I studied Mandarin Chinese 50 years ago. It took me nine months to reach a level where I could translate newspaper editorials from English to Chinese and from Chinese to English, read novels and interpret for people, I did this in the age of the open-reel tape recorder, long before the age of the Internet, online dictionaries, language learning apps, MP3 files and YouTube. 

If I reflect on what I did, I find that there were six things that helped me learn faster than other students who were studying with me. Below I list each of these tips on how to learn Chinese which you may want to apply to your studies.

My Six Tips on How to Learn Chinese:

Listen to Mandarin as Often as Possible

The first month or maybe two, just focus on listening.

Start out by focusing on listening. Just get used to the sounds. You should read whatever you are listening to, but do so using a phonetic writing system, such as Pinyin, in order to get a better sense of what you are hearing. You will have to learn the characters eventually but you can leave the characters out at first, and instead, try to get a little momentum in the language.

It’s too difficult to start learning characters when you don’t have any sense of the words, what they sound like, or how they work together. A new language can sound like undifferentiated noise at the beginning. The first step is to become accustomed to the individual sounds of the language, to learn to differentiate words from each other, and even to have a few words and phrases reverberating in your brain.

My first introduction to Mandarin was listening to Chinese Dialogues, an intermediate text with no characters, just romanization, in this case the Yale version of romanization. Today Pinyin, developed in China, has become the standard form of romanization for Mandarin. In Chinese Dialogues, the narrator spoke so fast I thought he was torturing us. But it worked. After a month or so I was used to the speed and had a sense of the language.

As an aside, I think it is a good idea to begin learning a language with intermediate level texts that include a lot of repetition of vocabulary, rather than overly simple beginner texts. Podcasts and audio books are great for this. The Mandarin Chinese mini- stories at LingQ are an example of the kind of point of view stories, with a great deal of repetition of high frequency verbs, that are available today. These were not available to me 50 years ago. Watching movies and TV shows is another excellent way to get lots of Chinese listening in.

With a sense of this exciting new language and some aural comprehension, my motivation to learn the characters grew. I wanted to know the characters for the words that I had been listening to and getting used to.

So that is tip number one, to focus on listening and Pinyin for the first month or two.

Devote Time to Memorizing Characters

The study of Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, is a long term project. It will bring you in touch with the language and the culture of well over 20% of humanity and a major influence on world history. For this reason, I always recommend learning Chinese characters if you are going to learn the language.

Once you decide to study Chinese characters,  work at them every day. Devote half an hour to an hour a day just on learning characters. Use whatever method you want, but set aside dedicated character learning time every day. Why every day? Because you will forget the characters almost as quickly as you learn them, and therefore need to relearn them again and again.

You may want to use Anki or some other modern computer based learning system. I developed my own spaced repetition system. I had a set of 1,000 small cardboard flashcards with the most frequent 1000 characters. I had sheets of squared paper to practice writing these characters. I would pick up one card, and write the character 10 times down one column on the squared paper and then write the meaning or pronunciation a few columns over. Then I would pick up another flashcard and do the same. Soon I ran into the meaning or sound of the previous character that I had written there. I then wrote that character out again a few times, hopefully before I had completely forgotten it. I did this for the first 1000 characters. After that I was able to learn them by reading, discovering new characters,  and randomly writing them out by hand a few times.

As we progress, learning new characters becomes easier because so many elements repeat in the characters. The characters all have “radicals”, components which give a hint of the meaning of a character. There are also components of the characters which suggest the sound. These radicals are helpful to acquiring the characters, although not at first. As with so much in language learning, too much explanation upfront is a distraction to acquiring the language. I found that the efforts of teachers to explain these radicals and other components at the early stages of my learning were not to great avail. I didn’t understand them. Only after enough exposure did I start to notice the components and that sped up my learning of the characters.

Tip number two is to really put a constant and dedicated effort into learning characters.

Recognize Patterns Rather than Rules

Focus on patterns. Don’t get caught up in complicated grammar explanations, just focus on patterns. When I was studying we had a wonderful book by Harriet Mills and P.S. Ni. It was called Intermediate Reader in Modern Chinese. In every single lesson they introduced patterns and to me that’s how I sort of got a sense of how the language worked. The patterns were the frames around which I could build whatever I wanted to say.

I have absolutely no sense of Chinese grammar, or grammar terms, yet I am quite fluent. I have seen books that introduce special grammar terms for Chinese. I don’t think they are necessary. It is better to get used to the patterns that Chinese uses to express things that we express in English using English patterns. Chinese has a rather uncomplicated grammar, one of the pleasures of learning Chinese. There are no declensions, conjugations, genders, verb aspects, complicated tenses or other sources of confusion that are found in many European languages.

Tip number three is to focus on patterns, write them out, say them to yourself, use them when speaking or writing, and watch for them when you listen and read.

If you would like a free grammar resource to help supplement your learning, then I recommend LingQ’s Chinese grammar resource.

Good luck!

Enjoyed this post? Check out polyglot and LingQ cofounder Steve Kaufmann’s blog post for some tips on how to learn Chinese!