the process will be much quicker. This is especially true for complicated words like 了 where it’s likely that you will form the wrong model if left entirely on your own.

Based on the examples in your book, you might think that 了 is a past tense marker, which it isn’t. If you start learning 了 with the idea that it marks aspect (the internal state of an action, such as if it’s completed or if it has changed), you’re much more likely to form the right mental model.

The problem is that finding accurate explanations of grammar is difficult, just figuring out one word can be a major research project if no one has looked into it before. Creating an easily accessible explanation for students is even harder. This is one of the main reasons why a good textbook and a competent teacher are so important! If you want basic descriptions of grammar, the best resource I know is the Chinese Grammar Wiki.

Remembering grammar

What I’ve said so far is basically that you should learn grammar as needed, but you don’t need to spend too much time on it as a beginner. I have also said that when you need to focus on grammar, the best way is exposure with guidance, i.e. knowing roughly what it’s about and then use large numbers of example sentences. But what do you do after you have gained basic understanding? How do you remember grammar?

I treat sentence patterns and grammar words like context-based vocabulary. For instance, while it’s fine to learn a word like 桌子 “table” out of context, it’s not a good idea to learn a grammar word such as 而 out of context, because it means completely different things in different situations.

There are two ways to create flashcards for these situations.

First, you can create fill-in-the-gap sentences where you leave out the keywords. This requires you to actively process the sentence each time you review it. If you want to create this kind of flashcard, I suggest using Anki.

Second, you can memorise an entire sentence. I think this is equally useful at all stages of learning, because it gives you a reassuring reference. If you remember that sentence, you will be able to substitute words and express your own ideas.

Once you have learnt a new sentence pattern or grammar point in this way, it’s not hard to start using it actively. You already have examples of how it’s used in your mind and you have heard or seen it a number of times. If you still feel insecure, start using it in writing first or in a situation you feel comfortable, such as with a friendly native speaker.

Deep structure and grammar

Chinese grammar is fascinating and there’s much going on that is very basic, but still isn’t mentioned in textbooks. This is because most authors, teachers and students seem to think that sentence patterns are all there is to Chinese grammar and haven’t studied the subject properly.

I haven’t done enough research in this area to be an expert, but I will share one example of a valuable insight into Chinese grammar, hoping to help you understand the language better and show you how interesting grammar can be at the same time. Let’s talk about word order and information structure!

The basic rule is that old, familiar information (for the listener) is placed before new information. This rule can be clearly illustrated by looking at word order in some very simple sentences. First look at these two sentences:

人来了/人來了)

来了人/來了人)

They look similar, right? Let’s apply the rule I introduced above. In the first case, 人 “person” is old information, whereas 来/來 is the action in focus. This is similar to the definite article in English, which denotes information that is known to the listener. If you say, “the man has arrived”, you expect the listener to know whom you’re talking about. The same is true in Chinese, so the first sentence is used to describe the arrival of an expected person.

In the second case, the order of the two words is reversed and the sentence therefore lacks the sense that an expected person has arrived and just means that someone has arrived (indefinite article in English).

Without a deeper analysis, these examples might seem identical and you might study Chinese for years without really understanding the difference.

Let’s look at another example:

雨下了

下了雨

Both these phrases are grammatical in certain contexts and by understanding the flow of information in each sentence, understanding the difference becomes easier.

In the first case, 雨 “rain” appears at the beginning of the sentence, indicating that it’s old information. This means that rain was already present in the context.

Perhaps someone first says that it started raining and then follows up with 雨下了一整天. In this sentence, it’s clear that “rain” is not the new piece of information, but instead the focus is on the fact that it rained “the entire day”.

The second sentence above, 下了雨, can’t really be used like this, but works better when you simply want to tell someone that it rained, i.e. when the rain itself is the main focus, such as in: 出门之后下了雨 / 出門之後下了雨.

You could reverse this sentence and say 出门之后雨下了 / 出門之後雨下了, but then again, it sounds like you’re talking about something known, perhaps that rain was forecast on the news that morning.

The general pattern of known to unknown, old to new and background to foreground can be found at many different levels in the Chinese language and is probably the most useful deep-structure rule to know.

There are of course exceptions, but when I learnt this rule, I had a long series of eureka moments and it made so many things fall into place. Grammar is really fascinating, you just need to approach it the right way!

3.6 Recommended resources

Below, I present some carefully selected resources that are meant to help you learn characters, words and grammar. If you want more resources, please visit Hacking Chinese Resources, where you can find more than 300 links, all tagged and sorted by proficiency level, topic and type.

Dictionaries and vocabulary references

MDBG - This is a user-friendly dictionary that works well as a starting point for beginners. It offers input in Pinyin, characters or handwriting. Entries give you a plethora of information, including coloured Pinyin, definition, stroke order (only for individual characters), audio (also only for individual characters).

ChinesePod Glossary - This is not a dictionary, but one of the best ways of finding suitable example sentences. This is a database of phrases written specifically for language learners. You can search for a word or character and see how it’s used in context. Most sentences have audio, which is truly awesome! A pop-up dictionary gives you the meaning of words you don’t understand.

HanziCraft - This site gives you information about character decomposition, including pronunciation clues (very useful) and example words sorted by frequency (which is lacking in many other dictionaries).

Zdic (漢典) - This is an online Chinese-Chinese dictionary which offers more detailed information than most other dictionaries on this list. It also offers example sentences sorted under the various definitions of an entry. Furthermore, it offers information about character variants, composition and pronunciation in other dialects, as well as stroke animations.

Youdao 有道 - This is my favourite dictionary for translation work. Apart from being a very comprehensive dictionary in general, it also offers bilingual example sentences. This resource is particularly useful for advanced students who need to translate specialised vocabulary. Also a good place to see how words are used in context in general.

Taiwan MoE dictionary (國語辭典) - This is the standard reference dictionary for traditional characters in Taiwan. It’s easy to use and well designed. It offers everything a normal dictionary does, but with the added benefits of tons of recorded audio (including definitions and examples). It also has translations to other languages, mostly German and French.

Chinese Etymology - As the title implies, this website focuses on character etymology (i.e. the historical development of characters). Much about Chinese characters doesn’t make sense unless you go back in history and this is one of the few sources available online and in English.

Pleco - Pleco is the best mobile app available for learning Chinese. It offers a number of dictionaries you can flip between depending on what you’re looking for. Pleco also offers manually recorded audio both by a male and female speaker (this is the only dictionary that does this, as far as I know). There are also OCR, flashcard and document reader functions. If you only get one app for learning Chines, it should be Pleco. The cost is insignificant to the value it offers. There is a free version, too.

Hanping - This is an alternative to Pleco also well-worth checking out. It costs less, but still has useful features like OCR, HSK vocabulary and much more. There is a free version you can try first.

现代汉语词典 - This is the printed dictionary that functions as a standard reference in Mainland China. If you want to be really sure that something is officially correct, this is where you should go. This is a Chinese-Chinese dictionary that only exists in print. It’s easy to buy in China, but harder from abroad. Try JD.com.

新华大字典 - This is an authoritative character dictionary (also Chinese-Chinese) that offers more detailed information on individual characters (but not words), such as etymology, usage, variant forms and more. Again, easy to buy in China, but harder from abroad. Try JD.com.

Tools and apps for learning vocabulary

Anki - This program should be the standard choice for the serious language learner. It takes some time to get used to, but this program is powerful and allows you to do almost anything with text, audio, video, pictures, cloze tests, multiple review directions and a very potent browser where you can select and edit cards as you please.

Pleco - Already mentioned above, but since it has a flashcard system as well, it should be mentioned here as well. This app for iOS and Android combines spaced repetition flashcards with multiple dictionaries. The flashcard add-on is not free, but not particularly expensive either.

Skritter - This is the only program that targets handwriting specifically and gives you corrective feedback. This makes learning to write characters by hand fun, and I think a Skritter subscription is essential for beginners and people who think character writing is important. I should mention that I work for Skritter, but also that I used the program long before I started to work for the company.

Word lists and vocabulary info

Chinese Expressions (Carl Fordham) - This site offers the most interesting vocabulary lists out there, sorted by topic.

YellowBridge word lists - Short and concise lists for various topics and themes.

Mandarin word lists (About.com) - Short and concise lists for various topics and themes.

The most common 3000 characters - A list of the 3000 most common characters in Chinese, with brief definitions in Chinese and some comments. This is probably not perfectly reliable, but a good resource for learners.

Frequency data for disyllabic words in Chinese - The above list just presents characters, this one deals with bigrams (two-character words). You can choose between “news” and “general fiction”. Useful to see how common words actually are in printed Chinese (which is of course not the same as what people speak).

Mnemonics and memory training

Memory aids and mnemonics to enhance learning - This is an introduction to how to use mnemonics for learning Chinese. It contains several different practical examples. Much of this is familiar from this chapter.

Remembering is a skill you can learn - My article meant to tell you that you can train your memory. You should know this already if you’ve read this chapter, but I want to mention the article again here in case you skipped to the resources.

Mnemonics on Wikipedia - This works well as a basic introduction to what a mnemonic is and the history of memory techniques. It also offers links to further reading and some examples.

Memory methods on ChangingMinds - This is a great overview of different memory techniques. Not all of them are suitable for learning Chinese. The entries here are introductions only, so if you want more detailed information, try searching for the specific method you want to know more about.

Learning grammar

Chinese Grammar Wiki - This is the best resource for learning grammar online. It offers detailed presentations of most common sentence patterns and function characters/words.

Oxford Chinese grammar notes - This page also provides good introductions to Chinese grammar points. Some discussions are very thorough (such as 的. There are also great sections with frequently asked questions and related explanations. A good alternative to the Chinese Grammar Wiki.

Common conjunctions in Mandarin - This is a neat page that summarises the most common ways of connecting sentences and clauses in Chinese. It gives you tons of examples on how to express things like parallel relationships, turning points, causal relationships and much more.

Mandarin Chinese Count/Measure Words - This is a list of common measure words in Chinese, not suitable for studying directly, but works well if you want to look something up.

Asking the experts: How to learn Chinese grammar - In this article, 16 experts give their ideas on how to learn Chinese grammar. They don’t all have the same approach, so by reading this article, you’ll get much needed information as well as inspiration on how to learn Chinese grammar.

4. Improving listening and reading

Listening and reading are incredibly important, and if you have some extra time to spend and aren’t sure where to invest it, it’s never a bad idea to listen and read more. Here are some of the reasons these skills are so important:

Vocabulary - If you want to expand your vocabulary, you should listen and read more, picking up useful words as you go along. Learning vocabulary through context is the preferred method, especially if the material is adapted to your current proficiency level.

Usage - You learn how to use words by listening and reading a lot. You will eventually develop a feel for how they are used and combined in different contexts. It’s very hard to memorise which verbs go with which nouns, but through large amounts of exposure, you can still learn it.

Grammar - I think it’s sometimes good to study grammar directly (see the previous chapter), but it’s often better to listen and read to such an extent that you build an intuitive feel for grammar. You can’t achieve this by a little input here and there, though, you need large amounts of it.

Opportunity - If your passive skills are good, every exposure becomes a learning opportunity. By contrast, if you don’t understand what you hear or see, you won’t learn much. This is intimately connected with what was brought up in chapter three about comprehensible input and incidental learning, topics we will look more at in this chapter.

Thinking - Chinese isn’t structured and expressed the same way as English is. There is logic there, but it’s not of the same kind you’re used to. Listening and reading is the only way to learn how to construct sentences and arguments properly in Chinese and avoiding sounding like a translation program.

Integration - Nothing is more socially isolating than not understanding what’s going on. By making sure your listening and reading are up to par, you will find it much easier to fit into Chinese society and get along with native speakers.

Culture - Listening and reading is the only way you can access Chinese culture. There is of course culture you can experience directly without language, but learning about Chinese culture in a language other than Chinese definitely adds a barrier between you and the topic.

4.1 Basic principles

Comprehensible input

As we saw in chapter two, you should strive to find material that is not so hard you don’t learn anything, but still difficult enough to teach you something new.

Unfortunately, this problem is much harder to solve for Chinese than for English. There simply aren’t that many resources available that present interesting content in a way that is comprehensible for beginner or intermediate students.

Reading children’s books in Chinese is a great example of what seems to be a good idea to read as a beginner, but usually doesn’t work at all. The books seem to be written with the edification of the child in mind, rather than entertainment. They are full of idioms, flowery expressions and words that would be a waste of time for most foreigners to learn.

There are graded readers that target foreigners at specific levels and these are great for learning, but they are few and can’t satisfy your input needs. I will discuss graded readers more later in this chapter. You can also base your reading on spoken language, such as the subtitles of TV shows.

In the end it will be up to you to collect the learning materials you need, but I will do my best to help you find them. Naturally, I will also provide you with suggestions for where to start. However, since you won’t be able to find enough material tailored to your specific level, the most important skill I can teach you is how to adapt material you find.

How to create comprehensible input

The concept of comprehensible input was made famous by Stephen Krashen, but there is in fact a much older metaphor I want to use, popularised by the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky in the 1930s.

In his metaphor, learning is like building a house: each new floor represents more advanced knowledge. To be able to reach higher up, the learner needs scaffolding. That way, material that would be too hard otherwise becomes manageable and comprehensible.

Gradually, the scaffolding can be removed when the learner can handle the new level without assistance. What we’re going to look at in this section is how to construct such scaffolding to enable you to handle input that is too hard for you to deal with on your own:

Use context-heavy media - For listening, this would be TV and film. Having pictures helps enormously. For reading, nothing beats comics. They provide a vivid visual context for the language and you don’t actually need to understand everything to enjoy reading. You can also read subtitles to films, relying on the video to understand what’s going on.

Go for the gist - When you listen and read, the goal should seldom be to understand every single word. Instead, you should be satisfied with learning enough to make sense of what you’re listening to or reading. This relates back to what I’ve said about not aiming for 100% earlier. Relax. Don’t be too serious.

Read digitally with pop-up dictionaries - There are several good pop-up dictionaries for browsers (see the resource section at the end of this chapter). They give you definitions of characters and words by simply pointing at them with your mouse. You can find similar tools for tablets, e-readers or smart phones. A word of warning, though, having a pop-up dictionary readily available doesn’t mean that you should quit reading the text and skip directly to the dictionary!

Preview the material properly - Whether you’re listening or reading, spend some time to preview the material and don’t just dive right in. When listening, listen a few times without really trying too hard, perhaps while doing the laundry or jogging. You might not feel like you understand much, but you do get an idea of the structure of the audio clip and what it’s about. When reading, look at the headlines, read the introduction and perhaps the ending first. Look at pictures and read the text below them, as well as headlines and other highlighted text.

Keep to topics you have already studied - If you’re new to the formal Chinese common in news broadcasts, don’t start your listening adventure with an article about financial legislation. Pick something you are relatively familiar with. If you feel your sports vocabulary is okay, then choose sports-related articles. Then slowly expand from there. This way, you already know roughly what they’re talking about; you just need to figure out how it’s done in Chinese.

Read about the topic in English first - Find a topic you can read about in English before you try it in Chinese. Newspapers and news broadcasts are of course perfect for this purpose, because as long as you choose major events, there will definitely be English coverage of the event. Some newspapers offer bilingual versions of articles (again, see the resource section at the end of this chapter).

Find Chinese translations of familiar media - This has several advantages. First, if you choose media you like, you don’t risk being bored. Second, you already know roughly what’s going on. Naturally, not all translations are good, so you might want to check the translation with a native speaker before you start. I have read many novels and seen many films I’m already familiar with in English.

Revisit the same material more than once - This might sound boring, but if you find the content interesting, it’s a great way of learning. By listening or reading the same material again, you stand a much better chance of understanding it.

Slow down the pace - When reading, it’s natural to slow down when you read something difficult, but what about listening? In real-life conversations, you can ask people to speak more slowly. When you practise on your own, use a program like Audacity to slow down the rate of speech (there is a function called “change tempo”).

These are some of the approaches I use to make difficult material more comprehensible. The idea is that you will gradually feel less of a need to use the above scaffolding for media about a certain topic at a certain level.

Quantity is king (again)

When it comes to input, quantity is more important than quality, a concept discussed both in chapters two and three. The most important thing is that you listen and read as much as possible.

Native speakers are good at their language partly because they have been immersed in it for many, many years. This amount of input is difficult to copy as a foreign adult learner, but you should do your best.

I attribute my current level both in English and Chinese to massive amounts of input (audio books, music, lectures, TV, radio, etc.) combined with relatively small amounts of high-quality practice (at least in the case of English). I have practised much more Chinese considering that I have lived in Chinese-speaking environments for four years, but never spent more than a week in an English-speaking country.

4.2 Improving listening ability

Listening ability is a complex skill that involves many components. If you want to fix a problem with listening ability or just improve in general, you need to know what component is lacking; you need to know what the weak link is.

Just listening more in general is useful, but targeting the most limiting component will lead to better results more quickly. Let’s look at how to identify problems with listening before we look at how to fix them.

Finding problems with listening ability

What skills are involved in listening comprehension? Or, in other words, what types of problems may you encounter when trying to understand spoken Chinese?

Here are four categories of problems:

Lack of phonological awareness: The Chinese sound inventory contains many features that aren’t present in most Western languages, most importantly tones. Not being able to distinguish between these sounds and tones will cause problems. This isn’t merely a problem for beginners; advanced learners also have to cope with regionally accented Chinese, people with different voices and ways of speaking.

Symptom: Chinese sounds like a stream of gibberish and you can’t figure out where one syllable stops and the next starts. Tones are enigmas and you find it very hard to distinguish between minimal pairs such as zh/z, b/p, n/ng. If someone asks you to write down what syllables someone is saying (the pronunciation, not the meaning), you find it hard.

Lack of vocabulary: This is a problem that most new learners face in everyday conversations and everyone else once you start listening to material produced for native speakers. Normal people have a large vocabulary and to fully understand what you hear, you need to know a large number of those words. Thus, simply not knowing the words is, I think, the most common problem. This problem can be alleviated somewhat by guesswork and extrapolation, but if you’re after deeper understanding of something, that won’t be enough.

Symptom: If you think that you could write down what’s being said in Pinyin, but still don’t understand what’s being said, then your phonological awareness is good, but your vocabulary isn’t large enough. This ties in well with what I wrote in chapter two about the importance of knowing many words.

Lack of speed: Listening speed is the pace at which you can understand spoken language, provided that you know the words. Being able to do this is usually the result of huge volumes of practice (i.e. immersion). There is no substitute, but SRS with audio can help. Listening speed is seldom discussed, but it’s clear that you not only need to know the words, you need to know them fast.

Symptom: If you can understand a passage after hearing it many times or at slower speed, it means that you have the necessary phonological awareness and a broad enough vocabulary, but you still lack the listening speed. Immersion is what you need in your case; quantity is, again, king.

