3 Ways to Learn Chinese Better and Faster
Learning Chinese isn’t easy, or is it?
No matter how long you’ve studied Chinese, there are efficient and not so efficient ways of tackling the language. Since you are already on such a tough journey, why not take the path with the biggest pot of gold at the end?
Some things are much more important to focus on than others when learning Chinese for use in the real world. Why? Because they are help make learning Chinese faster and more efficient, at least in the long run. Let’s take a look:
3 Things you must focus on to get better in Chinese
- Tones
- Individual Characters
- Sentence Order
Let’s go through these one at a time:
1. Tones
Learning tones well is the key to speaking any dialect of Chinese, and Mandarin is no exception. Drill them into your head. When you are unsure or have temporarily forgotten of how to produce certain tones, practice until you have gotten them right again. Whenever you learn a new word or character, make sure you know the tones that go with it. Relentlessly learn the tones for all new Chinese words and all the tones for old words that you have forgotten.
It is easier for a Chinese learner to guess what you are saying than a Chinese person
To a beginner or even intermediate learner of Chinese, tones seem less important than they actually are. We figure, “if I get everything else right but the tones wrong, Chinese people will understand what I am saying”. If this is what you think, though, you are wrong. To the typical Chinese person, tones are a more fundamental part of language than non-tonal phonemic elements (sounds). Chinese people often understand each other perfectly well even when the non-tonal sounds are wrong but the tones are right. The opposite is not true. Making significant mistakes with tones totally throws off most Chinese people.
This is hard for a speaker of a non-tonal language to really understand. But it’s true. If you want to learn Chinese well, you must focus on tones - whether you are learning Mandarin, Cantonese, or any of the hundreds (thousands?) of ‘dialects’ (other languages) in China.
2. Individual Characters
Is it better for you to learn (including their multiple possible meanings and sometimes pronunciations) individual characters than vocabulary? While in the short run, learning words (most words in Chinese are of the two character variety) will speed up your Chinese learning, in the long run, knowing cold the 3000 or so most commonly used characters will allow you to learn new vocabulary at a much faster rate - and you can often guess the meaning of new words instead of looking them up in the dictionary when you already know the various meanings of the individual component characters.
This is something that I am not too good at - I rarely learn individual characters, preferring to learn words instead. Yet experience has shown that if you want to learn written Chinese well, focusing more on learning characters individually is the best way to go.
And to those who believe that it is more efficient to only study speaking and listening to improve your spoken Chinese - you are right, in the short run. In the long run your speaking ability will trail far behind those who started on the path of becoming literate in Chinese.
3. Sentence Order
The last thing to focus on when learning Chinese is the easiest to get right initially, but perhaps one of the hardest to keep straight in your head.
Unlike English (which, thanks largely to its many permutations and non-native speakers, can usually be understood no matter how badly one messes up sentence order & grammar), Chinese is a language where sentence order, just like tones, must be correct to be quickly and easily understood. The fact is, most speakers of Chinese are Chinese, and so they are used to hearing people who have spoken Chinese since they were little speak Chinese =) Two things that almost all Chinese people get right most of the time when speaking Chinese are tones and sentence order.
So when you mix up the sentence order (usually by putting time in the wrong place), Chinese people get confused. Try not to do this. Chinese grammar is quite simple overall. But it’s not very flexible, especially when it comes to sentence order.
What do you think?
Do you agree with the advice above? Disagree? Have anything to add? Please leave some advice in the comments below.
‘tones’ should be ‘Pinyin with Tones’
Hey Carter,
Though you need to learn the Pinyin + Tones to really learn Chinese, this isn’t the focus of the tones part of the article. Chinese people can understand other Chinese people (like mentioned above) even when they get the Pinyin sans Tones (the non-tonal phonemic parts of a word part) a little wrong.
Of course, if you are going to learn the correct tone, you are going to do it at the same time as learning the rest of the Pinyin.
