Thank you to LearnMandarinNow.com for permission to repost their infographic!

The post Learning Chinese in China appeared first on Sensible Chinese.

The Basics

• Learn Mandarin Now is a free learning Chinese podcast available on this website and also via iTunes.
• At the time of writing there are 120+ episodes available on the website. Each episode is ~8-10 minutes.
• All podcast episodes are downloadable and come with Chinese/English transcripts and vocab lists.
• Each podcast follows a similar format: vocabulary introduction, dialogue and then step-by-step explanation of the language used in the dialogue.

Free Podcast

Probably the most important thing to mention upfront is that Learn Mandarin Now is totally free. A lot of other podcast shows have free tasters and then paid extended lessons or payment for other learning resources like the PDF scripts.

Learn Mandarin Now however is all free – the audio, text transcripts and download files are all available without cost and even without registering. Pretty cool, especially considering the quality of the material.

Structure of the Learn Mandarin Podcast

The basic structure of each 8-10 minute episode is: vocabulary introduction, dialogue and then a step-by-step explanation of the language used in the dialogue. This is fairly standard and you’ll hear this format in most foreign language podcasts.

The obvious comparison in Mandarin Chinese learning needs to be with Chinese Pod, one of the largest and most popular providers of Chinese audio podcasts at the moment. Chinese Pod follows a similar format (vocab, dialogue, explanation) and has a much larger library than Learn Mandarin Now but of course it isn’t free. Chinese Pod’s basic package starts at $14/month which isn’t cheap.

Learn Mandarin Now‘s podcast series (currently ~120+ and growing every week) is also more tuned towards beginners than Chinese Pod. This also makes sense as the vast majority of Chinese learners are in the early stages of study and as such there’s a lot more demand for beginners to low-intermediate material.

The best recommendation I can make if you are at an early level in learning Chinese is to use a free resource like Learn Mandarin Now to get started with (and, with 110+ episodes, a good distance into) Chinese listening comprehension. It’s a quality, free resource that is perfect for beginners to cut their teeth on.

After exhausting that content (perhaps after a year of study, depending on how fast you progress) then you should start looking at Chinesepod’s intermediate series and above to continue your study.

Style and presentation of the Learn Mandarin Now podcast

The presentation format of the Learn Mandarin Now podcast is very much educational: “here’s the information, here’s how to use the information”. Over each episode this strict adherence to education first, entertainment second remains in place.

Whether this is a good or bad thing totally depends on your learning style.

Again, let’s come back to the Chinese Pod comparison. Chinese Pod podcasts (especially the early beginner lessons) tend to have a lot more “banter”. There are normally two or more presenters in a Chinese Pod podcast, compared to the single presenter you’ll hear in Learn Mandarin Now.

Using multiple presenters means that you’ll often hear discussions and general chat on Chinese Pod podcasts. This can be entertaining, often educational, but at times the presenters get off topic and there’s very little language learning value to the digressions. This is especially the case in the beginner’s podcasts as the presenters speak in English! This means that for each 10 minutes of listening you may only be hearing a minute or two of Chinese. Considering the purpose of listening to Chinese podcasts is to expose yourself to more Chinese this is not ideal!

Learn Mandarin Now has one presenter (Song), who is a Chinese native speaker (from Beijing). Stripped of another host Song sticks to the script, focusing on the educational core of the podcast.

Again, whether you find the Chinesepod “banter” approach or the Learn Mandarin Now’s “school-room” approach is totally dependent on your personal preferences and learning styles.

There’s a similar contrast in the two main audio learning programmes out there: Pimsleur and Michel Thomas. Pimsleur’s programmes focus entirely on the foreign language, using as little English as possible. They are quite dry but their teaching potential is great. Michel Thomas’ audio programmes on the other hand are like a virtual classroom where there are a number of “students” on the audio recording learning alongside you. There’s a lot more digression,  mis-stepping and off-topic conversation, mainly in English.

Again, both methods work if you stick to them. The main thing is consistency. The absolute merits of the educational vs. entertaining approaches doesn’t matter if you don’t stick to a consistent habit of using the material. Therefore the best approach is to download and listen to a bunch of Learn Mandarin Now podcasts and a bunch of free Chinese Pod lessons and see which you prefer.