Lack of understanding: If you find that the above factors aren’t a problem for you, but you still find listening hard, then the only remaining explanation is that your understanding of Chinese in general is too weak. This might be because of a lack of cultural understanding, grammar or different ways of thinking and expressing opinions.

Symptom: None of the three areas above present any serious problems, at least not with the audio you’re currently tackling, but you still don’t understand what’s being said. This means that your problem is not related to listening at all and the solution should therefore be sought elsewhere. Exactly where depends on what problems you have, but going through the audio with a teacher or helpful friend would be a start.

The above analysis makes it look like listening comprehension problems are easy to untangle, but that’s not the case. It’s likely that you have some problems in all areas and that the situation constantly changes. You might also encounter different problems when listening to different types of audio.

What’s your weakest link?

Next time you don’t understand something you think you ought to understand, use the above list and try each point to figure out what your problem is. Can you write down the Pinyin? If no, your problem is phonological awareness, perhaps because you’re new to Chinese or at least this speaker. Do you understand the words? If not, vocabulary is your main problem, not listening as such. Do you understand the audio on the first try? If not, but you can understand it after a few times, you lack listening speed. If you pass all these tests, your problem isn’t related to listening ability.

The passive-active listening spectrum

As I have already discussed in chapter two, you learn the most when you actively process the language you’re learning, but you can’t study very actively all the time because it’s too demanding.

Therefore, you have to find different ways of improving listening ability, from very passive to very active methods. Which you choose depends on what you feel capable of at the moment.

Please note that these definitions are my own and that I use these categories to show you what the passive-active listening spectrum looks like. Other authors may use these words differently.

1. Active listening is when listening is the only thing you’re doing and you actively try to understand and learn as much as you can. Active listening is usually a form of deliberate practice, and as such, it is demanding. Here are some examples of active listening:

Transcribing a news broadcast

Taking notes from an online lecture

Listening to a podcast in order to summarise it

2. Passive listening is when listening is your main activity, even though you might do other, less demanding tasks at the same time, such as cooking or driving. Thus, it’s much less active and requires time of a different quality than active listening. I will talk more about time quality in chapter six. Here are a few common examples of passive listening:

Listening to podcasts while jogging

Tuning in to a radio station while playing a mindless game

Reviewing the audio material to your textbook while driving

3. Background listening implies that listening is not the primary task. You might or might not hear all the audio being played, and for periods of time, you might focus so little that you might not be conscious of it at all. Here are a few examples of background listening:

Listening to podcasts while working

Having the radio on in the background while surfing

Playing a (non-language-dependent) computer game in Chinese

Now that we know what the spectrum looks like, let’s discuss these three types of listening more closely and see how they can help you learn Chinese.

Active listening and deliberate practice

Active listening is usually what people mean when they say that they’re practising listening ability. Active listening means that you engage all your faculties to try to understand and process the language you hear.

To make sure that the processing is as complete as possible, you typically need to perform some activity which is not listening in itself, such as answering questions about the audio you just heard, taking notes while listening or translating parts of what you hear. In any case, some kind of transformation is needed.

Exercises for active listening

Participate in a challenging conversation - Having a conversation above your comfort level is definitely active listening. The transformation involved occurs when you’re supposed to take what you hear (input) and transform it to some kind of meaning in your head, and then give it back to the other person in an engaging manner (output). I think conversing with people slightly above your current level is the best way of learning.

Transcribe audio - Choose audio you find interesting and do your best to transcribe what you hear, either using characters or Pinyin (I type characters, which I consider to be the golden middle way). Choose a source that has transcripts, because otherwise you’ll have to ask people for help if you fail to transcribe a passage. I also suggest using a program that allows you to see the audio file, which will enable you to select specific passages to play again. I have already mentioned Audacity, which is free and available on most platforms. In Audacity, simply select a passage and hold shift while clicking play, which will loop the selected audio. You can transcribe anything you want, including films, cartoons, TV shows, music, podcasts and what people are saying around you.

Take notes and/or write a summary - Pretend that you’re attending a lecture and that there’s going to be a quiz or test after it has finished. Take notes that cover the main points of what you hear (even if the content isn’t lecture-like at all). After you’ve finished listening (listen more than once if you want to), take your notes and write a summary.

As you can see, it doesn’t really matter what you do, but transforming the audio you hear into some kind of output guarantees a high level of processing.

If none of these are possible, such as if you only have the audio and no other people or resources around, you can still make your listening more active. Here are a few things you can do:

Noticing - Repeat anything you find interesting, perhaps because it’s new to you or you find the expression useful. It can be anything from tones, words, phrases or grammar. If possible, repeat aloud to yourself. If not socially acceptable, repeat in your head. Think of this as a mental bookmark you use to tell your brain that this is something important.

Shadowing - Immediately repeat aloud what you hear. This is easy in your native language (try it), but hard in Chinese, at least if the audio material contains natural speech. If you can’t repeat everything, repeat as much as you can, aiming for keywords. If you for some reason can’t repeat aloud, you can do it mentally, but note that this is much easier than saying the words aloud.

Interpret - Translate what you hear as you hear it. The difficulty depends on what you’re listening to and if you’re familiar with the content beforehand or not. Note that the idea here isn’t to produce a good interpretation as such, but to allow you to focus on the main points of what’s being said and summarise that in your native language.

Some of the methods above are very demanding and hard to keep up for long periods of time, so don’t hesitate to fall back to a more passive listening mode if you feel too tired.

Passive listening

If you plan your studying correctly, your Chinese listening practice will be mostly passive, partly because you can’t cope with too much active practice and partly because normal people don’t have enough time, so you must combine listening with other tasks. I have already mentioned ways of making input less demanding (scaffolding), so let’s turn to another question: How do you make passive listening interesting?

Combine learning Chinese with something you like. If you’re interested in computer games, learn the relevant vocabulary and start playing games in Chinese. Watch matches in Chinese and chat on forums about the results. Whenever you feel an urge to do something unrelated to Chinese, stop and think for a second if there is a way to do that in Chinese instead.

Combine learning Chinese with something you don’t like. This sounds counter-intuitive, but if you take two boring or menial tasks and put them together, the fun-factor sometimes adds up and makes it acceptable. For instance, if you think reviewing old podcasts isn’t part of your definition of ”fun”, try doing it while washing dishes. You might find that by combining the two tasks, it suddenly feels more worthwhile. I do this daily.

The benefits of background listening

I consider background and passive listening very useful, indeed necessary. There is some controversy here, because some people regard background listening as useless.

I think this is a misunderstanding. I’m not claiming that ten minutes of background listening will teach you more than ten minutes of active listening. Instead, ten minutes of background listening is better than no listening at all.

In other words, you do passive listening when you don’t have the time, means or energy to do active listening. You do background listening when you can’t do passive listening for the same reasons.

Background listening is awesome mostly because it allows us to fill our days with hours and hours of Chinese, seemingly without taking up more time. It might look like you have a busy schedule, but you can usually squeeze in a large amount of background listening without sacrificing much. I will return to this when I talk about time management in chapter six.

There are two common problems with background listening:

Your Chinese listening is interfering with something important you’re doing. This means that you need to make the Chinese easier. If you were listening to a new radio show, listen to something you’re familiar with instead. If the problem persists, listen to something you have already listened to before. One of the most passive kinds of listening is having Chinese music you know well playing in the background.

Something else you’re doing is interfering with your listening practice. You try to listen to more Chinese, but the other things you’re doing stop you from focusing on the audio. This problem can be mostly solved through practice. Personally, I can do anything with spoken audio in the background except writing in the language being spoken. I wasn’t born with this ability, though; it’s something I’ve learnt through years of listening to audio books.

Can you learn from something you don’t notice?

If you are focused on reading e-mails or arranging your calendar, can you really learn Chinese at the same time? Is background listening meaningful?

To begin with, no one is fully focused on his or her work 100% of the time. There are always gaps. Thus, even if you don’t focus on the audio at all while reading an e-mail, you might listen to it briefly while switching between different e-mails, while copying text or when logging out of your e-mail client. There will always be short breaks and pauses.

Thus, background listening often turns into passive listening, albeit only for short intervals. The point is that the duration is so short that you’d never consider starting a podcast or turning on the radio, but if it’s already on, you will listen. Having to opt out of listening (requires effort to not study) is much better than having to opt-in (requires effort to study).

More about listening speed

I have briefly mentioned listening speed above and now it’s time to elaborate a bit on that and explain why listening speed is so important. In short, listening speed is how fast you can understand spoken Chinese.

Knowing a word is enough to be able to read it, but to understand spoken Chinese, you need to understand words quicker than they’re being said. Reading speed is variable, listening speed typically isn’t. Therefore, the speed at which you can go from sound to meaning is extremely important.

Let’s look at a more concrete example. The first time you hear a word in Chinese and understand its meaning, either because you can guess it or because someone tells you what it means, a link is created between the sound and the meaning. For example: “tīnglì” = “listening ability”.

Next time you encounter the sound ”tīnglì”, you might or might not remember its meaning. If you do remember it, the recollection isn’t instantaneous; let’s say it takes you five seconds to search your memory and come up with the correct meaning.

Next time you hear the word, the recollection will be quicker, let’s say it takes two seconds. Then one second. Gradually, as your brain gets used to connecting the sound with the meaning, the process is completed more and more quickly. Your listening speed is increasing.

Lack of listening speed is a serious problem. Assuming that you can distinguish the sounds used in Chinese and that your vocabulary is big enough, you should be able to understand anything said to you in Chinese, and if you just know enough words you should be able to pass the listening test on any advanced exam, right?

Wrong! Even if you understand all the words, your parsing of sentences might be too slow. If the speed at which you process the audio you hear is slower than the rate of speech, you will have a problem.

By my own non-scientific estimate, news broadcasts are typically read at a pace of 3-4 syllables per second, which gives something like 2-3 words per second. Thus, if you require more than half a second to understand what these words mean, you will fall behind and get lost in no time.

The solution is in line with what I have recommended throughout this book and this chapter: listen more; quantity is king. If you want to improve your word recognition skill, you can also use any good spaced repetition software and set it up so that it plays only audio (or make sure it plays audio and then don’t look at the text). You can do the same thing with sentences.

Audio for every situation

As I have said many times in this book already, if you want to spend a large amount of time on learning Chinese, you have to find ways of learning that cover the entire active-passive spectrum. If you only have audio you need to focus on 100% to make sense of, what are you supposed to do when you feel tired? You will only be able to maintain focus on that level for perhaps twenty minutes.

Thus, one of the most important goals is to make sure you always have audio suitable for any situation. You need audio to listen to in the background, you need easy listening material for when you are tired, but you also need more demanding audio for when you have the time and energy. And you need this audio as close as possible, preferably just a click away.

Build your audio library

Start building your audio library right now. Create two different folders and put everything you consider “easy” in the first and everything else in the second and call it “hard”. Listen to the latter as often as you can, but when you feel tired, switch to the audio in the “easy” folder. Move audio from “hard” to “easy” as you grow more familiar with it and your listening ability increases. Use the “easy” folder for background listening or create a separate one. Make sure you have this audio available at all times on your phone.

Diversify your listening practice

Have you ever had the feeling that, after speaking with someone for a long time and understanding most of what they say, you then speak with someone else and understand almost nothing?

Don’t worry; you are not alone. I’ve had this feeling many times and it’s perfectly natural. It arises because your experience of spoken Chinese is limited and there’s huge variation in the way people speak.

For instance, speakers differ when it comes to voice quality, rate of speech, volume, accent, intonation, rhythm, style, enunciation, as well as vocabulary and grammar. You have to dig your way through all these layers to get to the underlying message.

If you only listen to one person speaking Chinese, you will associate the way that person says a word with the meaning of the word. With only one sample, your brain can’t determine what in the input is important for the pronunciation of this particular word and what just happens to be a characteristic of how this person speaks.

This is why it can be confusing to listen to a new speaker, especially when the total number of speakers you have listened to is low; your brain hasn’t figured out how to make sense of input in general, just the specific input you have heard so far. The more speakers you are exposed to, the easier it becomes to understand new speakers.

This is true for listening on many levels, from individual sounds and tones to accents. From this follows that you should listen to many different voices while learning Chinese.

Here are a few things you can do to diversify your listening practice:

Speak with different people even if you are the introvert shy person. If you think it’s scary, at least listen to different people.

Switch tutors and/or language exchange partners often to stay alert. This is easy to do online.

Watch TV shows and radio programs that include people from all over China to hear as many different ways of speaking as possible.

Use more than one podcast to avoid becoming too familiar with the way the hosts speak.

Use more than one textbook so you get the audio from more native speakers.

Develop an accepting attitude towards accents and understand that they are all perfectly natural variations of the language.

Variety is important at all stages of learning Chinese. While it might be good to stick to one standard as a beginner, that standard should not be based on one single person.

Similarly, as an intermediate or advanced learner, you can focus on learning one way of speaking Chinese yourself, but you should listen to other dialects as well. You can’t control the accents of people you meet, so you need to adjust and be able to understand all sorts of different ways of speaking Chinese.

Learning Chinese through music

Lastly, before I turn to reading ability, I want to say a few words about learning Chinese through music. In general, I think music is widely overlooked as a way of learning languages. Listening to music is spaced repetition packaged in a way that doesn’t make it feel like studying.

Some students complain that they don’t like Chinese music. Seriously? What kinds of music do they like, English music? I thought I didn’t like Chinese music either for a while, because all the Chinese songs I had ever heard sounded roughly the same and were slow ballads about love, relying heavily on the singer’s voice and the lyrics.

If you don’t understand the lyrics and don’t particularly like slow ballads, it’s easy to draw the conclusion that all Chinese music sucks. However, it isn’t good music that is lacking, but the ability to find it. It’s not that hard to find new music, try this:

Search for “[any genre you like]” + “Chinese” on YouTube. You’re likely to find at least something, depending a little bit on what genre you search for. Here are some examples: reggae, hip-hop, thrash metal, there’s lots of stuff out there just waiting to be discovered.

Pick any of the songs you already like and check the related videos on YouTube, which is likely to give you similar (or the same) artists. You can also look for related artists by searching on forums and on the internet in general.

Check music sites such as 一听音乐, 独立音地, 新茶锋潮. Also check this article (in English) about QQ Music.

Check one of the songs here. I have published four articles containing about 50 songs that I find worth sharing. I can’t promise that you will love them, but I think it’s likely that you will find something interesting.

Naturally, using music to learn is not effortless; you can’t just listen to music in Chines and absorb the language by magic. Some studying is required, but if you like the music, it’s much more fun than other ways of studying.

The only case where I would not recommend studying music is if you’ve just started learning Chinese. The problem is that since Chinese is a tonal language, artists mostly ignore tones, so if you speak Chinese the way it’s sung, most tones will come out wrong. Wait until you have a solid grasp of tones before you turn to listening to music as a learning method.

Finding music you like

Start with the article linked to above where I introduce Chinese music I like. Browse through the songs (listen to them once) and pick a few you like. Find the lyrics (search for “[song title]” + “歌词/歌詞”) and learn the lyrics. Sing along! Learn to sing it without the text. Sing when you bike or walk. Find another song and repeat. Keep the songs you already know. Impress native speakers in your local KTV.

4.3 Improving reading ability

The reason I have chosen to put listening and reading in the same chapter is of course that the general principles are the same for language input, regardless of which medium is used.

Still, there are some elements that make reading different:

Weak links between sound and writing - Whereas most other languages use phonetic alphabets, Chinese does not. As we saw in chapter three, there are phonetic components of characters, but being able to understand a word in written and spoken form is still two different things.

Variable speed - Unlike listening, reading can be done at your own pace. If you’re taking an exam, you might need to read at a certain speed to finish on time, but in general, you can slow down and spend more time if you don’t understand.

Requires high quality time - Audio is easy to combine with other activities and is therefore easier to learn passively. Learning to read is harder because it requires high quality practice.

Different kind of language - Written Chinese is different from spoken Chinese in many ways (vocabulary, grammar, etc.). There’s also classical Chinese, which is like another language within the language, and this often spills over into formal Chinese.

Easier to break down - If you struggle with a sentence someone is saying, you can’t pause real life; there are no subtitles. When you read, however, you can copy and paste, use dictionaries, save sentences and so on, making it much easier to study.

Harder to break down - In another sense, written Chinese is harder to break down. When listening, you can pay attention to intonation, stress and pauses, whereas written Chinese offers fewer clues. The fact that there are no spaces between words increases the difficulty significantly.

Why you should read more in Chinese

Reading is one of the core skills in language learning, both when studying foreign languages and when learning one’s native tongue. If you aren’t convinced already, here’s a list of benefits that comes with reading more:

Reading is the best way to expand vocabulary - Research shows that people use a surprisingly limited amount of unique words in everyday conversations. Educated people use more words, but it’s still not close to the richness of written language. If you want to expand your vocabulary in Chinese, reading is the best way to do it.

Reading enables you to learn about other things - The written word is a cornerstone of modern civilisation. If you learn how to read in Chinese, you can access a whole world of knowledge, some of it only available in Chinese.

Reading gives you access to society and makes integration possible - Modern society is full of processes that require reading. Without reading, you can’t really integrate properly. This is especially true in the age of the internet.

Reading gives you access to culture and references to culture - Chinese culture is very rich, which is one of the reasons Chinese is fascinating to foreigners. There are thousands of years of history with a rich tradition of stories, real and fiction. You can access some of these through video and audio, but most only exist in writing.

Reading enables you to pass proficiency tests - Even though you have other reasons for wanting to learn Chinese, passing tests is a crucial factor for many students. You might need it to get a scholarship or to prove to an employer that your Chinese is good enough. Reading ability is very important in modern Chinese proficiency tests.

Reading develops your mind and ability to concentrate - Reading is good for you in general. Not only do you learn new things, you also increase your ability to do that by broadening your horizons. I think people who read a lot usually have more interesting things to say and are less prone to be narrow-minded. Reading makes you a more interesting person.

Apart from the above points, there are numerous other reasons you should read more, not only in Chinese. Most of these are either obvious or not directly related to foreign language learning, so I won’t discuss them in detail here.

The rule of three and the importance of 90%

Let’s return to two familiar principles: the rule of three and why 90% is better than 100%. Both have been discussed in earlier chapters, but now it’s time to look at them in more detail in relation to reading in Chinese.

The rule of three means that when you see a word, character or component you don’t know, you shouldn’t put down the book or resort to a dictionary immediately. If you do, you’re breaking the flow of reading and will become frustrated quickly.

Instead, wait until you see something you don’t understand three times or more, and then look it up. Everything else you don’t understand can be safely ignored unless you think it’s crucial for understanding the bigger picture.

