The Right Attitude for Learning Chinese

For Beginners:

1. Well, just like learning any other language, it's a life-long task to master Chinese. So be patient.
(In fact for Chinese, once you have overcome the pronunciations, it wouldn't be that difficult at the very beginning.)

2. "Why do I learn Chinese?" This is probably the most stupid question ever. Of course there can be motives such as living in a Chinese-speaking country, doing business with Chinese...etc, but never set a limit for yourself.

3. Do set up clear and down-to-earth objectives for each stage of your studies, for example "being able to read 80% of the characters I learn in class", "being able to order food in a restaurant" or "being able to ask for directions on the street"...

4. You can never learn Chinese without leaning characters!! Either simplified or traditional. Trust me!! I'll have to write an article to explain why.

5. The Chinese accent spoken in every Chinese-speaking country is absolutely correct. There's no right or wrong learning a specific accent. British speakers and American English speakers are all speaking the language properly, right?

For Intermediate learners:

1. I know you are now questioning yourself "Why am I learning this fucking language!?" It's so true. You'd better quit before you get too involved.
Just kidding LOL...... This actually happens to any second language so don't be frustrated.

2. As your vocubalry bank enlarges, you had better come up with a plan to organize all these words. I recommend that you classify the vocabs by topics or themes. For example, words for entertainment, words for education, words for personalities...etc.

3. Do pay attention to the difference between spoken language and written language. For example, 方便(convenient) is more often used in daily conversation whereas 便利(convenient) is more of a written form. We cannot use them interchangeably.

3. Pay even more attention to tones than you did before as a beginner. I think you have already found that incorrect tones can really be a big barrier in conversations, either for natives or foreign learners. So don't be shy to ask your teacher to perfect your tone.

For advanced learners:

1. At this stage, your progress will be really slow. This is normal so don't be frustrated. The reason is that we can't really do drills--mechanical trainings that make you improve fast-- at this stage. So yes it is sometimes hard to measure how much you have improved.

2. So what do we do at this level? Instead of learning new words or grammar, I would recommend that you spend more time reviewing the language you have spoken for the past few years. Are there systematic mistakes? Are there grammar rules that I still don't fully understand? Are there words that I know but still cannot use them in my speech/writing?

3. Learn how to learn by yourself. There will always be a new vocab, but you won't always have a teacher. So pay attention to how your teacher solve the problems but not just the answers.

4. One way to learn new words faster: learn the characters. Most teachers don't encourage students to look up every single character in the dictionary at a beginner's level. However as an advanced learner it is your task to conclude what meaning each character carries from all the words you've learnt. This does help you to understand more vocabs simply by reading the characters.

5. Don't just look up for the translation when you learn a new word. Also pay attention to: a) whether it is positive or negative b) whether it's formal or colloquial c) whether it's only used in a certain country/area d) whether it's only used under a certain circumstance e) the other words that show up in the context. I will give more examples about this in another article.