How best to use audio podcasts

Audio podcasts are a vital resource for getting used to the sound of Chinese and tuning your ear. Beyond this early level you can use extensive listening through podcasts to increase your listening comprehension, making you much more capable of carrying out conversations.

Initially (beginner level) listening is all about tuning your ear. At this stage I’d recommend listening and focusing on replicating the sounds, not worrying overly much about the complete meaning of sentences. The Learn Mandarin Now podcasts start right at the beginning with 你好 and the basics. First listen and focus on the sounds and repeating back what you hear. Then use the scripts on the website to read along as you listen. This will help you to couple together the sounds of Chinese and the letters than represent the sounds in the pinyin romanization system .

You can find out a lot more about using listening to get started in Chinese in my First Week in Chinese course (which is available as a free bonus with my Chinese Character Course).

Beyond the early beginner level audio podcasts are best for building your listening comprehension. At this point it’s about listening to a lot of Chinese at levels slightly above your current comfort level. By always focusing on material that is slightly above your current level you’ll always be learning but, importantly, not frustrated by difficulty.

Learn Mandarin Now is good in this respect because i) most of the episodes remain in Chinese rather than conversations in English and ii) the existing episodes are structured more like a traditional course, moving from one topic to another and steadily building in difficulty.

Action Plan for Listening Practice

1. Early beginners: Check out the full podcast archive at Learn Mandarin Now and use the early lessons to begin “tuning your ear” and building a basic base in Chinese. Supplement this with the free lessons at Chinesepod if you like the style.
2. Moving forward: Push through the complete 110+ lessons at Learn Mandarin Now  and/or supplement with Chinese Pod’s basic (paid) lessons.
3. Intermediate:This is where Chinese Pod’s content starts to shine because the podcasts become 100% Chinese. This is the ideal entry point for the content because it maximizes the amount of Chinese you hear in each listening session.
4. Beyond: Native language material from Youku / Youtube. Also check out 懒人听书 (Lazy Person’s Audio Books) for free Chinese audio books and radio shows. Start with kids shows if required and go from there depending on your interests.

The post Learn Mandarin Now Podcast Review appeared first on Sensible Chinese.

I want to speak to you about the best way to learn how to speak Chinese.

Here’s the big secret, the thing that holds people back from learning a foreign language: To learn to speak Chinese you need to speak Chinese.

Huh? That sounds obvious right? It is. Very obvious. But despite this so many people fail to do so!

Instead we spend time going to group classes, listening to teachers, watching youtube videos, listening to podcasts, learning vocabulary, writing characters out by hand over and over again or playing around with Chinese language learning games on our phones.

All of this stuff feels really productive. We are doing language learning activities – so we assume that eventually we’ll be able to speak Chinese.

What you have to realize is that learning to speak a language is a skill, not a subject. 

We tend to think of language learning as a subject – something that we learn at school. We have classes with the name Chinese, we have a Chinese learning section at the nearby bookstore, we have textbooks, we have examinations. All of this is school related – all of this is Chinese as a school subject. 

This is not the same as using the language as a skill. You can study about Chinese all you like – you can memorize vocabulary, learn grammatical patterns, master the character’s forms but unless you actually start using and practicing the skill of communication then all of this is just useless information. All your vocabulary just becomes a set of facts, all your grammar just a set of rules.

It’s only through practicing the skill of speaking Chinese that you can actually get better at the skill of speaking Chinese. Again, it sounds super simple but despite this we waste so much time studying the language rather than practicing. So how can you start practicing the language as a skill?

Easy – start speaking as soon as possible, as much as possible.

Don’t wait until you are ready. there’s no point when you are ready. Your teacher or textbook or phone app isn’t going to say “OK now you have studied enough Chinese to start speaking to a Chinese person in Chinese”. There’s no set point or benchmark.

Your first conversation or usage of Chinese is always going to be bad. Of course it is – you’ve never tried speaking Chinese before! You will make mistakes, you will be misunderstood. And that’s fine! In fact it’s great – you need to make mistakes so that you can learn. If you never make a mistake you can never learn – learning is by definition the process of making a mistake, receiving feedback and making that mistake less in the future.

Without mistakes there is no progress.

In fact the longer you wait to be “ready” the more of a shock your first conversation will be.