This will lead to a situation where you understand less than 100% of a text. As was the case for vocabulary, aiming for 100% means that efficiency will drop drastically. If reaching 90% comprehension of a text takes you 90 minutes, reaching 100% won’t take 100 minutes; it will take much longer. Some things are simply not worth spending time on, at least not until you have a good reason for doing so.

Here are some examples:

Near synonyms - As a beginner, you don’t need to know what the exact difference is between two near synonyms. Learn the general definition and how they are typically used, that’s enough.

Weird cases - Sometimes you encounter sentences or patterns that you actually know, but which are being used in a way you have never seen before. This might be an exception and spending time understanding exceptions is inefficient.

Rare words - Even carefully written textbooks contain rare words that the authors liked for some reason (or they inserted them to annoy learners; sometimes I really wonder). There are enough common words to learn, don’t bother with rare ones.

If you listen and read a lot, you don’t need to worry about the synonyms, tricky cases and rare words you skip, because if they really are important, they will appear again and you can learn them the next time around (or the third time around if you follow the rule of three).

What kind of reader are you?

Some people read to get the gist naturally and don’t care too much about the details. If you’re this kind of reader, congratulations! You will occasionally need to focus on details, but most of the time, just read as much as you can. If you think missing some information in the text is bad for you, change your attitude. You will not be able to read nearly enough Chinese if you get stuck on details. Most of these details will become clear with more reading. You need to make a conscious effort to stop aiming for 100%.

Finding suitable reading material in Chinese

Finding suitable reading material in Chinese isn’t easy. As is the case for listening, as an advanced learner you don’t have a problem, because you can read most texts written for native speakers. Beginners can keep busy with a few textbooks, the real problem is for people on a lower intermediate level.

Before I talk about alternative reading sources, I want to highlight textbooks. They are sometimes looked down upon, but textbooks are a really good source of suitable reading material. They are good because they combine several essential features:

They are designed with you in mind - This means that they contain the information you need, and you don’t need to use dictionaries or other tools as often. Tricky words or patterns are introduced gradually and explained carefully.

They are usually based on frequently used vocabulary - When you read a textbook at the beginner or intermediate level, you don’t really need to bother with the rule of three, because all words you encounter are very common.

The sentences are designed with you in mind - This is a double-edged sword. It’s good because it means that sentences follow the rules you have learnt and reinforce your knowledge of these rules. It’s bad because that’s not necessarily how normal people speak Chinese. I would say the benefits outweigh the disadvantages, though.

What about other sources of reading material? There are a few you should check out, perhaps not as a complete beginner, but when you reach a lower intermediate level and feel that you’re ready to move beyond your textbook. The reading material here is presented in rough order of difficulty, starting with the easiest. If you want concrete suggestions, please refer to the resource section at the end of this chapter.

Graded readers - Graded readers are really good. They are written with a specific reading ability in mind and typically use only a certain number of unique characters or words. I have included several graded readers in the recommended resources section.

Comics - This is one of the best sources for intermediate learners. I don’t mean to say that comics are easy to read, but because they contain pictures, they are much easier than novels. Comics will be discussed in more detail below.

TV and film - You might think it’s odd to include TV and film here, but I think that reading subtitles is a good way of practising reading. You have ample visual support as well. Try increasing the difficulty by turning the sound off.

Micro blogs - Micro blogs include sites like Twitter and Weibo. You have two alternatives: either you read native content (which is full of slang, references and generally harder than you think) or you subscribe to people who write Chinese specifically for foreigners.

Blogs - Ordinary blogs are sometimes very good, but it depends on who’s writing them and what they are about. It’s difficult to give general advice since I don’t know what you’re interested in, but asking a native speaker to find some for you usually works.

Social media - This means Facebook, Renren or other similar sites. This gives you access to chat as well as journals and/or status updates. The problems (and advantages) are similar to micro blogs.

Forums - If you’re interested in a particular topic, reading discussions about it in Chinese is great. It gives you a genuine feel for how people actually use the language in relation to your hobby. You can also make like-minded friends this way.

Textbooks for native speakers - You have two options: First, you can try to get hold of textbooks meant to teach Chinese. The textbook authors choose texts they think contain things children ought to know. If they ought to know something, you should probably know it, too. Second, you can study textbooks in other subjects (history, maths, science).

Newspapers - The biggest advantage with newspapers is that they keep you up-to-date with what’s going on and teach you Chinese at the same time. There’s also a huge amount of news being published every day, most of it online and free. You can read many articles about the same topic if you want to make it easier. Some newspapers have online bilingual versions.

Academic literature - If you already have a degree or plan to earn one, it will eventually be time to read academic books and journals in Chinese. Since you’re dealing with a specific field, it will be hard in the beginning before you grasp the key vocabulary, but it quickly becomes easier.

Novels - Reading a full-length novel is a long-term goal for many students. The first time, I did this by reading the Chinese translation of a novel I had already read in English. The most important thing is that you read a book you’re actually interested in. It’s going to be a struggle in the beginning, so you need a ton of motivation. There are also novels with parallel texts, Chinese on the left page, English on the right. Find a digital version if you can, which makes dictionary look-ups ten times quicker.

Finally, I would like to say that the best way of finding reading material as an advanced student is to ask native speakers, either online or people you know. Preferably, you should ask people who are interested in the same kind of books as you are. It’s hard to penetrate and get an overview of literature in a foreign language, so relying on native speakers will save time and frustration. One of the best things you can do is to go to a second hand bookshop with a Chinese friend.

What are you reading?

Some of the categories of reading material above might be beyond your current level, but go down the list and try the first category you haven’t tried already. I haven’t provided enough information here to find resources for all levels of proficiency, but I have listed many suggestions at the end of this chapter. Apart from this, searching or asking online should be enough.

Reading comics for more than just entertainment

I think reading comics is great practice, not only because it’s fun to read them, but also because they have several advantages over reading more traditional texts:

Bite-sized chunks - A book with massive blocks of text can be very intimidating if you’ve never read a book in Chinese before. Comics contain less text spread out over the page, making it feel easier. This psychological effect should not be underestimated!

Visual support - I have already mentioned that supporting media can be very helpful, and this is indeed the case when you read comics. Being able to see what’s going on makes understanding the text much easier. Sometimes, understanding words is just a matter of looking at the pictures and see what they are referring to.

Reading colloquial Chinese - Most of the text in comics is dialogue and it will often be colloquial. This gives you an almost unique opportunity to see colloquial words and phrases written down. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen a word written down and thought to myself “Ah, so that’s what people have been saying all the time!”

If you live in a Chinese-speaking environment, it should be easy to find comics locally, new, second hand or for rent. Renting comics is actually ideal, because you can try many different authors, artists and genres without spending much money. If you don’t have access to comics locally, it isn’t too hard to find them online.

Diversify your reading practice

Your primary goal should be to read things you’re interested in, but you should also try to diversify your reading. While this is absolutely essential for improving listening ability, it’s merely important for reading.

Proficiency exams typically give you different types of texts belonging to different genres. Naturally, real life contains text of different kinds as well, so spending all your time reading only one kind of text will prepare you neither for exams nor real life.

Here are a few ideas of how to diversify your reading:

Read lightweight online news - If you read the society, life or culture sections of various online newspapers, you will read news about many different topics. This is diverse in itself. If you feel brave, you can turn to more specialised news like technology, finance or politics.

Visit a local second-hand bookshop - The advantage with second hand books is that they are cheap. You can look around the different sections and pick books you think look interesting. Reading a page or two will tell you if they are on the right level or not. You can usually also buy comics, textbooks and magazines here.

Cooperate with other learners or native speakers - If you always find all your reading material on your own, you might limit yourself more than you want to. Cooperate with a classmate or a native speaker and share interesting reading material. You can also ask on online for suggestions.

Improving reading speed in Chinese

I think most students feel that they want to read faster, either to pass exams or just to be able to get through text more quickly. Taking Chinese language tests on advanced levels requires a reading speed that is significantly faster than most learners achieve without practising a lot.

A rough estimate says you need to be able to read about 150 characters per minute to stand a chance, but that 200 would be a safer bet. This is based on my own experience taking the advanced TOCFL (Test of Chinese as a Foreign Language) while keeping track of how fast I read articles and novels at that time, so take it with a pinch of salt.

As usual, if you want to improve reading speed, you need to figure out what the weak link in the chain is and work on that. Just practising reading faster in general is useful, but targeting specific problems will lead to better results:

Weak vocabulary - Not knowing enough words absolutely kills reading speed. Most people get stuck on words they don’t know, but even if you can learn to skip these words and still understand the gist, lacking vocabulary is the most common problem and the most serious one.

Weak connection between words and their meaning - If you see a word and need to think for five seconds before remembering what it means, you have a problem. You’re not lacking the vocabulary, but the connection between the visual input and the meaning of the word stored in your brain is too weak.

Weak reading skill - Reading is a skill that can be practised like any other skill. Knowing ten thousand words is not the same as being able to read. Connecting things together and extracting meaning from a collection of sentences is something that requires practise before you master it.

Weak grammatical understanding - If you don’t understand how Chinese sentences are structured, it will be hard to read quickly. On the other hand, if you know this structure well, it will become easy to figure out which parts are essential for understanding and which can be skimmed or even skipped.

There are a number of things you can try to improve reading speed. I’ve put these things roughly in order of importance with the most important method first:

If you don’t already read a lot, start reading more - None of the following advice is of any use if you don’t practise. There are no magic tricks to reading speed, but there are things that can make practising more efficient.

Force yourself to read more quickly than you normally do - Use your finger or a pencil and run it along the lines of characters at a specific pace and try to read at that pace. Time yourself to see that this speed is slightly faster than you normally read. Skip words if you have to. The goal is to make your brain accustomed to reading more quickly.

Make sure you know enough words - What “enough” means here depends on what you want to be able to read quickly, because texts about different topics naturally use different words. If you want to pass an exam, you probably want to avoid words that are too specialised and instead focus on high-frequency vocabulary.

I said above that there are no true shortcuts when it comes to reading speed, but there are some things you can do in order to read faster if you have an exam tomorrow and it’s too late to increase speed in general. These methods will be familiar to anyone who can read quickly in their native language, so I’m not claiming to present something new here:

Don’t read linearly - Just because a text is written in a certain order it doesn’t mean you have to read it that way. Read headings first, so you know what to expect. Read the first and the last sentence of a passage first, they usually contain more information than those in the middle. Also, read the questions before you read the text.

Don’t re-read if you stumble on a word - This requires practice, but if you encounter a word you don’t know or a sentence you didn’t really get, don’t re-read it immediately. Finish the paragraph first; because it’s likely you’ll understand the difficult part automatically because you know the rest of the paragraph. Also, the difficult part might not even be necessary for answering the question.

Don’t read sentences you don’t have to read - If you read the questions first (which you always should), you might figure out halfway through a sentence that this isn’t related to the questions at all. Skip the rest of the sentence and try to find where the text starts talking about things you need to know. However, note that some tests will try to trick you into a premature answer, so make sure what you have is actually the right answer (it might be followed by a 不过/不過 or 但是, signifying that there’s more to come).

Don’t use any of these methods as an excuse to not read more Chinese, though. There is only one way to get good at reading and that is to read more!

How fast do you read?

If you’ve reached a level where you can read Chinese beyond your textbook, it’s time to check how quickly you read. Select a text from one of the sources you normally read, perhaps a book or a newspaper. Set a timer for ten minutes and see how far you get! Count the characters (roughly), divide by ten and you have your approximate reading speed in Chinese. Try with a similar text a few months from now and see if you have improved!

4.4 Recommended resources

Below, I present some carefully selected resources that are meant to help you improve listening and reading ability. If you want more resources, please visit Hacking Chinese Resources, where you can find more than 300 links, all tagged and sorted by proficiency level, topic and type.

Textbooks

中文听说读写/中文聽說讀寫 (Integrated Chinese) - This is one of the most common books used to teach Chinese in the United States. It comes in two editions with either simplified or traditional characters. It’s reasonably good for self-studying and contains good explanations in English. It might feel overly focused on the US for students who have never been there.

新实用汉语课本 (New Practical Chinese Reader) - This textbook is more common in China and is of similar quality, although the design and layout feels much older. It’s also weaker in explanations in general, but still a very popular textbook.

實用視聽華語 (Practical Audio-Visual Chinese) - This is the standard textbook in many language schools in Taiwan. It’s solid, but sometimes lacks detailed explanations in English, making it less than ideal for self-study. Still, this is a good textbook overall.

Colloquial Chinese - Another popular textbook suitable for self-studying. Note that there are just two books in this series.

Tools for listening

Audacity - A program that makes listening more visual, allows repeating selected passages and also has a “change tempo” function to slow down speed.

Select and Speak (Text to speech) - A plugin for Chrome that reads text in your browser aloud. The pronunciation isn’t too bad, but is obviously synthetic, so this is no substitute for listening to real audio.

ImTranslator (Text to speech) - Similar to Select and Speak above, but for Firefox, fills the same function. The main problem isn’t pronunciation of words, but intonation and tempo. Still, the audio is clear enough to understand. You can control speed with this plugin, which is a plus.

Podcasts

ChinesePod - The most complete audio resource for learners of Chinese with over 3000 lessons available. I haven’t used their lessons, but prefer to just use the audio and sometimes transcripts. My only complaint is that lower-level lessons contain too much English. Focus on the dialogues or more advanced lessons.

Slow Chinese - A great resource collections with over 100 episodes, all with transcripts. The audio is, as the name implies, rather slow, which makes it more accessible than more rapid, native content. The episodes themselves are quite interesting since they deal with cultural topics and you will learn more than just language from listening to Slow Chinese. I haven’t used this podcast a lot myself, but what I have seen is pretty good.

Popup Chinese - Popup Chinese has a huge library of lessons for different levels and most of it is available for free (although you need to sign up). There are also vocabulary notes and so on, but I consider the actual audio the main point. Overall a very good podcast!

CSLPOD - CSLPOD offers a large library of audio for all levels and the audio is available for free (you can subscribe for some other services, such as vocabulary explanations, sentence drilling and some exercises, but I consider the free audio the most important resource. One important feature is that when the audio is played, the appropriate portion of the text is highlighted, making it a lot easier to follow. There’s also a translation freely available for each podcast. Overall a good listening resource!

Melnyks Podcast/Audio Course - This website offers theme-based, progressive and easy online lessons. Audio course with full PDF transcripts, worksheets, mobile apps, videos and more. From what I can see, the first 100 lessons are for free, but you need a subscription after that. I tried two episodes (1 and 100) and they are pretty good. The major benefit with this podcast compared with others is that it’s progressive, meaning that each lesson builds on the other, it’s not just random lessons put on the same page.

Native audio

锵锵三人行 - 锵锵三人行 is my favourite TV program. It’s also one of the best ones for language learners, mostly because of its focus on talking, availability of transcripts and variety of both guests and topics. This should be a key component of any immersion effort, but you probably need to be upper intermediate or above to benefit. This show has been aired every weekday for decades!

鳳凰FM - This website (also available as apps both for Android and iOS) offers unlimited amounts of listening material, everything from audio books to TV shows. A major benefit is that much material can be downloaded from within the app and listened to offline.

悦读FM – 倾听文字的声音 - This site offers a large collection of articles read aloud, with subtitles. They are all pretty short, meaning that they are suitable for intensive study as well as extensive learning (just keep a bunch on your phone).

Tools for reading

Perapera Chinese - This plugin for Firefox allows you to hover over words and characters and get their definition and pronunciation. Excellent for lowering the difficulty of reading online texts.

Zhongwen Chinese - This is similar to Perapera, but for Chrome instead. Fills exactly the same function.

Pleco - I have mentioned Pleco before in this book and I will do it again. The document reader add-on allows you to read texts on your phone with a pop-up dictionary. Very useful!

Graded readers

Mandarin Companion - This is a new series of graded readers. They are all of high quality and more interesting than most other graded readers I’ve seen so far. Since the series is still under development, the books are only on level one so far (around 300 unique characters). Looking forward to more!

Chinese Breeze - This series has been around for a while and offers more titles for three different levels (300, 500 and 750 unique characters). Since you need a lot of reading material, I see no reason not to use both series of graded readers.

Reading material

This is a selection based on this article. The best way to find more resources is to go to Hacking Chinese Resources and select your proficiency level and then “reading”.

Chinese Text Sampler: Readings in Chinese Literature, History, and Popular Culture (beginner, intermediate, advanced, submitted by Mike Love) - A carefully chosen selection of 80 significant Chinese texts for students wishing to develop their reading skills while improving their cultural literacy. Includes classical and modern Chinese literature, historical documents, song lyrics, children’s stories, and lists of commonly used characters, idioms, and proverbs

Marco Polo Project – read and translate new writing from China (advanced, submitted by Julien Leyre) - The Marco Polo Project is a digital community reading and translating new writing from China. The website proposes a diverse and original selection of new Chinese writing by independent journalists and intellectuals, with bilingual titles and tagging. Users can contribute to the translation of these articles, read a bilingual versions of those already translated, or use the website for Chinese reading practice.

Chinese online short story collection (Just Learn Chinese!) (intermediate, advanced, submitted by me) - This is a great repository of short stories for beginner and intermediate learners. Some of them also have audio and all have translations to English and word lists! I would be a little bit careful with trusting their difficulty ratings, though, I checked some stories that were meant to be beginner-intermediate that were definitely too hard for most students in this range. Still very good resource, though.

纽约时报中文网 国际纵览 (New York Times, Chinese) (advanced, submitted by me) - This is the Chinese website of the New York Times. It obviously contains large amounts of reading material about current issues as well as other things. The articles are available in both Chinese and English, and there is even an option to turn on parallel reading (Chinese and English side by side). I can think of few better ways of easing yourself into reading Chinese news! Try using a pop-up dictionary like Perapera as well.

Chinese Text Project (classical Chinese) (advanced, submitted by me) - The Chinese Text Project is a web-based e-text system designed to present ancient Chinese texts, particularly those relating to Chinese philosophy, in a well-structured and properly cross-referenced manner, making the most of the electronic medium to aid in the study and understanding of these texts. Note: I realise that this might not be the best resource for an extensive reading challenge, but it’s still a great reading resource!

Chengyu stories, Chinese idioms (Chinese-Tools.com) (beginner, intermediate, submitted by me - Chinese Idioms or chengyu are short sayings usually consisting of four characters. Unless you know the story and its common usage, a chengyu will sound like random nonsense. Here are some chengyu stories, as taught to Chinese students, with Pinyin and Chinese annotation.

好讀 (E-books in traditional Chinese) (advanced, submitted by me) - This site contains a huge amount of e-books in traditional Chinese. My guess is that downloading and reading them without having the original text might be illegal, but even so, it’s often great to have an electronic version of a book you’re reading in print. This allows you to find passages by searching, copying words and sentences into your SRS and so on. There are also some audio books here (recorded by amateurs, mostly).

