How I Made Chinese Easy

Mandarin Chinese is classed as one of the most difficult languages for us English speakers to learn it's right here at level five along with Arabic Cantonese Japanese and Korean now you go ask any language learning expert and they'll tell you the reason why all of these languages take at least three times longer to learn than say a level one language like Spanish and it's because they are very different from English and the moral language differs from your native language or a language you know very well the harder it is to learn but is it really that simple and does it really have to be this way well as a mandarin coach with 10 years of experience learning and teaching this language I figured out that yes there are things about Chinese that make it take a little bit longer to get the hang of but it certainly doesn't need to take three or four times longer and at no point does it have to feel hard in this video I'm going to share an amazing realization that I've had about how to make Chinese easy that took me literally 10 years to figure out so if you want to make this language easy and learn it relatively quickly you just need to follow the advice I'm going to lay out for you right now so let's start off with what specifically makes Chinese so much harder than other languages more similar to English number one of course is the tones now Mandarin tones do kind of freak us English speakers out at first tones make understanding and producing Chinese accurately very challenging for us in the beginning it's a little bit of a shock to the system but they don't pose nearly as much of a problem as those pesky characters on the Chinese writing system is probably the thing that increases the time to fluency the most out of everything on this list and here's why you see we have to learn at least a couple of thousand characters to be able to read well and ideally 3 000 of them if you want to be able to consume pretty much anything in the language now if you'd like to be able to say a few phrases and impress your non-chinese speaking family or have extremely basic conversations and that's about it then no need to bother with reading Chinese at all however if you want to achieve real fluency real proficiency improve your business and career prospects and not just impress your grandmother but actual native speakers as well they're learning to read is essential you'll learn why in more detail later on but unfortunately characters are very very hard to learn because number one rote learning is the go-to method it's where you write the characters over and over again until they're burned into your memory it's obviously mind-numbingly boring and Incredibly demotivating and it doesn't work really but with rote learning you know you put in so much time doing this boring activity only to constantly get that feeling of ah I've seen this character before I've written it a million times but I've forgotten what it means oh what's the tone again it's a bit of a nightmare now there's tons of methods out there for learning characters that are not rote learning but even most mnemonic systems I've seen don't work very well at all and they don't teach you the pronunciation as well so you kind of have to learn that separately which takes ages and traditional methods offer no way of actually efficiently reviewing what you learn and if you go through all of this pain and boredom to actually learn and remember 3000 characters really really well while graduating to compound words words made up of more than one character and then actually reading entire sentences and smoothly consuming the language it's a very daunting process and all this work and you haven't actually started to learn the language yet learning characters is a kind of little Marathon you have to do before starting the main Marathon so someone learning Spanish can pretty much start reading and consuming the language on day one after learning a few spelling rules but us Chinese Learners we have to learn those 3 000 characters just to start the race and then there's pronunciation of course so in terms of actually pronouncing the language accurately or similar to a native speaker Mandarin Chinese also has a set of sounds that do not exist in English at all and without great coaching they can be super tough to get the hang of too and Mandarin only also has around 400 or so different sounding syllables compared to the 10 000 Plus in English and only 1200 or so including the tone so this may means tons and tons of homophones or homonyms I can't remember which one means which so these are words that sound exactly the same but mean something entirely different such as the words red and red in English so just to illustrate this for you here's a very small collection of all of the very common words that all share the same sound depending on the tone so here's next grammar so Chinese word order is pretty darn different from English now of course I love you is what I need that's the same but when you get into more complex longer sentences everything all changes so instead of saying there is something in this little red box you would say this red little box inside has something they also use measure words that are specific to different objects with certain properties for example we don't just say this road we say this this specific measure word for road road we don't say a cat we say a measure word oh and by the way there's different measure words for different types of animals so toll is for a big animal we eat like a cow and P is a measure word specifically for horses so there are also words with grammatical functions that don't exist in English such as these guys so those are the main reasons why Chinese could be considered hard and I hope you stayed with me through that because now I'm going to reveal how to overcome all of these challenges and truly make Chinese easy you see over the years I've discovered that there really are three major factors that affect the difficulty of Chinese or any language really first and least important of all three is what I've just described the nature of the language itself the next factor is much more important and contributes far more to how hard or easy Chinese becomes for you so let's introduce the second factor with a quick story about me so when I first started learning Chinese I was just like the majority of Learners I had a profound misunderstanding about how to learn languages that was instilled in me during my school years and I spent my first year with Chinese going through tons of boring textbooks doing listen and repeat programs writing out Chinese characters over and over again trying and failing to memorize thousands of words and phrases studying grammar rules for literally months and after investing well over a thousand hours my listing comprehension sucked I couldn't read I'd forgotten most of the words I tried to learn and I couldn't have conversations deeper then basically my first year with Chinese was really hard then one day with the help of my friend study buddy and Mandarin blueprint co-founder Phil I learned that