Isn’t “sentence order” more like “word order?” To me this is one of the easiest aspects of learning Chinese–time always goes at the beginning of a clause, and, just like in English, most everything is a subject-verb-object construction(except for when you use the 把 or 将 constructions).
I agree completely with your opinion about tones, however. I don’t think people should put off learning tones. As a beginner they’re not essential (Chinese people will hear your bad Mandarin and expect your pronunciation to be off), but as you get more and more advanced the delivery of a correct tone is often essential for the meaning of a sentence.
I would also add that daily exposure to real Chinese is very important. Textbooks are good and all but nobody talks like that in real life. Watching an hour or two of Chinese TV everyday–whether you understand it or not, whether it’s damn awful or not–I think is a very good exercise. It helps you get adjusted to, at the very least, the sounds of idiomatic, natural Chinese, and also is a good form of vocabulary reinforcement–even if you don’t understand everything they say, there are always subtitles, and words will pop up that you’ve been studying in class.
Hi Kmm,
To be honest, what has held back my Chinese the most is not being willing to watch more than a token amount of Chinese TV / movies… if I completely replaced Lost and other series / movies from back home with Chinese TV, it would be a huge boost to Chinese learning overall.
But much of the time it is too painful to watch… There is some stuff that is OK, but most of Chinese TV is not fun to watch.
The best channels were the ones that used to filter over the border into Guangdong from Hong Kong… in Shanghai, though, these channels aren’t available, at least on the basic required cable TV service.
But one more plug for watching Chinese TV - if you don’t look Chinese people will never almost never speak to you like they naturally speak with others. Watching Chinese TV overcomes this problem.
Most everyone I know here says the same thing–that the shows are too awful to watch. I totally agree. Somehow I can keep watching them though. I think it’s just because when I watch them I turn on my brain’s study mode, which happens to be quite similar to its “endure long, dull, throbbing pain” mode.
You forgot the most important tip: Avoid English speaking people.
Let me put it in this way. The Chinese I learnt in my first year on my current company where I am the only foreigner and the Chinese level of my coworkers is, to be polite, “under construction” easily surpassess the previous 4 years I tried to learn Chinese surrounded by English speaking people (Chinese or not).
I like to listen to Mandarin-Cantonese movies with the subtitles off (I don’t listen really if I am reading) I am studying Cantonese and Mandarin at the same time. I do not understand any of what they are saying, which drives me back to the study material which I do understand. I become convinced that no one really talks like the study material, which drives me back to the movies I don’t understand.As frustrating as that sounds, I believe it is the only way to learn Chinese. My point being who would bother watching Chinese TV when you can watch some of the best movies ever made? Also, although I am not watching how the Chinese really are, I am watching what the Chinese think is cool, which is different from what Americans think of as cool. So I can infer a little of the culture from it.I don’t believe Chinese follows SVO order grammatically, even sentences which seem to follow that order can and should be interpreted according to a different framework. The framework which fits the Chinese sentences that do not fit that pattern and can explain why both types of sentences are equally idiomatic to the language.
@Marco - That’s a great point - if you can go to work for a company where you have to speak Chinese, and people are more comfortable speaking to you in Chinese than English, you will learn much faster.
@Stephen - Watching movies is a good way to learn any language, but there is the gap you need to cross to really get much out of the movies. But keep it up.
@kmm - we need to take Stephen’s advice and maybe watch the good Chinese movies over and over again =) Unfortunately, there is more to be learned by watching tons of shows and news =(
No matter how hard I try, I never quite get the pinyin and tones stuck in my head.
Its crazy difficult sometimes.
I think listening to Chinese music is a good way to learn the tones. Since the tones have to go along with the music, it’s a good way to figure out the differences on the tones. I’m just starting on studying Chinese and the word order is hard. I speak Russian as well, and that language doesn’t use much word order, so I’ve gotten used to saying thing SOV, SVO, OVS…
Hi Dan,
Studying Chinese music isn’t a bad way to go, don’t worry about the word order, it’s fairly easy once you get it down.