煎蛋：地球上没有新鲜事 (intermediate, advanced, submitted by me) - This website contains a lot of short and easy-to-access articles about science and technology related articles (although they are usually very lightweight, you don’t need to actually be a professional to understand this). There are lots of sections on this site and I want to point to one in particular (apart from the front page). 小学堂 explains different science-related questions, such as how do scientists deduce the age of planets, where does the water on Earth come from and why is spicy food spicy?

中文阅读天地 (University of Iowa)(beginner, intermediate, advanced, submitted by me) - This site contains a huge number of lessons, complete with texts, vocabulary, audio, exercises and much more. And it’s all free. Note that if you want to get the intermediate and advanced material, you need to click the appropriate link in the top navigation (it wasn’t possible to link to a main page or portal of some kind, doesn’t seem to be one there).

5. Improving speaking and writing

I have already argued that input is more important than output and that the former precedes the latter, but it’s of course a grave mistake to think that these are serial processes and that you should master listening before you start speaking.

Even though there are indications that this might be a good idea for learning the basic sounds of a language, it certainly isn’t true for speaking or writing in general, and doesn’t make sense for most adults who learn a foreign language.

Most people learn Chinese because they want to be able to use it, and the longer you postpone starting to use the language, the longer it will take you to make progress towards that goal.

5.1 Basic principles

As we have seen, listening and reading is to a large extent about finding ways of spending enough time in a meaningful and interesting way. When it comes to speaking and writing, I think there is much more to say about study methodology. There are also more hacks you can use to accelerate your learning.

Therefore, this chapter is longer than the previous one. This is also a reflection of the fact that pronunciation pedagogy is my own area of expertise.

Most of what I will say in this chapter is applicable to speaking as well as writing, but since most people prioritise speaking, that’s where I will put the main focus. I will start with some general principles, then move on to speaking and pronunciation, and then round off with a discussion of writing ability.

Language learning and mental models

What is a language? Some people say that a language is a specific way of labelling and describing the world and events that take place in it. Learning a language would then simply be about learning new labels for already familiar concepts and categories.

Even though some words have a 1:1 mapping between English and Chinese, simply switching labels is a poor way of describing what it’s like to learn Chinese.

The more I learn about Chinese, the more I realise how different it is from English and my native Swedish. Learning Chinese isn’t just about labels, the things and events being labelled are also seen, sliced and sorted differently.

When you learn something in Chinese, you create a mental model of that concept. This might either be a direct association (someone points to a dog and says “gǒu”) or indirectly through another language (translation).

When children learn languages, they don’t have a complete set of models. If you point to a dog and say “gǒu”, they might think that everything that has four legs can be called “gǒu” and then only gradually change this model when they learn that cats, cows and tables are different from dogs.

This is different from when you learn a foreign language as an adult. You already have a very complex representation of the world in your mind and it’s not something you can get rid of.

When someone points to the dog and says “gǒu”, you have a huge advantage over children in that you already know what a dog is, you just need to know what it’s called in Chinese. This is mostly a good thing.

The problem is that the mental model borrowed from another language is never entirely correct. For instance, even simple words like “hand” and “bread” might look easy enough, but are actually not 1:1 mappings.

First, 手 (shǒu) “hand” isn’t limited to the thing with five fingers below your wrist, but can include the entire arm (or at least the forearm); second, 面包/麵包 (miànbāo) “bread” typically includes things that we wouldn’t consider bread in English, such as cakes. These might be minor differences, but I want to show you that the models you borrow from other languages aren’t perfect.

As an adult, you can’t escape the “burden” of other languages you have already learnt. The bad news is that this will sometimes impede your learning, but the good news is that this often allows you to learn more quickly. It’s not unusual for serious students to be able to speak reasonably well after a year, which is much more than you can say of Chinese babies of that age.

Language acquisition and language learning

Learning a language, then, is about labelling, but it’s also about modifying models and creating new ones. The first time you see a word, you might only be able to establish a crude outline of its meaning.

Gradually, by exposing yourself to more Chinese, you will slowly and unconsciously alter the mental models you have. This is called language acquisition.

However, listening and reading can only give you positive feedback, telling you what you can say in Chinese. Input can only make your mental model bigger, it won’t give you negative feedback, telling you that a word can’t be used in a certain way.

If we take the “bread” example from above, it will take a large amount of reading and listening to realise that some things I consider cakes are actually called bread in Chinese. I only realised this when I asked a friend to buy some bread for me and ended up with what I would call a cake.

With huge amounts of exposure, it’s possible to adjust your mental models this way; it’s what native speakers do. But there is a quicker way of adjusting mental models: speaking and writing. When you use your incorrect models, other people will notice, and, if you’re lucky, they will help you improve.

Receiving feedback and being corrected

Learning a language, you might receive feedback from two types of sources:

Directly from teachers or native speakers

Indirectly from the reactions of people you speak with

Even though this might sound strange, getting accurate and honest feedback can be hard, especially for speaking and pronunciation. You’d think that enrolling in a language course would be enough, but that’s often not the case, not even for serious intensive courses.

There are many reasons for this, such as your teacher wanting to be nice and not embarrass you, that you’re doing better than average (the teacher will attend to more serious problems) or that you’re doing worse than average (hopeless case, why bother). None of these should happen, but they still do.

You can create crude mental models on your own, some people can actually get very close to the target just by listening, paying attention and mimicking, but feedback is still necessary. Children have no pre-existing mental models that block learning, but adults do and need help to overcome these blocks.

Feedback is a gift you should be grateful for

Whenever you receive feedback, you should treat it for what it is: a chance to improve. Try to understand what you did wrong and what you should have said instead. Repeat. Smile. Say thank you. Mean it.

If you don’t, the person who was kind enough to help you might not help you again. This also means that you should never become angry, defend yourself aggressively or make a fuss.

I have seen students refusing to accept pronunciation corrections from teachers, using different kinds of excuses like “that’s not what I said” or “this is how it’s said in [somewhere else]”, even though it’s obvious for everybody else that the student is just wrong.

It’s psychologically difficult to receive negative feedback, even if it is constructive. As a beginner, you aren’t expected to know anything, so if someone corrects you, you should simply try your best to change. The only problem here is that some people are afraid of making mistakes, but more about that later.

If someone points out a basic mistake to an advanced learner, however, there’s much more pride at stake and face to save. If you can’t throw these tethers off, you will stagnate and your Chinese will fossilise. You only have yourself to blame.

Being corrected

Think back to last time someone corrected your Chinese. What was your reaction? If you were grateful, did you express it? If you felt defensive and ignored the help you received, you need to do better! If you became aggressive or made a fuss, you have a big problem. In any case, pay attention to how you react when someone corrects you. Are you giving them the encouragement they need to correct you again?

Various ways of getting feedback

So, how do you get feedback on your speaking and writing? Here are a few ways I find useful:

Teachers are the obvious choice. They are (hopefully) trained in doing exactly what you need. The drawback is that not all teachers are good at this, either because they don’t understand your situation or because they don’t have enough training or experience. Still, teachers are more likely to do this well than other people.

Friends can sometimes also offer valuable feedback and usually don’t charge you money for doing so. However, they might not be able to give you systematic help or, in the worst cases, they might be wrong. Native speakers know a lot less about their own language than they think (this is not limited to Chinese, of course).

The internet is awesome. There are numerous services that offer free feedback for written and sometimes even spoken Chinese. If you pay money, you don’t even need to do anything in return. However, be aware that random native speaker you find online is just that, random. Some will praise your Chinese even if it sucks, and others will happily teach you things that they think are correct but actually aren’t.

You can also use yourself as a source for feedback. Read through your texts carefully, record your voice and listen to it a couple of times. When you’re speaking (or sometimes writing), you might not focus 100% on the language itself, but more on the content, how the other person is reacting or something else. When you listen to or look at your output again later, you will see many mistakes you can easily fix yourself.

The process matters more than the result

As can be clearly seen from the discussion above, the spoken or written Chinese you produce isn’t the most important part of learning. If you just produce tons of Chinese, but then don’t care about feedback of any kind, you would become better at what you already know, but you wouldn’t be able to adjust your mental models.

Unfortunately, many students and teachers make themselves guilty of this. For instance, if you have an oral presentation or a written report, it’s all too common to just deliver it and only care about the grade.

The teacher might be keen on giving you some comments to help you, but many students ignore this. This is terrible waste, partly resulting from bad course design.

What’s the point of a teacher correcting your Chinese if you don’t learn from the errors you’ve made? There is no point, or at least you don’t need a teacher to accomplish this, you could just write text on your computer and delete the files once you’re done.

What I want you to do instead is to focus on the process, which is good both if your goal is to get a good grade and if you want to learn Chinese. What I’ve written here works equally well for written Chinese as well, I’ve just chosen to talk about an oral presentation to make the explanation clearer.

Prepare an outline of a short speech or presentation on any topic - If you’re a beginner or intermediate learner, stick to things you’re already familiar with. Advanced learners should expand their horizons. The outline should consist of all the facts you want to include and in which order they should be presented.

Verify the language in the presentation with a native speaker - You don’t want to spend hours practising something that contains errors, so sending it to a friend, language exchange partner or teacher is a good idea.

Practice your presentation until you know it reasonably well - Don’t write it down and just memorise it, talk your way through it until you actually know what you’re saying. If you’re not sure about how to say something, look it up or ask someone. Copy structures and words from others, but avoid lifting entire sentences.

Record your presentation - Once you know what you’re going to say, record it using your phone or computer. Save the file and any related material you have collected.

Analyse the recording - Go through your presentation on your own and see if you can spot any mistakes, then ask a tutor or language exchange partner to go through it again with you, highlighting problems you need to fix.

Prepare and hold the presentation again - This time you should of course correct anything that came up during the previous step. This might include things like pronunciation, intonation, word usage, presentation techniques and voice projection. This could be your final presentation, or you could go through the same steps again if you have the time and motivation to do so.

Naturally, if you’re enrolled in a course, you can follow these steps on your own, even if your teacher doesn’t encourage you to, you just need to start preparing earlier.

If you finish your presentation a week before the deadline, you can give the presentation in front of a private tutor or friend, and let them help you improve your speaking ability. You then have at least a week to practise and both your final grade and your spoken Chinese will improve!

Focus on the process

Select an oral or written presentation you have due this month and follow the above steps. This means that you need to start much earlier than you’re used to and that everything will take more time, but you will learn much more from the experience. Alternatively, take a presentation you have already done and do it again, correcting the issues your teacher pointed out.

Errors and mistakes

In colloquial English, the words “mistake” and “error” are sometimes used interchangeably, but when talking about language learning, the difference between them matters greatly.

Let’s say that you receive feedback as described above, and someone points out that what you just said isn’t right. Did you make a mistake? Or was that an error? What’s the difference?

Mistakes

In short, a mistake is a slip. You know what you should have said or written, but you didn’t for some reason. A mistake is a little bit like tripping in your backyard, it’s a minor accident, nothing more. A typo doesn’t mean that you can’t spell. Native speakers make mistakes all the time.

However, it can be hard for the person giving you feedback to know if it actually was a mistake or something more serious. Some people give you a mini lecture about what you did wrong, even though it was actually just a slip of the tongue. Still, it’s hard to distinguish mistakes from errors for the person giving you feedback, so be civilised about it.

Errors

An error is more serious than a mistake. Errors occur when your mental model of Chinese is incorrect. You say or write something, believing it is correct, but it actually isn’t. Native speakers seldom commit errors.

This is part of what learning a language is, so you’d better get used to it and learn how to handle it, socially, psychologically and linguistically. From a social perspective, the goal should be to encourage more feedback so you can identify and eventually fix more errors.

Psychologically, it’s harder. You’re wrong; you’ve made an error. No one likes being wrong; you wished you hadn’t said or written that. However, let’s look at the alternative, which is worse.

What would have happened if you had used another word or another structure you knew better and produced only sentences you were sure of? No one would have corrected you, but the error in your mental model would still be there, a landmine, waiting to be stepped on. Tripping is fine, stepping on a landmine is bad.

Landmines in your back yard

If you literally had landmines in your back yard, what would you do? I would go and look for them with a minesweeper. I would definitely not ignore them and just try to avoid walking close to the patches of ground where there might be mines. With that approach, I’d be better off staying indoors (in my native language).

I try to maintain this attitude for errors in my mental models of Chinese as well. I know they are there, but instead of being afraid of them, I actively try to seek them out and do something about them.

Linguistically, errors are really important, and if you keep track of them, you might find patterns that will help you fix them.

5.2 Improving speaking ability

Some people say you should speak Chinese as much as possible from day one, others prefer a more cautious approach where you lay a passive foundation before you speak.

In summary, the people who tell you to speak from day one focus on function over form. If you can get your meaning across, regardless of method, you have successfully used the language. It makes sense to practise a lot immediately, because without practice, you won’t be able to use the language. This will give much better short-term results.

The other side argues that you should have a model to imitate; otherwise you risk getting stuck with bad pronunciation and grammar. Input is considered more important than output, and your own spoken language emerges naturally after a while. This method requires much more time to bear fruit.

While I agree with the arguments for the second approach, it’s simply not practical to have a silent period for most learners. If you live in China, you need Chinese for daily communication and trying to use the language you learn immediately is the natural thing to do. Trying to have a silent period while living in China is just a waste of good learning opportunities!

This is true if you study at home as well; the only way to increase your speaking ability is to speak. Yes, input will help, but only if you practise enough to turn that knowledge into active skill. I’m a big fan of input, but that should never be an excuse for not using Chinese actively!

I have met several people who speak decent conversational Mandarin after studying just a few months and they all spoke Chinese for hours every day from the start. However, they also studied very hard at home, so speaking only won’t be enough.

You should never avoid using the language because you don’t feel ready. If that’s your attitude, you will never be ready! Instead, speak as much as you can. Still, active practice is most useful when you already know something passively, so don’t skimp on input either.

Different components of speaking Chinese

Speaking ability is a complex skill than contains many different components. Do you know what your weak link is and what you should focus on to see the most gains overall?

Here is one way of breaking down speaking Chinese into several smaller components:

Vocabulary makes up the basic building material of a language.

Grammar is about how you combine words to form meaningful sentences.

Fluency refers to your ability to combine the above two components and produce intelligible and flowing spoken Chinese.

Pronunciation allows you to say sentences in a manner that allows other people to understand them.

We have already dealt with vocabulary and grammar (see chapter three), so now it’s time to talk about fluency and pronunciation.

Becoming fluent in Chinese

Fluency is one of the buzzwords in the (online) world of language learning, but since everybody has a different definition of fluent, the debate seldom gets very far. Some people claim they can become fluent in a language in just a few months, others say that they have studied for twenty years and still wouldn’t call themselves fluent.

According to the first group, fluency means that you can communicate in an uninterrupted and fluent fashion without having the conversation stopped by serious language problems. This definition makes good sales pitches and titles of books.

According to the second group, fluency means native-like and is the highest level a second language learner can hope to achieve. This definition is of little practical use and might also be an expression of modesty. In my opinion, “near-native” is a better term for this.

My own definition falls somewhere in between, but definitely closer to the first one. I call myself fluent in a language when I can talk about most normal topics without the language being an issue, either for me or for the other party. In addition, the conversation needs to flow smoothly and without too many pauses for choosing words or straightening out weird sentences.

How long does it take to become fluent?

So, how long does it take to reach this level? The definitions above, including my own, are too vague to mean much. As I said, I have had students who reached some kind of fluency (albeit a bit limited) in a few months. I have also met students who have studied for ten years without being able to converse in the language.

As we saw in chapter two, what matters isn’t how many months it takes, but how many hours. If you study 50 hours a week for three months with the right method, I’m sure you would be able to hold a conversation. Keep that up for six months to a year and you’d approach my definition of fluent.

Practising fluency directly

The main problem with speaking fluently in a foreign language is that there are many obstacles that stop your speech from flowing smoothly. There are many things that you don’t know how to express. You stumble.

Fluency is not about being able to say everything; it’s about being able to negotiate your way around any obstacles you encounter and to do so without stopping. Native speakers don’t know their own language perfectly, but they are adept at using what they do know to express themselves.

Let’s look at an example. If you want to express “Shanghai is a coastal city with many skyscrapers”, you might run into the problem of how to say “skyscraper” and “coastal”. However, you don’t need those words if you can find a smooth way around them.

If you say, “Shanghai is a city close to the sea with many tall buildings” few will even notice that you don’t know the words “skyscraper” and “coastal”. The goal is to speak fluently, not impress people with your broad vocabulary.

Actually, you can do this for simple words and still sound fluent (albeit a bit childish). Let’s say you don’t know how to say “city” either, you could just “a big place where many people live” or something similar. If you don’t know how to say “tunnel”, just say “road under the ground”. The point is that negotiating your way forward, constructing a sentence as you go along, is a skill, and that skill is called fluency.

The Chinese words used in the examples above are: 摩天大楼 / 摩天大樓 (mótiān dàlóu) ”skyscraper”, 沿海 (yánhǎi) ”coastal”, 城市 (chéngshì) ”city” and 隧道 (suìdào) “tunnel”.

For beginners and intermediate learners, it’s essential to get away from the translation trap as quickly as possible. It will take some serious time before you can produce accurate translations of English sentences, so you need to start thinking about how you can express something with the Chinese you have available. This can only be achieved by large amounts of practising.

This is especially true for more advanced students. You already have the knowledge you need to be fluent, but if you don’t feel fluent yet, you haven’t practised speaking enough. Your input and output skills are unbalanced.

Playing word games in Chinese

Try this with a native speaker: Think of a word, then describe that word without saying the word itself. For instance, if your word is “car”, you can say that it has four wheels and many people use it to get to work. If your word is “tree”, say that it’s green, tall and likes sunshine. If you think it’s hard to find words, select them randomly from your textbook’s vocabulary lists.

Speaking Chinese on different levels

Below, I have divided learners into beginner, intermediate and advanced levels, as well as pointed out the most important goals to strive for for each group.

You are a beginner if you cannot express what you want about everyday topics. This is most often because you haven’t learnt enough words, but it might also be because you still struggle with pronunciation or haven’t grasped the necessary grammar. If you still feel that speaking Chinese with native speakers is very demanding, you’re probably still a beginner.

Main goals: Learn the sounds and tones of Chinese and how they are written, learn basic everyday vocabulary, memorise common phrases (anything you need to say often should be in Chinese), get going with spaced repetition (with audio), go through a basic textbook, find some extra-curricular listening material, start communicating with natives directly.

You are an intermediate learner if you can express yourself about topics close to you, even if your language isn’t entirely correct and idiomatic. Note that ordinary native speakers should understand what you say, not just your teacher or people you know well. Getting your ideas across is not the main problem for intermediate learners, but increasing correctness and fluency is.

