HOW I LEARNED CHINESE

hello the jaha in town was younger name offense sound what's immature Jam where was your enemy julianka should sing de was a german bourgeois made up to go watch a dolla I'm definitely not here claiming to be a Chinese expert or a native Chinese speaker thoroughly sure whether John Welsh champion joão Goulart sure be nice Youngjae thuds amateur perfect Chinese cannot be authentic it should be a ha ha ha the Irish azim Tracy John window ha Mayo secret formula Mayo tricks or secrets Stiga bush and age on sandy ashoka Joanne the shipping pushin a John would rather Tracy John was she good journey dadada journey tofu young la mayoría de Mayo puto a doc so he didn't yell was I'm getting my first song or the journey Oh Joe Schobert amateur John one yeah sure with a jungle Gousha my China story ok let's go my Chinese journey started in 2012 as little baby faced a me walked into the shining gates of the University of New South Wales I was there to study a business Commerce degree and I thought you know what learning Chinese is always gonna be a good thing so I took a Chinese major and along side my business degree I took Chinese classes at my university I had about three hours of contact class hours per week and let me just say full disclosure right off the bat three hours of Chinese per week is not enough to even get you close to learning Chinese but don't get me wrong having Chinese classes is a really great way of learning the basics the Foundation's learning the pinyin the characters the tones but don't expect to graduate from university with a few Chinese classes in your belt and feel like you're gonna know how to speak Chinese it's just not gonna work like that actually there are a lot of things that they taught us in our classes that I have never heard a Chinese person actually say the most obvious example one of the first things we're taught in Chinese classes is niihama which means how are you the fact is Chinese don't say that I have never heard anyone say that and if you wanted to ask a Chinese person how they are the best thing you could probably say is Nietzsche Lamar which is have you eaten yet you could even say and you to me um but even this is a little bit strange as a cultural thing I've noticed that Chinese people don't have this kind of small talk at the beginning of their conversations as us Westerners know it you know there's no hi how are you going good thanks how are you which really is just a way of greeting each other in China it's you know if there's got something to say they're just gonna launch into it and say it which I really respect it's just a different way of starting a conversation and you know saying me how much which Chinese person is just gonna leave you with puzzled looks on their end so just be aware of that but regardless of this I would recommend to anyone who's planning to start Chinese to begin doing so in a classroom environment and this is for several reasons the first reason is that with such a complex language like Chinese it's really important to get good foundations and be taught well early on I know there are a lot of language learning apps out there at the moment you know duolingo that type of thing I would really advise in the beginning if you're just starting out in Chinese don't use those kind of apps because you don't want to be making little mistakes early on and then find yourself three years down the track and trying to reverse the mistakes you're making in the beginning like use those apps by all means to complement your studies in a classroom environment I really just think the best way to go about starting to learn Chinese is to have a trained professional a good Chinese teacher to come in and just teach you the basics get you the good foundations and then really how you grow is up to you and my second reason for learning in a classroom environment is in order to learn Chinese characters so many people and friends have told me oh I'm gonna start learning Chinese but I want to learn it really quickly so I'm just gonna like not learn the characters and just try and like pick it up without the characters don't do this do not do this it may sound way easier to bypass these complicated squiggly things but trust me it's actually gonna be a lot easier for you to just put in the work in the beginning by even just knowing the most basic Chinese characters you're able to properly integrate yourself into Chinese society but seriously in this online world everything especially in China is happening online and in the Chinese apps everything is in Chinese so by understanding and reading a little bit of Chinese you'll be able to order your takeaway off the Chinese apps you'll be able to shop on tarball you'll be able to send your Chinese friends we chat messages it's so worthwhile I have quite a few foreign friends living in China who speak fluent Chinese but they never learned to read or write Chinese characters and they are always complaining about it and regretting it and telling everyone that they can reach that you should from the beginning be learning Chinese characters so after two years of university Chinese classes I had the opportunity to do a year abroad in Fudan University in Shanghai if you're thinking of going on exchange Fudan is like for me arriving in Shanghai was like an awakening from the moment I stepped foot in Shanghai I felt like a piece of me it was at home and I've traveled a lot and I've never felt such a click or an affinity for a country there was no culture shock for me whatsoever I fell right into step with life in Shanghai it was like I was always meant to be there but my language definitely needed some work I discovered that on my first day of being in Shanghai so I arrived in Shanghai I made some new friends of the students I'd be studying with we all go out to dinner together and I'm so impressed by their level of Chinese they're just blubbering on about things and I'm first feeling really intimidated and then once we get to the restaurant and aya was quite thirsty and I found myself in a really weird and kind of embarrassing situation and you had to say water I knew how to say waiter I knew how to say give me but for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to string together the sentence of waiter could you please bring me some water and you know I think the waiter came over and I was like God for Yin right one-game quiet and everyone you know all these new friends I just made looking at me like oh yeah if he just started Chinese and I was so embarrassed to actually have to look them in the eye and say no actually I've been learning for two years I realized I had quite