Imagine two people learning to speak Chinese. The first student, on her very first day, using the tools I’ll show you in a second, has a conversation in Chinese. It’s rubbish. Her tones are bad, her pronunciation awful and she has no idea what is said back to her. It doesn’t matter! shes’s taken a super important first step and had her first interaction in Chinese. Job done.

The second student has been studying Chinese for a year. Maybe more. He’s sat in every class, done every piece of homework, learned his vocabulary lists, done lots of flashcards and maybe even an exam or two. Now he feels ready to start speaking! Guess what, his first conversation is also rubbish!

All that school learning goes out the window and his first stuttering sentences are almost as bad as our other student who just started speaking today. His confidence is shot. He decides that Chinese is just too hard – even after a year he can’t have a conversation. He gives up.

This happens so much. People wait until they are “ready”, have a bad first conversation, get dispirited, lose confidence and give up. They think they aren’t good at languages. If you ever studied French in high school you’ll know the feeling – you study for years and years and years, get good grades and then can’t order a croissant and a coffee when you eventually speak to a French person in real.

This is so infuriating and the reason why so many people throw their hands up and declare that they just aren’t good at languages!

When is the best time to start speaking then? As soon as possible. If you haven’t started some form of regular Chinese speaking practice then the best answer is: today. Start today.

OK- how to actually do this? Thankfully nowadays getting Chinese speaking practice is super easy. Previously you could hide behind excuses like “I don’t live in China” or “there aren’t any Chinese speakers in my area” or “I only have class once a week and we don’t do much speaking”.

These excuses won’t cut it any more. With the internet you have, literally at your fingertips, access to millions of Chinese speakers. Chinese speakers who, luckily for you, want to learn to speak English (or French, German, Spanish or whatever your mother tongue is).

The trick now is finding the method of communicating with the least friction, the least barriers. The more difficult the method the more excuses you’ll have to not practice.

At the moment the best tool I can recommend is HelloTalk. It’s a free app for iPhone and android. Free to download, free to sign up, free to use. You can quickly find thousands of Chinese speakers who want to talk to you using the app. Most importantly though you can speak to them directly using your phone. You simply hold down a button, record a message, let go of the button to stop recording and then tap send. It’s like text messaging but with audio recordings and it’s an amazing way to get started just saying “Hello” and starting to use your Chinese.

After that you can check out something like iTalki which is better for setting up more formal, longer talks via Skype but HelloTalk is the perfect tool to just get started today.

By the way I have no financial or any relationship with HelloTalk, just think it ‘s a great tool and that more people should know about it.

Whatever you do, don’t go away from this video thinking “sounds like a good idea, I’ll start speaking Chinese tomorrow”.

Go and do it now, even if it’s a tiny tiny interaction. Far better to make a tiny step forward than plan, and never achieve, a giant leap.

Here are some additional useful resources to get you started:

Step by step guide to getting started speaking Chinese

Free eBook about finding a speaking partner and maintaining a routine speaking practice

First Week in Chinese Video Course to guide you through the early period of speaking Chinese

The post How to Speak Chinese – Video Blog appeared first on Sensible Chinese.

How to Write in Chinese

Hi, 你好

My name is Kyle and I run sensiblechinese.com, a blog for helping you learn Chinese more efficiently.  In the above video I talk to you about how to write in Chinese. The article and the video are the same to better suit those who prefer to read and those who prefer to listen.

Are you struggling with Chinese characters? I want to talk to you about why this is and what you can do about it.

Chances are the methods you are using to learn are old fashioned and holding you back.

The first weeks or even months of Chinese are BRUTAL – there’s a lot to deal with all at the same time.

First up you have pronunciation. Sh-, s-, c- for example. Then we overlay tones mā má mǎ mà. At first all sounds so strange, so unfamiliar.

Even your first nǐhǎo is a pain. Two third tones with a tone change just to say “hello”! Learning characters on top of this is a nightmare.

But this is the normal procedure: to drop you straight in the deep end with pronunciation, tones and characters. Sink or swim!

Normally you have two options here:

1. Bull your way through to the other side through sheer willpower. If you have a good enough reason or maybe you are stuck in a 4 year programme, you’ll get through.

2. Or you can give up – follow the majority of learners who get overwhelmed and quit. These people join the ranks of those who say that Chinese is “too hard”.

I see this so much and it annoys me. It’s not the learner’s fault but instead because of the old fashioned methods used to teach Chinese in general and the characters in particular.