Main goals: Consolidate your understanding of sounds and tones, understand (not just use) basic grammar, expand your vocabulary beyond your own private sphere, diversify your learning materials, focus on extensive listening, actively look for problems with speaking and pronunciation, leave your comfort zone as often as you can, build your personal immersion environment.

You are an advanced learner when you can produce idiomatically correct Chinese about a wide range of topics not necessarily related to yourself. You current challenge is to approach a native speaker’s knowledge of word choice, grammar and ways of expressing ideas. Improving here typically requires an awful lot of input, but there are other things you can do to practise actively as well.

Main goals: Actively seek out and drill things you haven’t mastered yet, expand vocabulary into new areas you find interesting, diversify your listening and reading a lot (different regions, epochs, topics, styles, media, etc.), make Chinese a natural part of your life, use Chinese as a tool as much as you can, reduce your accent, deal with tricky synonyms and/or patterns.

That was a quick overview, but since your main goals at any given level are dependent on your long-term goals for learning Chines, everything isn’t necessarily relevant to you. Now that we have talked about speaking in general, it’s time to turn to pronunciation.

5.3 Learning pronunciation

The first and most important thing I want to say about learning to pronounce Chinese is that it can be done. I have successfully taught pronunciation to a large number of students, including people in their sixties and seventies. If they can, there’s no reason to think you can’t.

So far, I have never encountered a student who can’t learn. However, I have encountered people who don’t want to improve or are too lazy to spend the time required. Clear and easily understandable pronunciation is within reach of all students who are interested, but as with everything else in life, it comes only with hard work.

Before I talk about learning and improving pronunciation in detail, I want to discuss a few important principles. Some of these might sound obvious when you read them, but take a few moments to think about your own learning. Are you really implementing these principles?

Attitude and feedback

I believe that attitude is more important for learning and improving pronunciation than it is for any other area of learning Chinese. Pronunciation is personal and sensitive in a way the other skills are not. Most students can accept that they write something incorrectly, but it’s much harder to accept corrections on pronunciation.

Generally speaking, you should try to have an open mind and be aware of how you interact with other people when you learn. This involves paying attention to what other people say and how they say it, but also being alert to your own reactions when someone gives you feedback, either directly by highlighting a mistake, or indirectly by frowning or signalling that they struggle to understand.

Feedback is essential, so what I have already said about receiving feedback above applies here. You need to encourage people who help you with your pronunciation. Whatever you do, don’t become defensive and/or aggressive. It’s completely irrational to shoot the messenger. The way you pronounce a certain sound or tone is wrong and that’s a fact. The person who points this out to you doesn’t create the error; he or she merely alerts you to its existence.

If you remain unaware of the error, which is likely if you don’t listen to people or scare them away from giving you feedback, the error would have been there anyway, waiting to cause trouble. Remember the landmines from earlier in the chapter?

Your pronunciation isn’t as good as people say

Even if it’s hard to get high-quality feedback, you’re likely to be showered with casual comments. In America, the norm is to speak English and if you can’t speak English as a foreigner, you’re frowned upon. In China, the opposite is true.

If you can speak basic Chinese as a foreigner, you’re already an exception. If you speak it well, you might even become famous. Bear this in mind when you evaluate the feedback you receive from normal people.

When they say that your pronunciation is great (this happens a lot, believe me, it doesn’t matter how good or bad your pronunciation actually is), they are comparing you with the average foreigner, who probably reads Pinyin as if it were English, such as “woe she may go run” (wǒ shì měiguórén).

In their eyes, you’re doing a good job and deserve to be encouraged. You’re not like the people who refuse to learn Chinese even though they’ve lived in China for years.

Even though such praise is well meant and encouraging, it is useless as an assessment of your pronunciation. The problem is that if you think the average foreigner is a good benchmark against which to compare your Chinese, you might as well stop studying Chinese now. You have probably already reached your goal. If you want to learn to speak Chinese well, you need to raise the bar.

Learning pronunciation as an adult

One of the main differences between first and second language acquisition is that all normal children learn to pronounce their mother tongue perfectly. This is clearly not the case for all adults who try to learn Chinese, so the first thing you must realise is that what works for children doesn’t necessarily work for you.

If listening and mimicking would be enough, most foreigners living in China would have native-like pronunciation, but since this is far from the truth, it follows that something else is needed.

Understanding pronunciation helps. You don’t need theory of the kind that would allow you to write a doctoral dissertation in phonetics, but you do need practical knowledge of the differences between sounds and tones.

You don’t need the theory straight away, either, indeed it might be better to simply mimic in the beginning, but sooner or later you need to go through the sounds and actually understand them.

I have had many intermediate and advanced students who’ve got even basic sounds wrong because no one has ever corrected them and they haven’t bothered to check for themselves.

When I say understand the difference between sounds, I mean the following:

Place of articulation - Where should your tongue go, what part of it should touch or approach what other part of your mouth? You might be able to get some things right just by mimicking, but sounds that don’t exist in any other language you have learnt can be tricky. One example is the “j/q/x” series.

Manner of articulation - Given the place of articulation, how is the sound produced? This includes things like lip rounding, aspiration (puff of air) and voicing. This might be different than the closest match in your native language, so don’t be fooled by the similarities in writing if you use Pinyin.

Tones and tone sandhi - This is perhaps the most important part. It’s incredibly hard for adult learners to acquire good tones without knowing how they are supposed to be pronounced. The worst thing is that most people don’t know because textbooks and teachers don’t do enough. You need to know the pitch contours of the tones in Mandarin and you need to know how they change depending on context. Once you know that, you can learn the rest through practice and exposure.

There are more things to pronunciation than these three, but they are the basic things that are easiest to approach. Apart from this, there is also prosody, which is the rhythm, stress and intonation of the language.

These things can of course be taught, but I think that the best way of acquiring naturally sounding Chinese is to listen and pay attention, combined with mimicking exercises where you try to address the problems. Listen closely to how Chinese people intonate words and sentences and try to speak like they do. Learn the basics before you do that, however.

The problem with teachers who don’t speak English

One of the major disadvantages of having a teacher who doesn’t share a language with you is that while they can provide a good model for you to mimic, it’s much harder for them to make you understand what you’re doing wrong.

If I teach you, I can explain what you should do, how you should move your tongue and why the sound you pronounce isn’t the same as the sound I pronounce, and what you should do to improve. This might require you to learn a bit about your voice and how it works, but that’s not hard.

If you’re a beginner and the teacher only speaks Chinese, he or she has to rely on body language and pictures, which can sometimes be enough if done right, but this is exceedingly hard and most teachers don’t have the knowledge, time or resources to pull it off.

Lastly, you should be aware that many native speakers have a poor theoretical grasp of pronunciation (how much do you know about pronunciation in English?). Sadly, this is also true for many teachers.

For instance, I have asked numerous normal native speakers as well as educated teachers about how the third tone should be pronounced in different situations. Surprisingly many give either incomplete or inaccurate accounts. Most importantly, many fail to stress the fact that the third tone is a low tone in a large majority of cases. They pronounce it right themselves, of course, they just can’t explain when asked about it. That means they can’t tell you about it either.

How good is your pronunciation?

I regularly arrange pronunciation courses on Hacking Chinese, where I analyse your pronunciation in detail and give you feedback both on what you do right and what you need to improve. Check the availability of the course here and contact me if you are interested.

Learning pronunciation as a beginner

When it comes to pronunciation, a beginner is someone who still hasn’t learnt all the common sounds, tones and tone combinations in Mandarin. Learning pronunciation from scratch is different from improving it, so in this section I will discuss some things I think you should keep in mind as a beginner. After that, I will talk about improving pronunciation in general.

As a beginner, the way you approach pronunciation depends on what kind of course you’re taking or if you’re studying Chinese on your own. Most courses have a brief pronunciation section that goes through all the sounds and tones. This takes a week or two in intensive programs.

While it’s true that you can cover pronunciation in a short time, the fact that the teacher has explained and shown you all the sounds doesn’t mean that you have mastered them. You can learn basic tone patterns in an hour, but it takes more than that to be able to nail tones comfortably in sentences and free speech.

Indeed, this is something that people who have studied for years sometimes still struggle with. I don’t say this to discourage you, but you need to know that pronunciation is something you might receive occasional help with from your teacher or school, but this will be far from enough. If you want to learn to pronounce Chinese well, you’ll need to do most of the work on your own.

If you study Chinese outside formal courses, you really need to find someone who can help you with pronunciation. Don’t think for a second you can learn pronunciation from audio files and textbooks alone!

Now let’s look at some advice for how to approach pronunciation as a beginner.

Listen and pay attention - In order to be able to pronounce something, you need to be able to distinguish the sounds involved. There are several websites that will give you pronunciation of all syllables in Chinese with tones (see recommended resources below). Listen, listen and listen again. Mimic when you think you know the sound.

Record your own voice - Recording your own voice has many benefits. It helps you stay focused on pronunciation, makes it easier to identify problems and is great for benchmarking purposes. Most modern smart phones have pretty good microphones and you should make a habit of recording yourself whenever it’s convenient to do so and where it doesn’t encroach on the privacy of other people.

Listen to your own recording - Surprisingly often, you can hear if your voice sounds similar to a model voice or not, even if you couldn’t when you did the recording. Record again and compare. Do this until you have as close an approximation as possible. Before you figure out the key features, mimic everything as closely as you can. Become the native speaker!

Get feedback - Nothing beats feedback from a competent teacher. You need to know what you’re doing wrong and what you’re doing right. If you can’t get professional feedback, there are many drills and exercises you can do together with ordinary native speakers or language exchange partners (these will be introduced later). The earlier you get accurate feedback on your pronunciation, the better.

Never guess how something is pronounced - If you aren’t sure how something is pronounced, but keep practising how to pronounce it anyway, you risk cementing bad pronunciation and that will be hard to change later. If you use software to review your vocabulary, turn the audio on. If you don’t know how to pronounce something in your book, check the CD or look the word up in a good dictionary with audio (see the resources at the end).

Use visual representation of tones - Actually seeing what you’re saying is of great help. Use lined paper and let three lines represent high, mid and low pitch. Draw the tones as they are truly pronounced, i.e. after the tone sandhi rules have been applied. Start by listening carefully, drawing the tones of the model audio, then pronounce yourself. You can also use a program like Praat to actually see the pitch contour (again, see recommended resources).

Physical representation of tones - Sometimes it’s helpful to use a finger or your pencil to trace the contours of the tones as you say them. When the tone goes down, use your finger to push it down, when it goes up, use your pencil to pull it up. Some people use their heads for this, but this is a bit risky because if it becomes a habit, you will look silly when you speak Chinese later!

Don’t get stuck on syllables - Even if single syllables in Chinese can be hard to pronounce at first, it’s essential that you don’t get stuck on this level. One reason is that some changes, such as tone sandhi, only occur on word and sentence level. Instead of practising tones with single syllables, I suggest you spend most of your time on tone pairs. There are only 20 combinations and you have to know them well. You can read more about this here, including dozens of examples for each tone combination.

Get feedback now!

I don’t care how you do it, but you have to get feedback on your pronunciation from the beginning. Listening to teachers, textbooks and podcasts is great, but it won’t teach your proper pronunciation. You have to speak with a real person, in real life or online, so they can help you with your pronunciation. Professional help is best, but if you can’t afford that, any native speaker will do.

In the next section, we’ll look at pronunciation and transcription systems more closely. This is really important for beginners, but it sometimes causes confusion for intermediate and sometimes advanced learners as well.

Learning pronunciation with Hanyu Pinyin

When studying Chinese, you need some way of writing down how characters and words are pronounced, or, in other words, you need a transcription system. There are several of those around, but Hanyu Pinyin is dominating, which uses the Latin alphabet with some added diacritics for the tones.

Remember that even if the letters are familiar from your native language; they are seldom pronounced exactly the same way. Listen to the sounds; don’t get hung up on the letters! Listen, mimic, record, compare. Repeat.

I’m not going to advice you against using Pinyin (or any other phonetic system) as a beginner, but I will say that you should spend more time paying attention to how something sounds than how it’s written.

It’s important to realise that Pinyin is a way of writing Chinese syllables that wasn’t specifically designed for foreigners. For instance, there are conventions in Pinyin which make perfect sense for native speakers, but which create trouble for foreigners.

For instance, following j/q/x, “ü” is always written as just “u”, but it’s still pronounced “ü”. This is not a problem for native speakers because they know that only “ü” can follow j/q/x, but it is bewildering for foreigners.

The second thing you have to keep in mind is that Pinyin is not a phonetic alphabet where each symbol represents one and only one sound. For instance, the letter “e” in Pinyin can be pronounced in at least three different ways depending on context. The letter “a” can also be pronounced in three distinctly different ways, as can “i”. You can read more about the most confusing cases here: A guide to Pinyin traps and pitfalls

The best way around this problem is to think of Chinese pronunciation in terms of initials and finals. Don’t think of the final -ian as consisting of three parts, think of it as one single part and learn the pronunciation of that part. There are fewer than 40 finals and if you learn them all as individual units, you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble.

Focus on one or two things at a time

Before we get to the step-by-step guide to improving pronunciation, I want to say a few words about targeted practice. Many students and teachers make the mistake of trying to get everything right at the same time.

This is impossible.

Instead, you should focus on only one or perhaps two things at a time. For instance, if you have language exchange planned for this afternoon, you could decide (and tell your partner) that you want to focus on your tones.

If you focus exclusively on getting the tones right, it’s likely that you’ll start making other mistakes. This is okay, indeed it’s to be expected and a sign that you’re doing things right. I suggest sticking with a specific aspect of learning Chinese until you feel that you’ve made significant progress in that area and then switch focus.

This is of course true for the step-by-step guide below as well; you shouldn’t do this for all sounds in Chinese at the same time! Pick the most important errors and deal with them first.

A step-by-step guide to improving pronunciation

Now that we have looked at some general principles regarding pronunciation, it’s time to look at how to improve pronunciation. Some of these steps will be automatic or very quick; others might take a lot of effort over time.

Knowing that there is a problem - Many learners live in the illusion that their pronunciation is actually quite good. If you think your pronunciation is good, you’re probably wrong. I say that based on statistics, not because I want you to feel bad, but the truth is that very few foreigners have accurate and clear pronunciation in Mandarin.

Identifying the problem - The trick is to not only find isolated mistakes, but the underlying structural error. For instance, it might be good to know that you pronounce “měiguó” incorrectly, but if you can extend that to “any third tone occurring before a second tone”, that’s much better.

Understanding the problem - Once you have specified what the problem is, you need to understand it. How should it be pronounced? If we continue with the above example, do you know how a third tone should be pronounced before a second tone? It should be a low tone. Read about your problem online, ask your teacher and more advanced friends.

Hearing the difference - Now that you understand the difference between what you say and the accurate pronunciation, you should make sure you can hear the difference. If you rise on the first syllable in “měiguó”, can you hear the difference between that and the correct pronunciation?

Producing the correct sound - The next step is to be able to pronounce the sound in an easy context. If you struggle with tones, make sure the syllables used for practice are very easy (try “ma” or “yi”). Then increase the difficulty until you can handle all common syllables with this pronunciation.

Increasing the mental load - As you increase the number of factors to keep in mind, maintaining correct pronunciation gets harder. Most students can pronounce tones accurately in isolation or in words, but find it hard in sentences. This is because there’s so much to do simultaneously. The only way to learn how to handle this is to actually do it. Start with simple phrases and build up to long sentences.

Focused practice in free speech - After you have gained some confidence on the word and sentence level, you might still struggle in the wild. This is again because it’s hard to focus on many things at once, but make getting this part of pronunciation right the priority for a while.

Internalising correct pronunciation - This is not really something you do, but it is the end-state you arrive at after focusing on a problem for some time. In the beginning, you will have to focus to get it right, but gradually, the mental effort needed will decrease until one day you will say it correctly without spending any extra effort. Congratulations, you have successfully improved your pronunciation!

Staying vigilant and learning more - Even if you have successfully changed your pronunciation, you will occasionally fall back into old habits. Do your best to pay attention to your own pronunciation and ask other people to help. You should be able to correct yourself most of the time, though, which makes the task easier. Record yourself often!

In real life, the process isn’t as neat and tidy as it might look here, and you might need to jump back and forth between steps.

Now that we have dealt with the general process of changing pronunciation, it’s time to look at a few techniques you can use to practice. These don’t really belong to a specific step in the process, but are generally useful ways of practising pronunciation.

Follow the guide

The guide included in this section is already a call to action. The easiest way to use it is to choose a problem you know you have already, jump into the guide at the appropriate point (depends on how far you’ve come) and follow it to the end. Feel free to work with several errors at once, but add more only if the others are at level seven or above.

Mimicking native speakers

One of the most powerful ways of practising pronunciation is to mimic a native speaker. When I say mimic, I don’t mean you should just repeat what the voices are saying in the audio recordings for your textbook, I mean that you should study and learn the way another person speaks.

This is how I do it:

Select a model - If you’re a beginner or an intermediate student, any native speaker that has a standardised pronunciation and a voice roughly similar to your own will do. If you’re male, don’t use a female voice; if you’re female, don’t use a male voice. You’re going to copy as much as you can, and that will be weird if the pitch range is wrong. Intermediate and advanced learners can find material online. Ask a native speaker to give you a few names of people with good pronunciation and then find audio or videos where they speak.

Select an audio clip - Select something you find interesting and that contains as few distractions as possible, i.e. of high quality and with little background noise. Depending on what you want to practice, you can either choose a dialogue such as an interview or part of a film, or a presentation. If your audio clip is long, cut it down, you need only a few minutes. If you use video, rip the audio so you don’t need a monitor to practise.

Transcribe the audio - Write down what’s being said. If there are subtitles, you can use them, but subtitles are almost never verbatim, so you will have to change them so they really reflect what’s being said. If you can’t make something out, ask a native speaker to help you.

Study the audio clip - Unless you’re already an advanced learner, there will probably be some words you don’t understand. Learn them. Mimicking something that has no meaning to you is of little use.

Mimic your model - This is the most important step and takes by far the most time, but every second is worthwhile. I use Audacity to break down the audio into small parts, usually no longer than a few seconds. Practise each part until you can say it exactly as the native speaker. Record your own voice. Compare. Record again.

Ask for feedback - Send your best recording to a native speaker and ask him or her to give you some suggestions for how to improve. If you’re a beginner or intermediate learner, you’re not after perfection here, but hopefully you will receive a few pointers about tones or some sounds you’re not pronouncing correctly.

Correct the problems - Go through the audio clip and try to eliminate the problems. If you have a long list of problems, work on the most important ones first. Record again and make sure you get it right this time. Use the step-by-step guide presented earlier in this chapter if you need to.

Ask for feedback again - This time, you don’t need to ask for advice, you should ask directly if the problems your teacher pointed out last time have been fixed. You don’t need to ask the same native speaker, but it probably helps since he or she knows what your pronunciation was like the first time.