some way to go but the environment of just being in China helped me so much and it wasn't long before my listening began to improve being surrounded by Chinese every day just listening to conversations at the beginning someone would be talking and I'd kind of lose myself translating in my head and figuring out what they're trying to say but time in the environment time in Shanghai allowed me to slowly make progress in my listening and even though I was at Fudan University to be studying business courses not actually studying Chinese I improved more in six months of being in Shanghai than I had done in the previous two years of me having you know weekly Chinese classes at university you can't underestimate the power of the environment and you know being in the country itself halfway into my exchange experience I had like two months off for the summer vacation and I decided to spend five weeks traveling China if you want to improve your Chinese I would strongly recommend to go traveling in China there's nothing to test your language skills more than the pressure of being late for your train needing to line up in this ticket line and having you know impatient Chinese behind you and trying to explain your situation with the ticket seller it's it's very overwhelming but it really puts your Chinese to the test also by traveling you have the opportunity of spending a lot of time with locals and you know you have no other option than to speak Chinese they don't know English so you use what you have and you learn very quickly not to feel awkward about not having perfect Chinese for me one of the things I struggled with most at the beginning of learning Chinese was feeling like I wasn't saying things perfectly and I would feel really awkward about it but after traveling in China you learn that just get your point across and it's okay one piece of advice I'd share is never feel awkward about your level of Chinese however far you are in your language journey is already incredible it's such a complex language and there's nothing to be embarrassed about by using a word wrong or using the wrong tone or you know it's already an incredible accomplishment so after I came back from my year abroad in Shanghai my Chinese was so much better than it had ever been before I was so proud of the progress I had made but I was also terrified that coming back to an english-speaking environment and not being surrounded with the the Chinese speaking everyday that I would lose all the progress that I had made so I came up with three really great ways of trying to put as much Chinese into my you know Australian day-to-day life as possible the first thing I did is I started listening to Chinese songs I would listen to them learn them by heart and sing them to myself usually in the shower to this day my sister can still remember and sing the song I was so obsessed with for like 30 months this is actual footage of us singing that's what digestion the second thing I did is I started watching Chinese TV shows every day I really think this is the best way to improve your Chinese once you've mastered you know a conversational level of Chinese speaking so what I would do is I would watch a TV show this one here this is one of my favorites for learning Chinese it's Baba China or dad where are we going you can find it on YouTube and it's such a great option for Chinese learners because this is a reality TV show about kids traveling with their dads so it's really not complicated Chinese because the dads are speaking to young children and it's also super entertaining and you also learn a lot about China by watching this show so this is how I would do it I would press play I would pause it every time someone says something I would read the subtitles and if there was any word in here that I didn't recognize I would look it up using pleco a really great dictionary app and watching Chinese TV shows is so great because you're practicing you're reading by reading the subtitles you're increasing your vocabulary you're increasing your listening you're learning how to speak in more colloquial ways you're learning some slang another way I used to practice my Chinese with TV shows is I would listen to them say something and then I would repeat it to practice my speaking you'd rather I need to do something clida ba ba I'll also write below in the description some other Chinese TV shows that I really like that have helped me improve so you can check that out so the third thing I did when in Australia to maintain my Chinese level and this is when I was at more of an advanced stage I thought it was time to do a bit more advanced reading the first book I read in Chinese was Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone I've read this book and Harry Potter series maybe 10 times in English so I know the story pretty back-to-front and I think this is the best way to introduce yourself to reading in Chinese or really any language is take a story that you're already really familiar with and then when you're reading it through you're not you're not guessing about where the story is going or what might be happening you know exactly what's happening and if you see a foreign character our sentence you don't understand it's okay just move on and understand what you can and take it really slow that book took me a year to finish but it's still to this day one of my biggest Chinese language accomplishments and I'm so proud of myself that I was able to read a full novel in Chinese so by that stage I had been learning for about four years my Chinese was okay I could communicate I could even read a little bit and it was time for me to push myself and apply to participate in the Chinese bridge competition and if you don't know about the Chinese bridge competition it's basically a competition run by the Confucius Institute which brings together Chinese language speakers from all around the world to participate in this Chinese TV show environment and battle it out to say who's Chinese is the best it was the most amazing environment for learning Chinese I've ever seen it brought together people from every country you can imagine all learning Chinese and it was the coolest feeling standing in a group of foreigners where the common language isn't English it's Chinese and you know you're speaking to a Zimbabwean or or or a German or a or a South African using Chinese to communicate it was the coolest thing ever and it was such a motivating environment saying all these amazing Chinese speakers and you know the Chinese speaker jealousy is real to this day when I hear someone with better Chinese than I do I'm like Oh what doesn't what I just want to be