HSK 5 Exam Taken on December 1, 2019:
People ask me how I taught myself Chinese. Here’s what I tried. Maybe it works for you, maybe not. We all learn differently. Just find that motivation deep within that keeps fueling you to learn more and optimize strategies and environments that amplify the feeling. When you get into that learning flow, it’s truly exhilarating.
I was motivated to learn Chinese, because:
Great APPs for getting started:
Spend a week just wrapping your mind around all the sounds (pinyin). It feels daunting before you do it, but there aren’t actually that many (only 23 initials and 24 finals). Once you internalize the sounds, you will start hearing them everywhere. (Hello Chinese is a great app for this).
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HelloChinese like Duolingo will take you through how to navigate most situations (taxi, restaurant, chit chat, etc.) in an engaging way. Study a bit on the app everyday. I tried to finish it in a month but dragged it out to 3 months, because I didn’t have a good plan for how to continue learning after I finished. By the time you finish the app’s curriculum, you’ll be conversational in Chinese.
HelloTalk is really good for this. Also adding people in WeChat that can’t speak English and having small conversations with them is super helpful. You’ll get a sense for different personalities of people that help you learn most easily. Their character and warmth ooze from how they text.
I began writing my story in short Chinese sentences in response to these common questions that taxi drivers would always ask without fail:
I got a friend to help me correct my responses. Then I would record myself speaking from the transcript. Then I listened to the recording, and repeated after each sentence into a new recording. I did this until I could recite every response without needing to listen to the recording. When anyone, throughout the day, would ask me those questions, I would be prepared and could easily reply seemingly off the cuff. They would be impressed, and I would feel cool (which definitely helped with staying motivated to learn more). They would think I knew Chinese and then ask other questions, and then I would stare blankly and nod my head yes. I’d ask them to teach me the new question they asked, and expand my transcript responses later that evening.
Taxi drivers are hard to understand. In Beijing, the taxi drivers come from all different parts of China, and they all have different accents based on their home province’s dialects. Some drivers are impatient, but most are lovely warm people that always ask the same questions. Its a very fulfilling set of challenges to finally understand what they are asking and then begin conversing with them. The difficulty grows like this:
My favorite TV show when I just started learning Chinese was 非正式会谈, because it’s a bunch of foreigners talking in Chinese and was really inspiring that someday I could get that good too. Watching the show in Chinese with only Chinese subtitles was overwhelming at first. The subtitles change so fast before I could even finish reading them. At this stage I wasn’t trying to understand everything they were saying, but instead just try to connect the sounds to the characters. When I’d see the characters elsewhere, I would have an intuition for what they sounded like, and then start gaining meaning from where I see them. I really tried to mimic a baby in their environment and immerse myself in that feeling for as long as I could everyday. Slowly, after watching one hour per day for two weeks or so, you can start to read the whole sentence of subtitles before it changes. Then slowly you can start to get more and more individual characters meanings and slowly understand what they are saying. It’s super fun and empowering. You can feel yourself growing and learning. It’s just so cool.