Repeat the process - One cycle of this might take a few days up to several weeks depending on how long the clip is, how much time you spend per day and how good you are at mimicking other people.

Mimicking is helpful because it forces you to really pay attention to the way another person speaks, the way you speak and the difference between them. This difference is part of what makes you a non-native speaker. It might be hard to bridge this gap completely, but you can make the distance smaller.

Become a native speaker

This section is again a call to action in itself. Your goal should be to produce a few minutes of native like audio. It’s going to take you a lot of time and effort, but it’s more than worth it. Post your final result online and ask for feedback!

Fossilisation and advanced learners

In short, fossilisation means that the learner stops improving in a certain area, pronunciation in this case. I don’t like this term because it has little explanatory value and is often used as an excuse for bad pronunciation.

Fossilisation sounds like something that happens to adult students and when it does, there’s not much you can do about it. This is of course nonsense. Many students don’t have time, don’t want to or don’t receive enough support to change their pronunciation, which are the real reasons why they stagnate.

To keep improving your pronunciation, you need a structured plan and professional feedback. Obviously, you also need to listen, mimic and speak, but without feedback, you stand little to no chance of improving.

5.4 Improving writing ability

Even though writing is completely different from speaking at first sight, they actually aren’t all that different. The skills required to write Chinese are similar to what you need to be able to speak well.

Earlier in this chapter, we saw that speaking ability consisted of vocabulary, grammar, fluency and pronunciation. The first two are obviously related to writing as well, but fluency and pronunciation are also relevant. Let’s look at them in more detail:

Vocabulary - For beginner and lower-intermediate learners, speaking and writing is much the same in this regard. If you could write the way natives speak, that would be awesome. When you reach a more advanced level, you will find that written Chinese has an additional formal layer with different vocabulary and grammar, but for most students, speaking and writing are much the same when it comes to vocabulary.

Grammar - The sentence patterns and grammar you learn as a beginner will work equally well in speaking and writing. The biggest difference is that when speaking, grammar isn’t visible and word order is more flexible. In other words, native speakers often use sentences your teacher would deduct points for. This doesn’t mean you should ignore grammar, it just means that your errors will be more clearly visible when written down. This makes it easier to improve.

Fluency - When writing, fluency matters much less than it does when speaking because you can take your time, use dictionaries and no one will know how much time you spent on a text. This is perhaps the biggest difference between spoken and written output for beginner and intermediate learners. Chatting and instant messaging comes closer to speaking.

Pronunciation - It might seem odd that I say that pronunciation is relevant for writing, but it is. If you know how to pronounce Chinese already, you will be able to type on a computer or your phone as long as you can also recognise characters. Naturally, being able to recognise the correct characters is many times easier than being able to write them by hand, so if you can speak Chinese well and know the Pinyin, it won’t take you long to be able to type basic sentences.

Obviously, something is lacking here, there is more to writing Chinese than these four components. One of the most fundamental differences between speaking and writing is that Chinese characters are only indirectly linked to pronunciation. Therefore, handwriting is a topic that needs to be highlighted and discussed.

Is it necessary to learn to write Chinese characters by hand?

As we have seen, learning to write Chinese takes time. Apart from learning to compose texts, you also need to write the characters themselves. Learning to type is much easier, and only requires you to pronounce and recognise characters.

If you don’t enjoy writing by hand, it can feel like a big waste of time. Even if you love characters, learning to write them takes time from other areas. So this begs the question, do you really have to learn to write by hand?

I’ll ask a counter question: When was the last time you wrote something in English by hand? Personally I seldom write by hand in English or Swedish, only shopping lists, to-do lists and short notes to family and friends.

These require only basic writing competence and if communication is the goal, you can revert to Pinyin if you forget how to write some characters. Therefore, it looks like there is no convincing practical case for learning to write by hand. Before we dismiss handwriting, though, lets look at the issue from different angles.

Handwriting as a beginner

I’m not going to debate a speaking-only approach here; I assume that you’re interested in learning to write if you’re reading this section. If you want to become literate in Chinese, you really do need to learn to write characters at some point, albeit not necessarily from day one.

Without it, it will be hard to understand how Chinese characters are structured. The number of characters you should learn to write by hand to reach a basic understanding of them is somewhat arbitrary, but I think learning the most common 1000 or so is a good idea for all students.

Continue learning characters beyond the 1000 most common on a need-to basis, such as the characters for your country, your name, your address and so on. This is enough for most practical purposes.

Handwriting for more advanced learners

You can’t really claim to know Chinese without knowing how to write, but exactly how much writing you need depends entirely on what you plan to do in the future. Here are a few examples:

Communicating with Chinese friends and relatives - This almost certainly requires no handwriting ability at all. You don’t need to go beyond the most common characters, spend that time on improving your listening, speaking or reading instead.

Studying something other than Chinese in China - If you want to pursue higher education in China, you will need to be able to write by hand, because your tests might be in Chinese. I know that some institutions allow foreign students to write in English, but I wouldn’t bet on it. If your education is in any way related to the Chinese language, you will definitely have to be able to write by hand.

Teaching Chinese - This is the obvious case where you need to learn how to write by hand. I don’t think teachers necessarily need to write beautiful characters, but we need to be able to write correctly and clearly so that students can see what we’re doing, even if they themselves aren’t focusing on handwriting.

Working in China - Let’s say you want to work in China, but with something other than Chinese (engineering, business, tourism). Being able to write Chinese by hand is probably good, but it’s not likely to be crucial. Being able to speak, listen, read and type will be more important.

In summary, the question of whether you need to focus on handwriting or not depends on your long-term goals. I think all students should learn to write the most common characters at some point, but feel free to wait a while if you want.

The rest of this chapter will focus on composition, i.e. it will be relevant both for typing and handwriting. It’s about how you learn to write texts in Chinese, regardless of the method you use to put the characters on paper or screen.

Do you need to write by hand?

What’s your long-term goal for learning Chinese? You should have this written down from chapter two, and now it’s time to compare it with the situations I have described here. How likely are you to use handwriting? How important is reading? If you don’t care about either, forget handwriting. If you care about the latter, learn at least 1000 characters, but it’s okay if your writing lags behind your passive understanding. Only focus seriously on handwriting if you love it or are required to do so.

The importance of reading

Developing your writing ability beyond your speaking ability requires two things: exposure to written Chinese and focused practice, preferably in that order. The reason I say beyond your speaking ability is that as we have seen, speaking and writing aren’t that different for beginners, it’s only when you try to develop writing ability which is different from your speaking ability this becomes important.

As usual, if you want to improve in any area, you first need to figure out what the weakest link in the chain is. Put another way, what is stopping you from writing the kind of Chinese you want to write? Your problem(s) could be located on three different levels:

Words - Vocabulary really is king and if you don’t know enough words, it will be hard to write well in Chinese. Still, I think problems on this level are general in nature and not specifically related to writing; knowing words in isolation isn’t going to be enough.

Sentences - You use sentences to describe things, express opinions, ask questions, gainsaying others and so on. What kind of sentence do you have problems with? For instance, I think I’m good arguing a point in Chinese, as well as explaining things, but I’m not very good at describing people, places and events.

Paragraphs - The next level deals with how you structure your text and how you make it easy for the reader to understand. This includes linking paragraphs together, introducing new ideas, highlighting causal relationships and so on. If you have problems in this area alone, you might produce texts that are grammatically correct but are confusing to read.

You might have problems on all levels, but since you can’t focus on everything at once, you still need to select a small number of targets. Again, ask yourself, what’s the weakest link?

Focused reading to improve writing ability

Now, let’s move on to how focused reading can help you overcome the problems you have identified. It’s easy to say that you need huge amounts of reading to become good at writing in a language, but it’s not very helpful.

What should you read and how? Quantity matters, but quality certainly has a role to play as well, and what we’re going to look at now is one way of increasing the quality of your reading.

Select an area of focus (see above)

Start recording good examples from the material you read

Extract sentence patterns and useful phrases

Sort and organise the examples you record

Keep your record handy next time you write

Get feedback on the texts you write using the new language

Change focus and start over again

Let’s look at an example. A while ago, I found it hard to refer to academic sources in Chinese. This is so common in academic writing that it’s a big handicap not being able to do it smoothly. To solve this problem I simply wrote down different ways of referring to authors and/or books that I encountered in my reading.

After doing this for a week or so, I had more than a dozen ways of citing sources. Then, when writing papers or reports, I just glanced at that list and tried them out one by one, asking native speakers to give me feedback on the usage.

Some ways of referring didn’t really work the way I imagined they would, but I still increased my active vocabulary in this area effectively. Naturally, what you focus on will depend on your level and your goals. Here are a few additional examples:

Ways of saying “but” in a sentence

Ways of saying “however” between paragraphs

Ways of linking similar arguments

Ways of agreeing and adding emphasis

How to present a counter argument

How to raise a sensitive topic

How to be humble in writing

How to describe graphs and statistics

Focused reading

Pick anything you find difficult to express in Chinese and try the method described in this section. You should end up with a text file with a bunch of examples, then several sentences you have written yourself and feedback you have received from native speakers. After doing this, you won’t find it so hard to express this in Chinese.

The merits of writing summaries

One of the best ways to expand your active writing ability is to pair it with focused reading. The easiest way to do this is to write summaries of what you read. In a summary, you’re forced to use the vocabulary used in the texts you have read, but rather than copying sentences, you’re actively processing the content and producing your own text.

I have learnt an enormous amount of Chinese from writing take-home exams where I had to read books and articles and then produce answers to exam questions. This involves not only reading and understanding the material, but also learning the relevant vocabulary and how to use it.

Just writing in general works as well, but the problem is that you have no target model. If you read three texts about a subject before you write about it, you can find the words you need in those texts. There are few better ways of improving writing ability.

As a bonus, most advanced proficiency exams check your writing ability by letting you read texts and then write about them, usually both a summary and some kind of personal comment. This skill is also invaluable if you pursue any kind of higher education and is likely to be useful in many other situations as well.

Drills aren’t only for beginners

I said above that you need both focused reading and active practice; so now that we have talked about reading, let’s look closer at how to practise, including drills. These are used to transfer passive knowledge to active skill. I’m not a big fan of drills myself because they are boring, but some drills and exercises are very good at what they are designed for and ignoring them would be foolish.

If you pick up a word or notice a new pattern, you might be able to understand it next time it appears, but you’re not very likely to be able to use it accurately yourself. You need to use the word several times before you really acquire it. This can be done naturally or haphazardly, but the process can also be accelerated through drills.

As a beginner, drills are more or less compulsory. It’s hard to master basic vocabulary and grammar without practising how to use them directly. Since this is the norm in most classrooms and textbooks, I’m not going to talk more about beginner drills here, but instead turn to more advanced learners.

There are a large number of exercises you can use as an intermediate or advanced learner, but there are two key ingredients you should never lose track of:

Active usage - Reading from a textbook is not going to give you the active skill you need. Instead, you need to simulate a real situation as much as you can; you need to actively create sentences that are meaningful to you.

Real communication - Even if you practise using a pattern, you can still communicate with your teacher, language exchange partner or friend, rather than just produce random sentences. Use the pattern to say something meaningful!

In my experience, many advanced learners don’t use drills enough (I know I don’t), and as a result, the difference between passive and active language skill becomes bigger and bigger.

Partly, this is natural, but it’s still a problem if your active vocabulary limits your ability to express yourself in Chinese. You can do many things with a tutor, but drilling useful words, phrases and patterns is one of the more important ones.

Naturally, this isn’t limited to writing, but writing is still a safe and controlled environment where you can explore how Chinese is used. Some people feel uncomfortable with throwing out new words in conversations without knowing if they can be used that way; experimenting with writing should be less intimidating.

Receiving feedback on your written Chinese

Receiving good feedback on pronunciation can be hard, but fortunately, getting feedback on your writing is easier. I prefer to use Lang-8, which is a website where you can register for free and have your texts checked by native speakers.

In return, you help other students who are learning your native language. You can of course do something similar with a paid tutor or a language exchange partner. In general, getting feedback on your written Chinese isn’t a big problem.

The topic you write about matters

So, what topic should you choose, then? Some textbooks and teachers are very good at asking suitable questions at the right level, but others are terribly bad at it. The topic you write about matters, so do your best to select a good one.

If you enjoy writing in your native language, you might feel that the task your teacher gives you is childish, and you lose interest quickly. Obviously, you can’t go for really hard topics as a beginner, but the wish to communicate something to the reader is essential.

I know that many students find it hard to come up with suitable topics on their own, so I have compiled a small list with some useful sources for finding suitable topics:

Read and summarise. This works for all levels. As a beginner, try paraphrasing your textbook and describe what’s going on in the dialogues, where they are and what the characters are like. More advanced learners can summarise anything they find interesting to read or listen to.

Write about daily life. Your life changes and different things happen every day, so focusing on these things provides an inexhaustible source of topics. Start writing a diary in Chinese!

Translate from other languages. Even if you’re serious with learning Chinese, it’s likely that you spend at least some time reading things in your own language. Take some of this text and translate it into Chinese. If it’s too hard, translate only the essence and use your own words.

Find questions or topics online. Topics are available in huge quantities online. Try searching for ESL questions and/or topics. I’ve put some interesting lists I found online in the recommended resources section at the end of this chapter.

Communication is key. Don’t write about things you aren’t interested in communicating to someone else. Choose topics with care!

A few words on perfectionism

When you write, you have to realise that even if you want to communicate something, the writing itself is an important goal. Caring too much about the product is dangerous, because nothing kills creativity faster than perfectionism. You will…

…waste time looking for the perfect topic before starting.

…fail to start because you’re waiting for the perfect situation.

…waste time looking for the perfect word.

…put writing off because of failure anxiety.

I find it comforting to focus on the learning process. The main purpose of writing in Chinese instead of another language is usually to practise Chinese. In that case, you can throw perfectionism aside immediately for the reasons discussed in chapter two: it’s simply inefficient. It’s okay to spend time on problems that involve actual writing, but not to use those problems as excuses for not writing at all.

5.5 Recommended resources

Below, I present some carefully selected resources for improving speaking and writing. If you want more resources, please visit Hacking Chinese Resources, where you can find more than 300 links, all tagged and sorted by proficiency level, topic and type.

Speaking online

HelloTalk- This is an app both for iOS and Android that connects you to native speakers. Note that these are ordinary native speakers that also want to learn your language, so it’s more of language exchange app than a way of finding a teacher.

Italki - Italki offers direct lessons with native speakers online. The quality varies, but the price is usually low. Excellent for talking with different native speakers without leaving the comfort of your living room.

Basic sound references

Yabla Pinyin Chart With Audio - A web-based Pinyin chart with audio for all syllables with all tones. Also includes possible combinations that actually don’t exist as real words, which might be good for practice.

Pinyin audio and video on YouTube - This clip introduces all the initials and finals in Pinyin (using the first tone). It adds value to the rest of the resources here because the camera is pointed to the speaker’s mouth, showing clearly how the lips move.

Lost Theory Mandarin Phonetics - Another web-based resource with recorded audio for all syllables with all tones. You can also get the “spelling” of the syllable read to you, i.e. Initial, final and then the whole syllable.

New Concept Mandarin introduction to Pinyin - Yet another web-based Pinyin chart with a different voice. It’s slightly more annoying to navigate, but only contains real syllables, which might be good as a reality check.

ChinesePod Introduction to Pinyin - This app is available for free for both Android and iOS and contains the full Pinyin chart with audio. It also explains the sounds, although not always accurately (there is no “nasal U” in Mandarin).

Sinosplice Tone Pair Drills - As the name implied, this is tone pair drilling with audio. You should really know how to pronounce all combinations and here you have them with audio references.

AllSet Learning Pinyin - This resource is only available for iPhone and iPad, but it’s free to download. It contains audio for all syllables in Mandarin (including tones) as well as some other useful features.

Pinyin Chart in IPA - In case you know the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) this chart provides you with a transcription of all syllables in Mandarin. It also highlights some potential issues with spelling in Pinyin.

Pronunciation explained

Zein on Mandarin Chinese Phonetics - This is a basic introduction and is suitable for most beginners. I don’t really like talking too much about equivalent sounds in English, but he does a fair job most of the time.

Chinese Pronunciation on Sinosplice - This is a short but good introduction to some of the sounds that are unique to Mandarin (at least from the perspective of a native English speaker). It’s not very exhaustive, but still a good introduction.

Standard Chinese Phonology on Wikipedia- This article is quite good and is the next step if you want to go beyond just describing how sounds are pronounced. There are also lots of useful references here.

Pinyin Traps and Pitfalls - This is my article about various common problems students have with Pinyin. These problems mostly exist because people read Pinyin as if it were a phonetic alphabet instead of a transcription system.

The Phonology of Standard Chinese (San Duan-mu) - This book is a great resource for anyone who thinks they know a little bit about phonetics and phonology and want a more thorough discussion. Do not read this book without having read at least one book about phonology and one about Chinese phonetics. The link goes to my review.

A guide to Pinyin traps and pitfalls - This is my article about common problems students encounter when learning Pinyin. Specifically, it discusses irregularities or exceptions in the Pinyin system that usually leads students astray.

Advice on learning pronunciation

Tones are more important than you think - This is an article about the importance of tones. I don’t think anyone who reads this guide thinks tones aren’t important, but it might be good to have some arguments to convince your friends.

Learning the third tone in Chinese - I have spent a fair amount of time researching the third tone in Mandarin. In this article, I share some of the results and discuss what they mean for you as a learner.

A smart method to discover problems with tones - I have referred to this article already, but I want to mention it again. It introduces a really neat way of testing pronunciation without having a teacher. Everybody should try this at least once.

Recording yourself to improve speaking ability - This is a closer look at how you can use recording as a tool to improve pronunciation. Most of what I cover here has appeared in different parts of this guide.

John Pasden’s tips on Chines pronunciation - I have referred to specific parts of this site earlier, but this is the main page for everything about pronunciation. John has many good things to say about pronunciation, listen to him!

Extending Mnemonics to Tones and Pronunciation - This is isn’t specifically about how to learn to pronounce Chinese, but instead about how to remember the sounds (this is surprisingly often the problem; you have to remember how a word is pronounced if you want to be able to pronounce it correctly).

Improving Foreign Language Pronunciation - This is an interview done with me over at Language is Culture. I talk with David Mansaray about learning to pronounce Chinese (and other languages). It isn’t directly useful as a guide for how to change pronunciation, but might be interesting to some readers. The audio interview is about 70 minutes long.

Tools and apps to improve pronunciation

Audacity - This program is excellent for mimicking purposes, but also for careful listening in general. It’s easy to use and available for free on most platforms. It’s a powerful audio editing and playback software that allows you to view and edit audio, as well as slow down, speed up, mute channels and much more. The link goes to my article about using Audacity and I introduce more tricks there.