If you’ve ever had to write out a Chinese character 100 times from a vocab list you know what I mean. It’s old fashioned, inefficient – no wonder people quit!

So these two routes seem pretty hopeless. Stubbornly fight through using every ounce of your willpower or give up.

Here’s a third way. A more sensible way.

First of all forgot about the characters for now. Focus on spoken communicative Chinese and get a grip on pronunciation and tones before overlaying the additional layer of characters. There’s plenty of time to learn characters so don’t worry about delaying a few weeks.

When you do get to the characters though take your time to understand them; how they are constructed, the different types, the logic of characters and how characters are grouped together to make up words.

Then take this knowledge and apply it systematically. Most importantly there are three levels of written Chinese we need to know about: the components, characters and words.

Once you grasp these levels and how they interact the internal logic of Chinese begins to reveal itself.

Did you know for example that around 90-95% of Chinese characters have hints buried in them about not only what the character means but about how to pronounce it.

It’s called a “sound-meaning character” and the vast majority of Chinese characters have these clues. Here you can find   ~30 mins of  free video lessons with me talking about these sound-meaning characters

It’s not enough just to know about the characters though. We can take this knowledge and systematically apply it to speed up how fast we learn the characters.

There are a huge number of techniques out there that are much more efficient than rote memorization and paper flashcards.

Personally when I encounter a new character I do the following:

1. break it down into its components.
2. use the components to create a memory device. This memory device helps me recall the meaning, the pronunciation and the tone.
3. I feed my new characters into a spaced repetition system (SRS). A SRS is like flashcards on steroids – you are shown the flashcard at just the right time before you forget it, this memory bump at just the right time is the most efficient way to shift information from your short term to your long term memory.
4. I use SRS to review characters, trying to recall their meaning, pronunciation and tones using my mnemonics. If I can’t remember I relearn – this means creating a new mnemonic not just hoping to remember it next time!
5. every week I remove a certain number of words and characters from my SRS system – content that I am comfortable with – write example sentences, get them checked on Lang-8 and then use them in communication with real Chinese speakers on iTalki and/or HelloTalk, a great new app for language exchange.
6. any new content from this usage stage loops back to the top of my system. I break down new content, create mnemonics, use SRS and the use new content in speaking practice.

This learning loop is what I now call the Sensible Chinese Character System. It’s taken me years of trial and error to nail the system down and even longer to work out how best to help other people implement the system .

When I was learning the characters I used this method to learn 75-100 new characters per day with 90% retention 7 days later.

You can find out more in this blog article: Brief Introduction to the Sensible Chinese Character System or check out my ~7 hour step by step video course teaching all the knowledge you need and how to set up your own character learning system.

The post How to Write in Chinese – Video Blog appeared first on Sensible Chinese.

In this long article I’m going to go through a step-by-step method for how to most efficiently learning how to write in Chinese.

It’s a long article so I recommend you bookmark (Ctrl+D or Command+D on a Mac) and come back to it as a reference as your Chinese progresses.

This article will follow the basic outline of my Sensible Chinese Character Course. This video course goes into a lot more depth (~7 hours of videos!) and is worth checking out if you find this approach useful.

This article is split into three main sections:

1. Before learning Chinese characters.
2. Knowledge about the Chinese characters.
3. A systematic method for learning the Chinese characters.

Also, this article is relevant to both Simplified and Traditional characters but I’ll be using Simplified characters as that is what around 80% of learners (and 90% of my readers) use. This article is relevant to Mandarin Chinese only because I don’t speak Cantonese and don’t know enough about it. Sorry!

Let’s jump in.

How to Write in Chinese Phase 1: Before Learning Chinese Characters – The Preliminaries

First up, depending on where you are in your Chinese journey you may be OK to wait a while before learning Chinese characters.

This is controversial but hear me out.

The first couple of weeks (or even months) of Chinese are hard.

Most of Chinese’s reputation for being a “hard language” comes from this difficulty spike right at the beginning of the process.

On Day 1 of learning Chinese you’ll be hit with nǐhǎo 你好, “hello”.