you I'm so jealous like how how did you do that but yeah in this environment it was just amplified like these people representing their countries the best of the best I think it was just a huge fluke that I got in and yeah I made it quite far out of 100 and something contestants I made to the final 15 I competed in these crazy challenges I sung in Chinese I I went into like the Chinese Big Brother house by that stage I was really feeling the pressure of the competition because I was by far the worst of the final 15 contestants and I'm not I'm not being modest here they were all fluent native level Chinese speakers and I was like a baby compared to them but it was a really great environment to push me and motivate me and you know I worked so hard and and it was after that experience that I decided yep China's for me I'm really gonna pursue a future there in some way and the following year as soon as I had graduated from my University with my business degree I took myself back to China using the scholarship that I had won as my prize in the Chinese bridge competition so my prize was basically choose any university that I wanted to go to China and study a year of intense Chinese language courses so I chose to my University in Beijing because I wanted you know a different City experience to the Shanghai one I had and also to moi is number one University in China so I thought it could be a really cool experience and yeah anyone who has the opportunity of doing an intense language course in China take it it was the first time I was able to spend a hundred percent of my time on Chinese before going to team hua Chinese was only ever really a side hobby or something I did after work or after I finished my assignments and it felt so good to just put everything into it and I improved so much because in the intensive language course as the name suggests it's intense it's five hours a day five days a week of Chinese classes and that's not including the self-study time you have to do after class which would probably be two to three hours if you put your mind to it and you're ready to study really hard and work hard for your Chinese you can learn so much in an intensive language course but the one big negative thing about intensive language courses in China is that all your friends are foreigners you're studying with them every day and it's only natural that you become really close with them so the problem with this is yes you may be spending five hours a day studying Chinese in class but as soon as you leave class you're only speaking English so it's really kind of a two step forward one step back raishin and i as hard as it is the best way to improve your chinese when doing an intense language course is to make some Chinese friends in my second semester I made it a big priority of mine to try and disassociate myself from the foreign crowd which was really a little bit awkward but instead try go out on my own and make some Chinese friends and I did and there to this day some of my closest friends in the world I've traveled across China with them and even after I finished my I live with them for a four-month period and that is where I learned Chinese I credit 50% of my Chinese to them I was living breathing eating Chinese every day for four months like it got to the stage where the only time I was speaking English was when I was facetiming my parents and it felt weird I even started dreaming in Chinese so one of one of these friends her name is Amelia she's one of my bestest friends in the world now and she's one of the most open-minded intellectual strong independent women I've really ever met and we would have some of the most intense conversations while drinking tea every morning and you know I would find myself halfway through a conversation talking about you know deep stuff like religion politics societal problems and kind of stop myself and be like wait I'm speaking in Chinese right now and that's where I realize how far I had come and throughout learning Chinese you never feel like you're making much progress but when you look back on it you're kind of like wow like how did I get here how am I suddenly talking about you know what is life with with a Chinese woman and it's really it's a amazing feeling so for me my Chinese language journey has definitely been more of a slow burn no sprinting here but not to say that you can't learn Chinese at a faster pace I know people that have been studying Chinese for two years that have already way surpassed me so as I said in the beginning there's no right way and there's no wrong way of studying Chinese but this is my way and this is my journey and I find myself eight years later suddenly able to speak Chinese but yeah I'd like to say to anyone who's considering learning Chinese it may sound really intimidating right now it's like just standing at the base of a mountain looking up at all the hard work to come but once you get into it and you start it I've never felt the struggle it's only been fun and enjoyable and life-changing and for anyone who is currently learning Chinese I know that you're currently having bad days like I had so many days where I couldn't even string a sentence together and to this day I have days where I'm like what the hell is going on why can't I find my words why do I feel so stupid and trust me you are going to have those days but then the next day you're gonna wake up and you'll find yourself having an amazing conversation and using words that you didn't even know you could remember just know that there is a light at the end of the tunnel and even though it doesn't feel like you're making progress you are so yeah good luck to you however you decide to go about learning Chinese I know you're gonna go great so one super quick last thing I'd like to share with you guys is that I have just started an Instagram account for blending in China I'm super super excited about it really not much there I have 0 followers and you could be my first one it's gonna be a place where I share all my China photos trying to content some really funny Chinese stories as I'm traveling and yeah I really appreciate the support yeah thank you guys so much I'll see you next time bye

Channel: Blondie in China

Views: 322,150

Rating: 4.9568238 out of 5

Keywords: china, learning chinese, mandarin, learning mandarin, how to learn chinese, living in china, study in china, study abroad, study abroad in china, china exchange, fudan university, fudan, tsinghua, tsinghua university, intensive language course, language hacks, learn language, polyglot, travel, china travel

Id: xQvY5Bz9fAM

Length: 20min 6sec (1206 seconds)

Published: Wed May 22 2019