Hsk Learning Chinese

[Donahue Granados]

A few summers ago I became addicted to the language-learning app Duolingo. I was a complete beginner in Chinese having spent the previous year attending a few scattered elementary classes and, like many people in my situation, was searching for a magic app that could transport me to fluency.

A friend who I met on a trip to China and whose Chinese was more advanced than mine told me he had been using an app that helped him build vocabulary and learn sentence structures. Out of curiosity I downloaded it and was soon hooked.

For the uninitiated, DuoLingo is an app that turns language learning into a simple and addictive game. The app lets you take courses that are split by topics, starting with basic introductions and progressing to more complex themes like business and travel.

I disagree that communicating in Chinese has much to do with learning rules and I disagree even more that encountering isolated, unnatural sentences that native speakers would never actually say is an effective way of acquiring grammar.

Alternative tools, such as graded readers are much more effective than DuoLingo at immersing learners in grammar patterns because they are designed to enable those with a small vocabulary to read extensively rather than translating one random, isolated sentence at a time. However wacky DuoLingo sentences might be, they will never be as compelling as good stories and meaningful articles on interesting topics.

Shortly after completing Duolingo, I discovered Mandarin Companion graded readers starting from as few as 150 words. The website LingQ also has a series of mini-stories aimed at beginners in Chinese. If I had known about these resources earlier I would have quit DuoLingo sooner. In the end, it was these tools combined with taking every opportunity to practice speaking the language, not DuoLingo, that transported me to fluency.

In one limited sense, DuoLingo has a valid claim to being useful; as an aid to vocabulary building in the initial stages of learning Chinese. Learners who know fewer than 150 words will struggle to read the simplest beginner books or articles and DuoLingo can help bridge the gap to meaningful content. Learning your first few dozen words in Chinese can feel like a slog and the app is at least as fun as your average textbook.

Wow, I really enjoyed the presentation of your article and I agree! I have been using Duo Lingo for several years and have experimented with all the languages they offer, but I have narrowed it down from 37 to just 17 languages to work on. I agree with you that a person should put more energy into language learning than just one program, regardless of which one it is. I am thrilled with Ninchanese and the link to it! I had never heard of it before so I really appreciate you sharing it.

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This list solely based on my own very limited experience and I am clearly not a professional educator of Chinese. Different people will learn in different ways and you need to tailor your Chinese learning according to what you want and what time/resources you have to invest in it. I would suggest trying out different things to see what works for you in your life and review this at different stages throughout the year. Hopefully there is something of use here if you are learning or thinking about learning Chinese.

I want to share my thinking process before going to learn Chinese. Then, once we land and the three months progress, I can see how well my predictions met reality and how different my original strategy differed from the one I eventually settled upon.

With most of my learning goals, I start with fairly elaborate plans, involving dozens of separate tactics and schedules. Then, after a few weeks, I usually settle on something that only uses one or two of those tactics. The plans are complex and intricate, the reality tends to be simple and pragmatic.

I can remember my original notes when planning for the MIT Challenge. I had planned out 12-hour studying schedules, along with dozens of separate tactics to learn the material. I wound up using closer to 8-hour daily schedules with tactics that boiled down to (1) reading textbooks/watching lectures, (2) doing practice problems, (3) doing Feynman techniques.

Right now, my Chinese is far weaker than my Spanish was prior to arriving in Spain. I can make some basic requests, and with a dictionary and a patient conversation partner, I can express simple ideas. In the ten hours of tutoring I did, only near the end was I reaching a point where I could speak entirely in Chinese, with Google translate, and be understood.

I typically divide new learning goals into two parts. The first is the schedule I want to use for learning. This is all time management and it is an incredibly important part of the learning process. Devoting insufficient time or making a schedule which is impossible to follow are recipes for disaster.

The schedule I want to use for Chinese is broken by roughly two big constraints, first, tutor availability and second, my social life in China. Both tutoring and social activities are helpful for the learning process, so making a schedule which sacrifices them in the name of getting another hour at a textbook is foolish.

My current plan is to spend six hours per day on deliberate study. I imagine roughly two hours per day for private tutoring, two hours for Anki spread throughout the day and another two hours studying grammar, vocabulary or using other methods to improve my weak points in Chinese.

MCC is a series of Anki decks I found quite helpful that fits into this category. Ostensibly designed to help you learn the basic few thousand characters, it actually helps a lot with speaking too. It has great audio samples, sentence samples to pick up grammatical patterns and listening exercises on top of the character recognition tasks.

My secondary hope is that the minimal exposure to the characters will also help with my ability to speak. Chinese characters often contain semantic connections (unlike the merely phonetic connections present in alphabetic languages) so the ideal amount of study of characters solely to maximize speaking ability is probably a bit more than zero.

If accent is a problem, I might spend an hour or so a day working on my pronunciation outside of class. Olle Linge has some good games you can play to work on your tone practice (and presumably could also be used to work on some difficult phoneme distinctions).

A simple method is simply listening to a recording of set phrases, hearing it, recording yourself repeating it, and listening to that recording. Pimsleur works on this principle, but skips the self-recording step. My sense is that if you separate out worrying about remembering words and grammar, and focus entirely on how to pronounce certain word combinations, you can train those habits of speech more effectively.

My grammar book was one of my best investments in Spanish. Although I generally consider studying grammar to be a low-value activity done in isolation, if you spend your entire day speaking the language its value goes up tremendously.

The problem is finding a good book. Most language learning books are bloated and horrible. They try to be all-in-one packages, instead of being specialized for a particular aspect of the language learning process.

Chinese characters can be broken down into radicals, which are more basic components that reappear in many different characters. Sometimes these components have semantic clues, such as indicating that a character is associated with water or women. Other times these components have phonological cues, indicating that a character has a similar sound to another, more basic, character.

One major difference between the MIT Challenge and my upcoming Chinese project is that I already have the experience of doing two previous languages with this method. That means most of my planning is trying to cope with the additional challenges that Chinese offers, not with the basics of learning a language at all.

I expect that, as with Spanish and Portuguese, the no-English rule will once again be the most important factor in my learning progress. Private tutoring sessions and regular interaction with real people will also form the bulk of the learning progress, with the above tactics and study simply making this process go more smoothly.

My expectation is that the degree to which I follow these steps with Chinese will be based a lot on how much difficulty we have with the local culture. If making friends and having genuine social interactions is difficult, the more self-study and paid tutoring have to shift to accommodate for it.

My biggest challenge ever was probably landing in China knowing two words in Chinese with even some doubt about their pronunciation. It was nihao (你好) which means hello and xiexie (谢谢) which means thank you, two words that have been useful so far.

After seven months here I realized that to truly understand Chinese culture better it is important to speak its language. My advice for all those who are interested in learning Chinese is to know that conversation is the key. Chinese people are quite talkative, they will be always ready to open any conversation with a foreigner: ask for directions, order food or even tell a joke. I encountered hundreds of funny anecdotes about misunderstandings and I became a storyteller. Leave your comfort zone and be ready to put yourself in potentially embarrassing situations. Adventure is out there.

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The course he took is one of the two most popular language courses for those wanting to learn. Through his research he discovered that TaiDa attracts more serious students while ShiDa, because of how famous the school is, attracts more students that are not as serious about language acquisition therefore can drag down the rest of the class.

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