Praat - This is one of the most widely used programs when it comes to scientific analysis of pronunciation. The program is not made for students specifically, but you can get pretty far just by using the material available on the website. Praat is free and works on most platforms. One of the most important features for students is to be able to see pitch contours and compare these to those of native speakers.

Pleco - This is my favourite Chinese dictionary (available for both Android and iOS), but that’s not why I mention it here. If you feel like spending some money, you can buy one or two voices that read most words in the dictionary. This is not synthesised sound; they actually record each word! Mimic your way to better pronunciation, don’t improvise or guess the right pronunciation.

Resources for writing

If you’re looking for resources about vocabulary and grammar, please check the resource section in chapter three.

Lang-8 - Make a habit of uploading all your texts on this site (you can even do this with chat logs or text messages). You will receive feedback quickly. Naturally, it varies how helpful the feedback is, but you will get plenty of help. It takes only a fraction of the time to help others or you can pay for the service.

Finding topics to write about:

Conversation Questions for the ESL/EFL Classroom

ESL Question and Conversation Cards and Lessons

50 Questions That Will Free Your Mind

List of Fun and Awkward Questions to Ask Friends

Great Questions List

6. Managing your studies

Language learning is harder than it seems. In the previous chapters, I have done my best to help you find methods that w ork well for you, but even if you know the perfect method to learn Chinese, that would only be a small part of what is needed to succeed. Language learning isn’t all that complicated. If you divide your time equally between studying hard and using the language, you will reach a decent level soon.

So what’s the problem? It’s not unique to language learning. We all have long lists in our minds of things we want to do or think that we ought to do, but we just don’t do them. In other words, simply getting things done isn’t as easy as it sounds. “Just do it” is a good slogan, but it doesn’t really capture the complexity of the problem.

In this chapter, we’re going to look at how to carry out your plans, as well as how to set relevant goals and track your progress. I will also share some ideas on how to find the time to study Chinese, even if you’re busy with other things, or how to maximise study time if you’re a full-time student. This involves more than just learning a language, it involves examining your life, understanding how habits work and how to change your life and your environment to help you achieve your goals.

Most of what I say here isn’t limited to learning Chinese or even learning languages in general, it’s relevant for everything you do in life. For instance, the concept of time quality is important for getting anything done, and time boxing has changed the way I do everyday tasks like tidying up or cleaning our apartment. Still, I will stay as close to language learning as I can, don’t worry!

This chapter is divided into four parts as follows:

Getting things done

Keeping track of your learning

Time management and planning

Relevant resources

6.1 Getting things done

If you know what to do but still don’t do it, there are some steps you can take. Some of them might seem obvious, but don’t dismiss them unless you have tried them; they really do make a difference.

The first thing you have to realise is that you can’t just “master Chinese”. That’s not something you do, it’s a long-term goal that you achieve after doing other things. A lot of other things. Thus, even though it’s definitely a good idea to have a long-term goal, that’s something that gives you a general direction, it doesn’t really dictate what you do in your daily learning.

I have used the analogy of parachuting in unknown territory before in this book and it’s suitable here as well. Even if you know that you’re heading towards the mountain range beyond the horizon, that’s not really what you should keep your eyes focused on most of the time. If you do, you will run into serious problems:

You will feel that the road is too long and the climb too steep – This is common and I think all students have felt this at some point. Why bother learning if it will take so long to reach the destination? It’s very discouraging to study for a day or a week without any noticeable progress; the mountain range looks equally remote.

You will find it hard to overcome smaller problems on the way – It goes without saying that if you don’t focus on what’s immediately in front of you, it will be hard to deal with immediate problems. Focusing on mastering Chinese in general tells you nothing about solving problems you encounter now.

Bite-sized learning and winnable games

The solution to both these problems is the same and can be explained in several different ways. First, let’s continue using the analogy of exploring a strange landscape. Although it might require a million steps to reach your destination (that’s roughly the length of both the Amazon and Nile rivers, by the way), each step is very easy. Just put one foot in front of the other. Repeat.

There is a transition here from something trivial (taking a step) into something hard (reaching the distant mountains), yet the first will inevitably lead to the second if you keep at it for long enough. This has something vital to tell us about achieving things in general: if you can break down the process into small enough steps, any goal can be reached by completing many small steps. Sometimes it’s not obvious how to break down the process, but I’ve tried to provide lots of help with that already in previous chapters.

Another way of looking at this is through games. If you played a game where you needed 1000 points to win, but you only scored around 10 points every time, would you keep playing? Probably not, because there’s no way you can win. What if you played a game where you needed 12 points to win? That’s better, you might be able to do that if you practise a bit and concentrate hard. Once beaten, replace that game with another game where you need 15 points to win. And so on. Repeat that and you will soon reach 1000 points.

This is very basic psychology: people like doing things they’re good at and failure is something we want to avoid. Thus, if you play the 1000-point game, you don’t really want to keep playing because you will fail miserably thousands of times before you approach your goal. If you play the 15-point game, you will still fail sometimes, but if you increase the level slowly enough, you will win most of the time. This is actually the same thing as the exploration analogy above, but I find this way of thinking is more helpful in some situations.

The way you break things down depends on what kind of tasks they are. If it’s a skill like speaking Chinese, the best you can do is compare your current skill with your long-term goal and see what your weakest area is and focus on that until it’s no longer your weakest area. If it’s a task that has a clear process, breaking it down into steps is easier, the trick is just to make each step small enough. I will show you lots of examples below; don’t worry.

What’s your next step to master Chinese?

Not knowing what the next step is makes progress impossible. This ought to be obvious, but it’s often overlooked. Do you know what your next step is for learning Chinese? I’m not talking about goals here, I’m talking about things you can do now and that are small enough that you will almost certainly succeed.

If you know your next action for improving listening, speaking, reading, writing and vocabulary, then congratulations, you’ve come much farther than most students. Of course, it’s perfectly fine to have more than one next action to choose from.

If you don’t know what your next action is and find yourself procrastinating, you now know the reason. How are you supposed to be able to get something done if you don’t know what it is? I’m convinced that many people are held back simply because they try to achieve things that are too big or too vague.

Let’s look at a few examples of what your next action could be for the five areas mentioned above. Of course, these actions don’t exist in a vacuum, but appear to do so here because I haven’t attached them to a long-term goal. I will talk more about goal management later in this chapter.

Next action to improve listening ability

Find a suitable news article with transcripts

Transcribe one podcast dialogue

Look up new words in a dialogue you’ve already listened to

Transfer five new Chinese songs to your phone

Listen to a radio program for 15 minutes and take notes

Next action to improve speaking ability

Arrange a time with a language partner

Write down two errors you want to focus on this week

Practise the errors on the above list

Record yourself reading a text

Record a voice diary in Chinese

Next action to improve reading ability

Make sure you have Chinese text in the bathroom and close to your bed

Read the first (next) five pages in a book

Go through markings you’ve made when reading earlier

Reread something you’ve read earlier

Benchmark your reading ability

Next action to improve writing ability

Write a post in Chinese on your favourite social media

Read through feedback you received on Lang-8

Create an outline of something you want to write

Brainstorm new ideas for articles (help here)

Write a draft of the first paragraph in an article

Next action to expand vocabulary

Set a timer on 10 minutes and start reviewing on Skritter

Check through your Chinese notebook and look-up new words

Enter new vocabulary from your recent reading into your SRS

Set a timer and kill some leeches

Deepen your knowledge through horizontal vocabulary learning

I tend to have a number of projects going, such as “read book x”, “memorize y”, “learn z new characters” and so on. For each of these, I try to be aware of the next action. If it’s doing something a large number of times (such as reading 1000 pages), I often use time boxing, a technique I will talk more about later.

If you’re not used to breaking down large tasks, I suggest that you do it in writing. Naturally, if you have a perfectly linear task like reading a book, you don’t need to write anything down, the point is being aware of the next action; it doesn’t really matter how you do it. Still, writing it down means that you can tick a box when you’re done to underscore your win and that always feels good! In complex tasks like a major writing project or improving pronunciation, it’s essential to write things down, otherwise these tasks might feel overwhelming.

As we have seen, getting started on a long journey can be very hard. The reason is that starting it tomorrow or next week is essentially the same as setting out today. However, if the next action is much smaller and more manageable, postponement looks silly. Immersing yourself in Chinese might sound like a very hard task, but downloading a podcast is very easy and there is simply no way you can fail.

Your next step

Do you know what your next step is? Go through your milestones, then write down a few different steps you could take right now that would take you closer to your goal. Naturally, you don’t need to write everything down in your day-to-day studying, but try it out this time at least!

Goal management

At first sight, goal management might not be something worthwhile exploring. After all, we all have the same goal of learning Chinese, right? Perhaps, but there’s much more to it than that. A long-term goal merely gives you a direction, but is too distant to directly influence what you choose to do right now. Therefore, you need milestones along the way that make sure you’re moving in the right direction without being so distant that they disappear beyond the horizon.

As we saw in the previous section, you need concrete things you complete and finish. Therefore, the next step or action mentioned above is also a kind of goal, even though it’s just a step on the way. Let’s call these micro goals. Goal management is about defining a long-term goal and then breaking that down into achievable milestones and then breaking those down into small steps you can easily take.

Goals are also necessary if you care about efficiency. The reason is simple: If you don’t have a clearly expressed goal, you can’t evaluate the methods you’re using. Studying without a goal is like preparing for an exam without knowing anything about the exam. Since you don’t really know what will be tested, there’s no way of knowing if you’re focusing on the right things or not.

Long-term goals

When it comes to long-term goals, it’s a good idea to be specific and write them out. Why do you want to learn Chinese? There’s a huge difference between someone who wants to be able to read the great classics of Chinese literature and someone who wants to be able to chat with friends. Being able to do business in Chinese requires a different skill set from that of teaching Chinese in your home country.

Many decisions about your learning method will be based on what you’re after. If literature is your main focus, pronunciation probably isn’t that important, but if you want to teach, you definitely need good pronunciation. If you want to chat with friends, perhaps you don’t need to be able to write much by hand or even bother with characters at all at a beginner level. If you want to do business, you need to think about more than just language.

Here are some long-term goals I think are common for Chinese learners. Some of them take only a few months to achieve, others will take years:

Be able to chat with a Chinese friend

Understand a film in Chinese

Be able to do business in China

Convince Chinese partners you’re serious about China

Be able to read The Journey to the West in Chinese

Teach Chinese in your home country

Pass the highest level HSK exam

Pass a university course taught in Chinese

Short-term goals (milestones)

If long-term goals stretch over months and years, short-term goals stretch over days and weeks. These goals are as important as the long-term goal, but because they change faster, you’re going to have to deal with them more. Short-term goals are created by breaking down long-term goals, asking the question: What do I need to practice doing to achieve this long-term goal?

Here are a few example of short-term goals:

Pass the exam on March 5th

Go through all the sounds in Chinese

Read five short texts

Summarise the feedback on my writing assignments

Find a language exchange partner

Learn to sing five songs

How many short-term goals you have at any given time depends entirely on how much time you spend on studying Chinese. If you spend a few hours every week, having just a few short-term goals will be enough, but if you study full time, you can have a dozen if you stay organised.

It’s generally safer to have too few goals, finish them quickly and then set new ones, compared with having too many goals, which increases the risk of feeling overwhelmed and also risks spreading you too thin, making little progress in each area. Even if you study full time, it doesn’t make sense to focus on everything at once.

Micro goals

The shortest goals are the micro goals I discussed above. I normally regard these actions or steps rather than goals, so that’s why I described them earlier and called them something else.

Still, I want to return to micro goals here to close the circle. You have now broken down long-term goals into milestones and arrived back at the bite-sized chunks and winnable games I discussed earlier. Here are some examples of micro goals:

Learn the words for the basic colours

Enter words from a chapter in your textbook to your computer

Read one chapter (one page) in a book

Write one diary entry

Post a contact ad on a forum

Review your long-term goals

You should be able to fit micro goals into a time boxing period. If not, they’re too long and procrastination becomes a threat. That’s the second time I mention time boxing without explaining it, so let’s look at how to use this technique to take the next step towards mastering Chinese.

Time boxing

In general, the more time you have to complete a task, the less efficiently you work on it. This is obvious when you think about it, and I’m sure most people have experienced this in their everyday lives. Didn’t you have homework assignments you didn’t complete until the last minute? Having lots of time is not a guarantee for finishing anything, in fact, it’s usually an excuse to procrastinate more.

Realising this, time boxing is about limiting the time you have available and thus increasing efficiency. The “boxing” refers to dividing time in smaller boxes, so even if it might feel like you’re fighting time, boxing here refers to putting something in a container.

For example, instead of saying that you’re going to review vocabulary until you’re done, you say that you’re going to work hard on reviewing characters for exactly ten minutes. Setting goals “until I’m done” works well if you actually can complete them, but the risk is that it will feel daunting and the risk of failing is considerably higher. Learning how to time box properly is a matter of practice. I know what works for me, but I don’t know what works for you.

In the above example, I chose ten minutes as the default duration, but that’s just a good starting point. I’ve found ten minutes to be a good time interval for most tasks, but you might find that you need shorter intervals to really stay focused.

Likewise, you might find that some tasks need more time than that to be meaningful. Estimate, experiment, evaluate; learn how to time box the specific activities you’re engaged in. Whatever time you choose, make sure to use a timer that will alert you when the time is up. Personally, I prefer using a physical timer.

Time boxing is an extremely powerful weapon against procrastination and many people who try it are surprised by how effective it is. It’s almost magic, but not really, because you know why it works.

Learn time boxing

Try this for a few days: Time box everything you find difficult to get started with. Start with a ten-minute timer and then increase the time slowly. If you find that you cannot work for the set time, lower it to a manageable level. Take a short break between each time period. Stand up. Stretch. Do a back flip. Start the next one. Alternate the tasks to avoid boredom.

Micro goals vs. time boxing

It should be clear by now that you should split major tasks into many smaller and easier ones. You can do this either by limiting the time (time boxing) or by limiting the scope of the task (micro goals). Let’s compare the two:

The major advantage with time boxing is that the amount of work you need to do is clearly defined. This means that it’s easier to motivate yourself to get started, because you know when you start that it only takes ten minutes. Can you really persuade yourself to not spend just ten minutes learning characters today? Compare this with learning a fixed number of characters, which might take 10, 20 or 30 minutes, and is also of unknown difficulty (you might fail). Time boxing works best for tasks that are continuous.

Micro goals are more useful for tasks that are complex and can be separated into stages with clearly different properties. Furthermore, they are synonymous with progress. You can’t reach a micro goal without having made progress, but you can spend ten minutes trying to do something and not achieving anything. If you feel that it’s hard to concentrate on one thing, time boxing also invites procrastination in a way that micro goals don’t.

I think both methods are useful and I use them both daily. I tend to use micro goals more, especially when I know what I’m doing and have a good grasp of how long something takes to achieve. However, when it comes to reviewing characters or doing anything that feels even slightly menial, time boxing is king. It is also the default solution when I can’t or don’t want to break something down further or when the process is unknown.

Finally, I should mention that I do all these things on a need-to basis. I don’t time box just because I can, and I don’t create long lists of micro goals if it seems like I’m getting things done anyway. I do these things when I need to. This guarantees gaining maximum benefits from the two methods without spending too much time on things other than achieving my goals.

Habit hacking for language learners

Humans are very good at performing habitual tasks. A habit is a task that you have performed so many times that it requires little or no mental effort to start doing it, it’s become ingrained in the way you do things. Some habits are so deeply ingrained that effort is needed to stop doing them!

I have exercised for as long as I can remember and for me it’s not really a question if I should go to the gym or not, I just think about when I’m going to do it. If I don’t do it, it feels wrong. Habits are good because they save energy while still making sure you get things done. Getting a daily dose of spoken and written Chinese along with reviewing vocabulary comes high on the priority list of habits you want to establish.

The obvious place to start when trying to form a habit is to explore and define the habit you want to form. Why do you want it? What benefits will it bring you? What exactly does successful habit formation look like, i.e. what’s your target behaviour? This is good not only because it helps you understand your goal, but also because it increases motivation; you want to be that better version of yourself with those benefits you just listed.

The key to successful habit formation is to take baby steps. The reason why this is a good idea is similar to the thinking behind micro goals, i.e. that if you aim low, you can’t really fail. Then you can gradually increase the volume or the strictness of your new habit until it approaches the target level.

For example, if you want to learn Chinese characters, don’t start with trying to learn 20 a day, because the likelihood is that you will do that for a few days and then give up. Instead, start out slow and then gradually increase the load. Learn one new character per day.

This isn’t only a feel-good kind of advice for weaklings; it’s based on findings in neuropsychological research. It seems that the regularity of the action is much more important than the exact volume and duration of the task you perform. Thus, if you want to review characters daily, get used to doing that every single day first and then slowly increase the number of repetitions.

Forming a habit takes at least a few weeks. To really form a habit, you need a long-term plan that tells you what will happen after you have formed the habit. You need to plan for possible problems before they appear. This can be easy, making yourself accountable or setting reminders both work fine. Either way, you need to stay conscious of your habit long after forming it or you risk losing it.

In addition, you need a back-up plan. This is where most people go wrong. They only plan for how to form the habit and what to do when they succeed. It’s all or nothing. If they fail, it’s over. This isn’t good at all, because you might very well fail. When you fail, you need to practise damage control.

The easiest way to get around this is to make yourself accountable. For instance, you can promise someone to treat him or her to a nice dinner every time you forget to do whatever you have promised to do. This means that failing once will be bad for you, but failing twice will be twice as bad. After failing once, you have strong incentives not to fail again.

Even the most basic course in behaviour therapy will tell you that rewards and punishments are key to behaviour change in general. Rewards tend to be more useful than punishments, but you need to make the rewards immediate and linked to the behaviour in question. What works as a reward for you is entirely individual, of course.

Punishments can be very powerful as well, but be aware that they do tend to increase the stress level. For instance, I once had to finish a freelance writing project and gave my dad $1000 and said that he could keep the money if I hadn’t finished the project in two weeks. After not having done anything for two months, I finished it all with time to spare. A bit forced, yes, but it worked. However, as this excellent animation shows, rewards and punishments don’t always work they way you think they do.

Habit formation and behaviour change are extremely complex topics and there are lots of books written about the subject. I have tried to outline some of the basic concepts and some practical tips that I’ve found to work well for language learning. Try them out! There are also a number of apps and services you can use. Please refer to the resource section at the end of the chapter.

Form a new habit!

According to your goals, what kind of habit would be most helpful to you? My guess is that you should listen and read more Chinese. Either way, decide on one new habit you want to form this month. Follow the suggestions offered in this section. Start gently and add more later on. Make yourself accountable. Create a back-up plan. Set a reminder sometime next month to see how things are going. If they are going well, focus on another habit next month.