languages are primarily acquired by understanding messages that is getting comprehensible input in the form of written or spoken Chinese you can at least mostly understand basically you just read watch and listen to Chinese a lot then practice speaking a lot and that's pretty much how you become fluid you don't really need textbooks classrooms or even teachers in the traditional sense when I did finally learn this I began immediately listening to Chinese audio dialogues every day and watching simple content like cartoons and I felt rapid Improvement but I also knew I had to learn to read to be able to access more interesting content so I looked into smarter less soul-destroying ways of learning and remembering Chinese characters I stumbled upon this awesome technique that allowed me to read write and pronounce including the tone a hundred characters a day easily using the power of memory palaces and I also started using space to repetition software digital flash cards to efficiently remember everything I learned and you can watch this video for the full guide on how to use it for yourself if you like so with this discovery the hardest part about Chinese suddenly became genuinely easy and actually super fun I mastered over 3 000 characters in just a few months working an hour or two per day with an almost 100 retention rate and this by the way usually takes people years of boredom to achieve and they still forget what they learn anyway after that so on top of this learning Chinese characters started this beautiful chain reaction that made so many parts of the language so much easier after that Chinese was no longer this confusing mess of similar sounds these homonyms or homophones I realized that every single one of those shoes that I mentioned earlier had a distinct and Vivid visual squiggle associated with them and I developed a personal relationship with each and every one I then immediately began to see the beautifully obvious logic within the vast majority of Chinese compound words most of these compound words are as logical as the English word playground a Clarity that learning characters grants you immediate access to and as an unexpected bonus the hands and moving method this Memory Palace technique massively improved my tones as it involves mapping out each tone of each character to a specific location in my memory palaces awesome TV shows movies podcasts and books that were previously way out of my reach were suddenly accessible because I could read the subtitles transcripts and I could rapidly look up words on the fly in my dictionary I discovered all kinds of cool mnemonic techniques for learning words even faster and also began reviewing lots of example sentences along with audio in my flashcards and guess what this did well combined with the immersion that I was doing I started naturally improving my grammar all those weird confusing grammatical words in Chinese that don't exist in English suddenly became super obvious because I just seen them them in context so many times now I couldn't explain grammatically how they work at the time but I could certainly produce them in an example sentence I could use them to express myself in Chinese and I could understand them perfectly so instead of studying grammar rules which is really hard and boring I began acquiring grammar the natural way the same way I acquired my native language through Mass exposure which is relatively easy after reading and hearing Chinese sentences over and over again I naturally developed a feel for how to use the language the Chinese word order soon became second nature after enough input and daily shadowing and speaking practice how to use the tough grammatical words that don't exist in English like Bata and Le and the three does that usually cause so much confusion for Learners gradually became super obvious to me the measure words are also super easy to tackle too because there's only like 20 of them used in common speech and when you immerse every day they come up so often that you'll get used to them very quickly and if you can't remember member which measure word to use when just use the universal measure word and you'll be fine oh and you know those sounds in Mandarin that don't exist in English well it turns out that if you just Master Three Easy tongue positions you can pronounce them like a native without much issue and check out my full pronunciation guide right here if you like so I went from totally failing and about to quit Chinese to about B2 fluency and hsk 6 pass in less than a year Chinese went from a super hard language to genuinely easy and fun and it all came down to one thing my Approach so if I had never learned about comprehensible input that had the movie method mnemonics space repetition software I probably wouldn't be here talking to you right now I would have given up on Chinese long ago then told everyone how hard it was and that my friends is why your approach the efficiency Effectiveness and fun level of the methods and tools you use is far more of a factor in the difficulty of Chinese than the language itself how easy your hard Chinese is for you depends so much on this so much so that I predict that someone learning Spanish a relatively easy language for us English speakers might very well take longer and find it harder learning the traditional way through textbooks than someone learning Chinese the Mandarin blueprint way in the way I just describe and by the way if you would like access to the most efficient effective and fun approach for long-term success with Chinese you should definitely check out our courses particularly the Mandarin blueprint method this is a 9 000 lesson curriculum that takes you step by step from zero to near native Proficiency in Chinese teaching you over 3 000 characters and just under 12 000 words now you'll also get tons of example sentences dialogues and articles with studio quality male and female recorded audio everything you need to pass the hsk 9 if you want to and our data shows that you'll be able to get results better than any University degree can provide but three to five times faster and of course you'll never need to go to class or do homework or exams you watch our videos use our crazy effective memory techniques review our flash cards and gain rapid comprehension in Chinese and naturally find yourself able to understand and produce the language with ease so our courses in my humble and Incredibly biased opinion combined with the advice found in videos like this one provided without a doubt the best methods for learning Chinese easily but we're not done here let's take a look at this graph one more time as you can see there's still a missing piece here and it's a much larger piece that means there is still a third and believe it or not even bigger more important factor in how difficult or easy Chinese becomes for you this is really the number one decider of your success with Chinese or any language you learn in the future so to explain this I'll need to continue my story so Phil and I had these amazing breakthroughs with Chinese and decided to create our own