Does recognizing words in Chinese feel easy at first? Some of the characters make sense for some reason, once you know how it’s pronounced and what it means (very intuitive). And can you suggest anything for handwriting? I can write character with a lot of straight lines and squares (like ma3 and wen4) , but other, more open, curvy ones like wo3 just seem impossible. I’ve wasted so sheets of paper with just wo3.
Important thing to learn Chinese is speaking with right tone. Watching TV and listening to Chinese Radio or pop music are the good choice. Funny thing always makes me excited and aspire me to concentrate. I will not think about learning Chinese in boring textbook. I like to listen to Chinese song and use lyrics to remember Chinese character.
i just finished the first level 30 pimsleur lessons, but i think it isn’t good enough.
thanks for your advise, i thought so but i had to read many articles on the net to find a good opinion.
I think for chars you can learn the 3,000 most used chinese chars.
And there is a software “Tell me more - Chinese” it’s a full course, specially useful for the tones, it has a speech recognition system that shows you the “waveform” and “tone-waveform” of your recorded speech compared with a native one.
well ,so happy to see many people talking about chinese .the frist i need tell all the guys i’m from china .i think speak chinese is very easy becuse it not have many more grammar and any verb displacement i was learn french i think that’s really hard some times can make me crazy if you work at china i think only three month you can speak chinese and chinese also is hard why i said is hard ?cease if you want read or understand some chinese words that’s very difficulty all the words is different nothing connection even some word very like other word that also is different meaning .some people want to say we can use pinyin .all right that’s good but for words we never use pinyin to write that’s only for kids to learn it .so for words only rote to learn it .even your chinese very poor but if you can write some sentence without chars to your chinese friend maybe many place have mistake but we also can understand (i means use pinyin to write )so i think the best good way to learn chinese is find some china people we can talking by msn that will be very fast more than watch movice and song (personal idea)i think all the language is hard learn a language you never heard before that really difficult but the most important is interest.interest is a very good teacher if you in interested this language that will be very easy to learn it . hope evry one have fun in this language .
Reading this, and the follow up messages totally puts me off learning Chinese.
Especially the bit about the tones being important.
It is exasperating that their tones all sound the same, without finding out that this is actually very important.
Thank you for the post. I am contemplating how I want to attack this language. I found the commentary and the article itself helpful.
Although, I do have a question. Is it necessary to learn the character system, or is pinyin sufficient? Or is that moreso a question of whether or not one wishes to be able to read the language as it would normally be written?
Cheers,
BEB
Hi Brandon - If all you want to do is talk to people, pinyin will be sufficient. If you want to be able to do much more effectively, you’ll definitely need to learn characters - you won’t find pinyin (most of the time) at train stations, restaurants, etc, and you won’t be able to read anything without learning characters.
You are absolutely right, Chinese people can understand pretty much anything if the tones are correct. I have friends that speak Cantonese as their native language, so their mandarin is riddled with mispronunciation, especiall confusing the “n” and “l” sounds, but yet because their tones are right, they are always understood. As a mandarin learner, however, I mispronounce one tone, and the whole sentenced is missed by them! I would like to say that it’s not true that tones are not that important at the beginning…Tones and Pinyin are THE MOST IMPORTANT when you first start learning chinese! without those down pat, you will never be a fast learner, you will never be able to read pinyin and pronounce characters correctly without hearing them said outloud! Also, while listening to Chinese music is my favorite way to improve my vocabulary, it is NOT a good way to learn tones! Do you ever notice that Chinese music videos ALWAYS have subtitles? That’s because it’s impossible to understand songs without them, because you can’t sing with a melody, and use appropriate tones. So use songs wisely as a learning device. When you hear a new word, look it up and figure out its correct pronunciation. Also, while many Chinese dramas, especially Taiwanese, seem childish and the same story plot, there are many MANY good ones, that will help tremendously with Chinese language acquisition!
Does anyone have recommendations for a specific learning program, for instance like the Rosetta Stone? Also, any recommendations on a dictionary to use? And/or an electronic dictionary that says the word out loud? Thanks.