Your minimum output and why it matters

If we were to arrange a one-year competition for learning Chinese, it wouldn’t be the person who spent the most time during one single week that would win, but the one who studied the largest number of hours in total.

It’s not the peaks in the graph that matter, but the total area beneath the graph. If you want to maximise this area, your main focus should be to make the slumps as short as possible, rather than focusing on the peaks.

The reason is that peaks are usually short (it’s hard to maintain a steady, high output), while slumps tend to be long, especially if you focus too much on the peaks and burn out. One week of binge studying doesn’t make up for the two weeks you spend doing nothing after that. If reducing the height of the peak is what it takes to make the slump less serious, that’s what you should do.

The most important thing when dealing with slumps is to prepare in advance and build habits. If you have solid study habits, you’re likely to stick to them even during a slump. The problem is that creating habits is a demanding task in itself, so it’s something you need to do before you actually need the habit. If you feel like you have a lot of energy to study now, then it’s time to think about how to deal with your next slump!

You can do this by planning some lightweight, slump-friendly activities you can fall back to when you don’t want to study as you normally do. Anything related to Chinese is better than nothing at all. It’s okay to cut back on difficult listening, demanding reading or tricky characters. Try these things instead:

Don’t conquer, consolidate - Slumps are great for reviewing. Fall back to texts or audio you already know but want to listen to again. Don’t add new words; review old ones instead. Read things that are easier than you’re used to.

Have fun - You should of course try to have fun all the time, but this is especially true during a slump. Remove the menial and boring tasks and add fun ways of learning. Play a game in Chinese, watch a film, read a comic, listen to a song.

Make language a tool - Focus on activities that aren’t studying as such, but where you use or are exposed to Chinese. This is good advice in general, but very important during a slump. Make sure you have these habits in place before the slump, though.

Make learning social - This might be different from learner to learner, but I find it much easier to motivate myself if I’m learning with someone. This can be a friendly native speaker or a classmate, it doesn’t matter, simply doing things with another human being makes it more interesting.

Managing your capacity cycle is a bit like managing the economy of a country. When everything is going swimmingly, economists try to cool things down, trying to avoid over heating. You should do the same when studying Chinese. Don’t add a hundred words just because you feel great today. If you really feel like binging, do it on something that won’t give you a hangover. Listen or read more.

6.2 Keeping track of your learning

There are two things you should keep track of: what you don’t know and what you do know. The first is pretty straightforward: make sure to take notes and write down what you don’t know but think you ought to know. For instance, if you speak Chinese and realise you don’t know how to ask someone to speak more slowly, ask in English and write down the answer in Chinese. If you read a book and notice an expression you think looks grammatically incorrect, keep it for later.

I have a (physical) notebook where I write such things down. When I have a teacher or friendly native speaker who can help me, I go through some of the questions and make sure I understand the answers. I also post some of these questions online or ask fellow second language learners. Some answers turn out to be uninteresting, others very important, but it’s almost impossible to know which in advance. You can also use apps like LinqApp to ask questions by writing, taking a photo or recording audio.

If you don’t have a Chinese notebook, I suggest you get one now. Keep it in your pocket or your bag. If you feel it’s easy to write characters, take notes and make simple edits on your phone, by all means use that, but I find this less practical than an actual notebook. If you write all sorts of things down, tag the questions according to what they are about so you can ask all pronunciation questions when you meet your pronunciation expert friend. Read more about using a notebook here.

Let’s turn to keeping track of what you have learnt, i.e. your progress. When you start learning Chinese, you don’t need to keep track, because every step you take will be obvious both to you and to people around you. You will literally feel how your Chinese improves. However, this feeling goes away when you reach an intermediate level, and you stop feeling that you’re moving forward.

This is easy to explain. Think of a bucket. Each hour you study represents a drop in the bucket. If you start with an empty bucket, you will definitely notice how water starts collecting at the bottom of the bucket as you keep studying. However, when the bucket is half full (or is it half empty?), you don’t really see the result of adding another drop because it’s such a small percentage of what you have already learnt. This is sometimes referred to as the law of diminishing returns, stating that the (noticeable) result you get for a fixed amount of practice decreases as your proficiency improves. It’s just a drop in the bucket.

Therefore, from an intermediate level and above, it’s important to keep track of progress. If you’re enrolled in a rigorous course, this will be done for you through exams, but I still suggest that you benchmark your Chinese proficiency now and then on your own. Apart from highlighting the fact that you are learning something, this can also help you spot problems in your learning or how you divide time between different areas. As we have seen, it’s also likely that your school will neglect some areas of learning.

Below, I will offer some hands-on suggestions for how to benchmark different areas of Chinese. Benchmarking is itself a kind of studying, so there is no time wasted here. I suggest benchmarking at least once a semester, but you can do it more seldom if you are already an advanced learner.

Benchmarking listening ability

Listening ability is a passive skill that you can test mostly on your own. Find a suitable audio source and see how much you understand now and compare that with a result in the future. As we saw in chapter four, listening is a complex skill, so it follows that you can test it in a number of different ways:

Listen to informal vs. formal Chinese

Listen once vs. listening many times

Listen to a standard dialect vs. regional dialect

Listen to texts read aloud vs. natural conversation

Listen to audio about different topics

Benchmarking speaking ability

This has already been dealt with partially in chapter five, but I will focus exclusively on the benchmarking part here. Speaking is by far the hardest skill to benchmark, because it’s evanescent by nature and you need advanced technology to record it. Recording is essential; otherwise you have no way of comparing later.

I suggest that you record speech digitally, as often and as much as possible. You don’t need to use all the material, but it costs you almost nothing to store recorded audio. You should record different kinds of speech, focusing on different aspects:

Record your best performance

Record your average reading

Record improvised speech on a prepared topic

Record improvised speech on a random subject

Record conversations with native speakers

Start a podcast or a video diary and share your progress (and get valuable feedback). If you don’t want everybody to be able to listen to your Chinese, add a password and share only with teachers and helpful friends. The important thing is that you keep your recordings for later.

Benchmarking reading ability

Reading ability is the easiest area to benchmark because you can do it entirely on your own without using any fancy equipment. Reading can of course be tested in many ways, but here are some:

Read easy texts for full comprehension

Read harder texts to understand the gist

Read texts in different genres

Read handwritten Chinese

These goals can also be combined, but since it would be far too time consuming to try all combinations, find a few that match your current goals for learning Chinese. Here are some things you should pay attention to:

How often you need to use a dictionary

How much time you need to finish the text

How you feel when reading the text

Benchmarking writing ability

Writing is by nature something permanent that can be accessed at any time, so it’s not as hard to benchmark as speaking, but still harder than listening or reading. Starting your own blog to post your texts is easy. Using a blog, you can have all written Chinese in one place, easily accessible both for you and others.

Try writing texts of different kinds:

Write texts in different styles (formal/informal)

Write texts on different subjects

Write text with or without the help dictionaries

Write texts with or without help from real people

Write texts by hand or type using a computer

Write in different genres

Comparing your own texts, it should be to see if you have made progress. Perhaps you aren’t making the errors you can see in your own writing from last semester any longer, or you find that the sentences you wrote then are short and unnatural. That means you’ve improved, congratulations! Still, you can only do so much on your own; you need feedback here as well:

Ask a native speaker to compare texts of a similar type

Ask a native speaker to comment on your errors

Ask for an overall judgement of your writing ability

Ask a native speaker for advice on what to improve

Benchmark your Chinese today

If you haven’t benchmarked your Chinese before, you should do so right away. Remember that this is also a great form of studying; it just has the added benefit that you can compare later. Benchmark all four skills, but perhaps not all in one day. Save the results in a benchmark folder on your computer. Don’t forget to add dates and some comments about how it went.

Counting what counts

When Einstein said “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted” he likely didn’t have language learning or even education in mind, but this is what we’re going to look at now.

Have you ever felt that your teacher is correcting the wrong things or that he or she says that one thing is all-important, but then ignores that when setting grades? Have you tried measuring your own progress and found that it’s not easy to quantify language learning?

This is because language learning is very complex and we tend to simplify, sometimes too much. It might also be because it’s not obvious (to the teacher in this case) that the way of measuring things influences the way you study. Let’s look at two examples:

Formal grades – In general, students do what is required of them and little more. Therefore, if you measure progress, you must make sure to count all the areas that matter (this is true for both students and teachers). There are two possible problems. First, you or your teacher might neglect an area of language learning. For instance, many non-beginner courses in Chinese don’t grade your pronunciation, even though it’s painfully clear that many students have basic problems. Second, you or your teacher might overemphasise something that actually isn’t all that important. For example, a zealous approach to handwriting is certain to slow down progress in other areas, yet this is common in many classrooms.

Self-assessed learning - When you measure your progress like I have suggested here, you need to make sure that you are counting what actually counts. If your short-term goals don’t cover everything you need to accomplish your long-term goals, you will run into problems. For instance, if you keep track of your study time, make sure you count properly, including all the skills you need. It’s very easy to stick to things that are easy to count, which is what we’re going to look at more closely in the next section.

Measurable progress is a double-edged sword

Before I answer the question above, I’d like to share with you my personal theory of measurable progress. It started with this question: Why is it that so many people like going to the gym these days? I like body-weight exercises myself (I practice gymnastics) and these can be done for free at home, so why pay money and spend extra time going to the gym?

Even though there are many other factors, I think measurable progress is a key component. In a gym, each movement can be measured very exactly. You repeat more or less the same routines, and therefore your progress becomes visible. It’s there, black on white; it’s measurable. Last month, you could bench 50 kg, now you can bench 55 kg. This makes us feel good about exercising.

There is a downside, however, which is related to what I said above about counting what counts. Take spaced repetition software, for instance. Some people binge and spend most of their time learning and reviewing characters and words. I think this is similar to the gym story above; it offers proof of progress. At the end of the day you can see how many characters you learnt or how many words you reviewed.

The problem is that these programs were never meant to supplant using the language to communicate. They are useful tools that can help you boost vocabulary and reinforce certain other areas, but they are not substitutes for actually using the language! Using only spaced repetition software would be like doing a few exercises in the gym and then expecting to win a multi-sport event.

6.3 Time management and planning

How long does it take to learn Chinese? Naturally, there is no simple answer to the question, but one thing is certain: the answer should be in hours, not months or years. I did a survey with over 100 participants online, and found that it wasn’t uncommon for some students to spend more time in one year than other students did in ten!

The problem is of course that even if you know that you should spend as much time as possible learning Chinese, it’s not so easily done. I have already discussed some productivity issues, but now I’m going to discuss time in particular, including how to find time to study Chinese and how to invest that time wisely.

Finding time to study Chinese

You’re not as busy as you think. Most people have a bad intuitive grasp of how they spend their time and think that they have little or no time to learn a language. Or they think they’re already spending as much time as they possible can. This is seldom the case. Therefore, the first step towards finding more time to learn Chinese is to examine your daily life in detail through a time log.

Creating a time log is pretty simple, just write down everything you do for a day. Write it down in as much detail as you can, making a note every time you switch activities. This is tedious to keep up for more than a day, so choose a day that is likely to be representative for the life you normally lead. Most people I’ve spoken with after doing such a time log are surprised that they spend so little time doing the things they thought they were doing most. You can check one of my time logs here if you want.

The point here isn’t necessarily to find empty slots of time where you could study Chinese. Instead, the goal is to understand what kind of time you have available. In other words, time isn’t something you either have or don’t have, it’s something you can have in different quantities and qualities. For instance, you might not be able to study your textbook in the bus queue or on your way to work, but you could easily review characters in the first case and listen to a podcast in the second.

Do a time log

If you haven’t done a time log, you don’t really understand how you spend your time. Try it at least for one day, once. This will give you insights into what kind of time you have available for learning Chinese and will be useful when you implement all the advice I have offered in this book. If your situation changes, do another time log. It just takes a few minutes extra, but adds much to your understanding of your study situation.

To explain this, I usually use what I call the time barrel:

The barrel represents all time you could theoretically use, i.e. all 24 hours in a day. Naturally, you can’t use all this time for studying, but I want to make it clear that the barrel still represents all 24 hours, including the time you usually sleep, work, eat and so on.

The rocks represent major tasks that can’t be interfered with such as sleeping, because no matter what you do, you need to sleep. If you’re close to the average of 8 hours sleep per day, your barrel will contain one big rock representing those eight hours. There are other potential rocks such as working, eating and some social activities, but these normally consist of many smaller pieces rather than a big lump.

You still have room for pebbles. If rocks represented big, bulky tasks, pebbles represent smaller tasks you can move about more freely. Let’s say a rock is something which takes several hours to complete whereas a pebble only takes ten minutes. Now, even though your day looks full, you can see that it’s still possible to fill it with a whole lot of pebbles, such as reading a few pages before going to bed, sing a song in Chinese or write a few sentences on your favourite social media.

Now it’s really starting to look full. Yet there is still room for sand that trickles down between the pebbles and fills the spaces you didn’t know were there. This is the kind of studying you only do for a few seconds up to several minutes each time, but that accumulates over time to become a significant factor. For instance, you could review vocabulary using spaced repetition software on your smart phone, listen to a few minutes of audio, review tricky characters you have written on your hand or chat with a friend in Chinese.

The barrel is full! Not a grain of sand can be added, let alone pebbles or rocks. Still, it’s possible to add several litres of water to such a barrel without it overflowing. For instance, you can listen to Chinese audio while doing other tasks, use your phone and/or computer in Chinese or perform some tasks entirely in Chinese. Do you play computer games? Do that in Chinese. Many of the rocks are more permeable than they look!

Studying Chinese isn’t one kind of activity that requires you to sit at home or in the library in front of a computer or textbook. You can study Chinese when you walk, shower, work and shop for groceries. Don’t think of studying as sitting down in front of your desk, think of it as any activity that exposes you to Chinese.

Fill your barrel

Use the information you gained from your time log above and turn it into the metaphor of the time barrel. List your rocks and pebbles. Where you have space left, add more pebbles. Now see where you can still pour some sand. Then try to pour water into all remaining cavities. Remember to study according to your current productivity level; if it’s too much, you should turn to more lightweight forms of studying! You can read more about this here.

Studying the right thing at the right time

Now that you know more about what kind of time you have available, it’s time to look at how to use it optimally. The essence here is a concept I call “time quality”.

The basic idea is that a given stretch of time has a certain quality. The time of the highest quality is when you have no restrictions, can do whatever you want and have access to all resources you need. Low quality time is time when you can study, but only in a limited manner. High-quality time is related to bigger pebbles or rocks in your time barrel, low-quality time to small pebbles, water and sand.

Time quality is not a linear spectrum, however, because even if there is only one kind of high-quality time, there are many different types of low-quality time, and it’s important to understand the difference between them. The general principle is this:

Always strive to use time of as low quality as possible while still enabling you to complete the task.

Let’s say you have two hours to study Chinese every day, one at home before you go to bed and one on the bus/train/metro to and from work. It’s stupid to spend the hour at home practising listening, because that is something you can easily do when you commute. You’re violating the above principle by using high-quality time to complete a task you could have used lower quality time for.

It takes a while to get used to thinking like this, but it’s not complicated at all. Make a list of the things you normally study throughout the day and then try to find slots of time of as low quality as possible, but which still allows you to finish the tasks. Here are some situations analysed using time quality:

Make sure vocabulary learning is portable, preferably using spaced repetition software on your phone. Reviewing characters in front of your computer is a waste of time quality. This can easily be done while you wait for a friend, while you wait for food on sit on the bus.

Make sure you always have something to listen to. Since listening ability is mostly a product of time spent listening, it’s essential that you can utilise low-quality time as much as possible, because you’re going to need the higher quality time to learn other things. As I have shown with the time barrel above, you should have plenty of time to listen to Chinese.

Use Chinese when you speak with yourself. Depending on what level you have reached, this can include anything from counting things in Chinese to having your internal dialogue in Chinese. This means that you can practice piecing together sentences in Chinese in many situations where many other kinds of studying are impossible.

Prepare before you go to class. Asking your teacher questions you might as well have looked up on your own is a waste of your time as well as your classmates’. You want your teacher to correct your pronunciation, grammar and so on, which is hard to do on your own. If you just want to know how to say “torpedo” in Chinese, use a dictionary (it’s yúléi, “fish thunder”).

In short, this is just a different way of looking at the time you have at your disposal and trying to find what is optimal to do in any given situation. This is not only useful for studying Chinese; the same approach can be used for anything.

Just like language hacking in general, time quality is a concept for the lazy and the ambitious alike. If you study what you need to study on the bus, you can do other things when you get home. If you study all your flashcards while waiting for a friend, you can chat with him or her a bit longer!

6.4 Recommended resources

Below, I present some extra resources for time management and getting things done. Please also see the recommended resources in chapter two. If you want more resources, please visit Hacking Chinese Resources, where you can find more than 300 links, all tagged and sorted by proficiency level, topic and type.

Beeminder - This is a service that offers to take your money if you don’t keep on track. Sounds stupid, but it works! When your money’s on the line, you are more likely to stick to your goals. Of course, if you do what you should, it costs you nothing at all.

HabitRPG - Another app for getting things done in the shape of a classic RPG. Complete your tasks, earn your XP and level up. I prefer more minimalistic approaches, but I can definitely see why some people love this.

50 Tricks to Get Things Done Faster, Better, and More Easily - I’m not a big fan of X thing to do Y, but this list is actually very good. There are also plenty of links to other, related articles.

7. Epilogue

The text in this book has been through a lot; this is my third attempt at writing a book about learning Chinese. The first two weren’t complete failures, but were abandoned because they ballooned out of control; the number of pages kept creeping up with no end in sight. This book could have been a thousand pages long, but that would have benefited few readers.

The current version is based on a draft that was almost twice as long, which means that it’s been through some serious axing. In most cases, this is only positive since I forced myself to think about which parts were truly essential. I should probably have removed even more.

Still, the three chapters in the book that deal with the main areas of learning Chinese certainly could have been longer, but I also realise that I can’t write everything I want in one book. Therefore, I saved some text and ideas for future books dealing specifically with smaller areas of learning Chinese, such as learning characters or pronunciation.

I don’t know when I will publish something based on this material; it depends largely on how this course is received. I’m no longer in a position where I can treat Hacking Chinese merely as a hobby; I need to sustain myself as well. If readers want to pay for text, audio or video I produce, I’d be happy to do that; if not, I need to invest my time in other projects.

I’m curious to hear what you think about the book and the course. If you’ve come this far, why don’t you send me an e-mail and tell me about your reading experience? If you find any errors or unclear passages, I will definitely fix them and update the book as soon as I can. If you just want to say hello, that’s fine as well. I hope you have enjoyed reading this book and that you have improved your learning as a result!

Best wishes,

Olle Linge 凌雲龍

Stockholm

2015