curriculum we started Mandarin blueprint together and once I began growing my business I stopped being a single part-time English teacher in China without a care in the world I now had a mission and many important daily tasks taking up my time and then got married and I started a family and I became even busier and as a result I let my Chinese take a back seat to the rest of my life for several years and you know what I told myself I just didn't have time to learn Chinese anymore not if I wanted to succeed at being a husband a father and entrepreneur even though learning Chinese was the reason I became an entrepreneur in the first place but anyway I apparently didn't have time to exercise or eat well either because I stopped doing those too I also drank alcohol a bit too often and all of this combined to make me tired and burned out very easily now when I did put time into Chinese it was just Light reading I stopped consuming Chinese media doing speaking practice and I let my ability to express myself in Chinese atrophy along with you know my actual body I didn't push myself to speak much either because it really was the weakest area of my skill set and my ego stopped me from leaving my comfort zone my habits my mindset my physical health were at an all-time low and I just couldn't get as excited about learning Chinese as I used to during this time I just lost the spark for self-improvement basically as a result despite having without a doubt the best methods and tools for acquiring Chinese quickly and easily the psychological and emotional obstacles I created for myself May made Chinese officially hard again that's the last time I'm doing those air quotes I promise I think you see where this is going right the final most important factor in language difficulty and often overlooked factor that plays the most significant role in how much you suffer or how much you enjoy getting to fluency is you well and me uh you know us Chinese was so difficult for me at first because of the methods available but my situation with them was pretty easy you know I had a few responsibilities lots of motivation to learn this language because of the constant discoveries and breakthroughs I was having but once the breakthroughs slowed down and life itself became more challenging well I lost motivation and I didn't have the discipline to keep myself going without that motivation after waking up to this I put myself through a long period of rather painful growth and eventually improved in a few very important areas number one I learned how to build and maintain good habits and developed a balance between Family Health work and study I either dropped or massively cut down on bad habits despite being busy than ever I also managed to set aside at least an hour a day to actively immerse myself in Chinese media which I still keep up with right now speaking of Chinese media well that's another issue you sort of discover later on with learning Chinese which is the media itself the TV shows the movies Etc the quality of them are a little bit lower or quite a bit lower than you would find in say the west and that's largely due to the censorship of the Chinese government but as I came across this problem I just said oh Chinese TV Chinese movies are all rubbish I'm just gonna not bother watching them anymore and I use that as an excuse not to immerse but then later on I decided no I'm gonna stop lamenting that I'll never find a Chinese show as good as say Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones or Yellowstone and I'm going to start exploring a bit more and I got a bit creative and I found podcasts and YouTube videos talking about western movies Chinese TV shows and movies I found that were good I watched repeatedly obsessively and I relied on Chinese for more education than entertainment so for example if I wanted to improve my personal relationships or business I would find a translation of the western self-help book or just Chinese YouTube videos on the subject finally most importantly I dropped my go and I stopped taking myself so seriously stopped worrying so much about making mistakes and I pushed myself to get out of my comfort zone when it came to speaking so because of all of those changes that I made I now see consistent incremental improvements in my Chinese with minimal effort almost all negative emotions associated with learn the language are gone and I'm enjoying the journey every single day Chinese is easy again and if you would like Chinese to be easy for you too here is my humble suggestion try and see the difficulty of Chinese or any language really like this graph know that the language itself contributes the least to the overall difficulty languages with more complex grammar such as Russian or alien writing systems such as Chinese and Japanese will take longer but how much longer and how long and hard you perceive the journey to be depends on how effective efficient and fun your approach is and most of all you you are by far the most significant factor of all so with this in mind here's what I would do if I were to start learning Chinese from the beginning first follow the advice I've given you today about the best methods for Chinese seriously try our courses they work then how much pain and struggle between now and the version of you that's fluent in Mandarin is the following your habits will you set aside 30 to 60 minutes or more a day consistently no matter what your mindset will you maintain a positive playful and exploratory perspective on language learning at least most of the time your health will you eat sleep and exercise well so you can learn more effectively your belief will you keep working on Chinese and Trust in the acquisition process even when the results are not immediately apparent day by day your knowledge will you continue discovering new resources methods and tools for improved language acquisition your patience will you live in the moment enjoy the journey and not obsess over reaching illusory and ultimately insignificant milestones and finally your ego will you laugh at yourself when you make mistakes stay humble and curious leave your comfort zone and push through the inevitable period of sucking at this language once you say yes to just some of these questions Chinese will become so much easier for you I promise if you say yes to all of them well this might just be one of the most enjoyable and life-changing Endeavors you ever Embark upon and I hope that was very useful for you don't forget to like And subscribe and also if you would like my in-depth detailed guide on making Chinese an integral part of your life through building great habits then check out this video right here

Channel: Mandarin Blueprint

Views: 87,016

Keywords: How to learn Chinese, How to Learn Mandarin, How to Learn Chinese Language, Chinese Video Lesson, Chinese online course, chinese course, learn chinese fast, learn mandarin, lean chinese online, online chinese learning, learn language, learn a new language

Id: dDK4aC7U3xI

Length: 20min 20sec (1220 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 23 2023