To be able to say hello in Chinese you need to:

• Get a grip on pinyin pronunciation and the fact that it’s sometimes similar to English but largely not
• Learn about the tones, in particular the slippery 3rd tone, a tone that isn’t actually falling-rising despite it being taught this way
• Find out about tone changes – in this case the fact that the 3rd tone in nǐ is going to be pronounced as a second tone ní (even though we don’t write the pinyin that way)
• Get over the initial hurdle of characters. Most likely your textbook will have the characters alongside the pinyin to help you “get used to” the characters. More often than not this will scare the heck out of you, especially if you flick to the back of the text book and see a “Great Wall of Chinese”.

A Great Wall of Chinese. “Cool, cool, I’ve got this…one at a time…Argh!” Source: Wikipedia

The first few weeks of Chinese are tough.

You basically have two options here:

1. Stick it out and stubbornly fight through the first few weeks and hope that after that everything will start to “make sense”. If you have a really good reason for learning Chinese or perhaps are stuck in a 4 year programme then you have a better chance of sticking it out and reaching this “got it” point. If not then you’ll have to rely on sheer stubbornness and an unwillingness to give up.
2. Give up. Throw your hands in the air (and the textbook maybe!) and declare that Chinese is just “too darn tough”. This is sadly what a lot of people learning Chinese do. They hit the wall of difficulty early on, get discouraged and give up. To save face they’ll likely go and tell other people that Chinese is “too hard” and that no-one can really learn it. Nonsense!

Granted, the first couple of weeks of Chinese can be rough. However, once you get over this difficulty hump and start to understand a bit more about how Chinese works – a bit more about the logic of Chinese – then the language becomes very approachable. At this point you can start worrying about how to write in Chinese.

I’ve learned a bunch of different European languages and the opposite is true with these languages. In European languages starting out is often relatively smooth sailing. You can take advantage of similar sounds, similar alphabets and words that are basically the same across multiple languages (like “hotel”).

With European languages though this easy start gets more rocky when you need to start memorizing verb forms, learning conjugations, cases and other more grammatical concepts. In European languages you’ll often hear of a difficulty hump at the intermediate stage.

Chinese is just different in where the difficulty is encountered. It’s front-loaded. “OK, day 1, here you go! All the tricky parts of the language at the same time!”

Get past this initial difficulty hump though and Chinese become’s way easier. Tenses? Plurals? Case endings? Conjugations? Please. Word construction and vocabulary acquisition. A cinch.

But we still need to get past the tricky first stages.

The best way to do this is to hold off on the Chinese characters and focus on getting a solid foundation in spoken Chinese first.

What’s the best way to learn a new skill? It’s to break the skill into a set of sub-skills and work on mastering each of the pieces individually first.

We can do this in Chinese by tackling one thing at a time rather than trying to master pronunciation, tones and characters from the very start. It’s too much to deal with and your progress will be agonizingly slow. Instead of worrying immediately about how to write in Chinese I recommend you take a more step by step approach.

My concrete recommendations are:

1. Nail down pinyin pronunciation. I’ve got a complete, free (no need for email signup or anything fancy like that) Pinyin course here: Sensible Chinese Pinyin Course. That plus a pinyin app on your phone and you’ll have a solid grip on pinyin in a couple of days.
2. Learn the tones. Now that you’ve got a grip on pronunciation we can overlay pronunciation with tones to start making actual words. Horray! Trying to overlay tones onto sounds we can’t even pronounce yet is asking for trouble. So pronunciation (pinyin) and then tones. Simple.
   1. First up learn a little about the tones. This blog post goes through tones in a lot of detail.
   2. Grab an app like Laokang’s tone trainer or Written Chinese’s Tone Trainer to start getting used to the sounds and being able to hear the differences.
   3. As soon as possible start practicing “tone pairs”. Chinese words are almost always two-characters long (more on this later) and so learning to discern tones in pairs helps with understanding of natural language. Learning tones in isolation (one at a time) is a big mistake. Here’s a blog article I’ve written about tone pairs and why they are amazing.
3. Start talking! Ideally you start speaking on Day 1 of your Chinese journey. The reason for this is that we need feedback if we ever want to learn from our mistakes. How else can you know if you’ve messed up the pronunciation or tone unless you have a Chinese speaker to correct your errors!
   1. Use HelloTalk for free and really easy language exchange on your phone.
   2. Use iTalki for more structured classes or to find a tutor. I talk at length (surprise!) about the different types of language partners (teachers, tutors and language exchange) you can work with in this eBook.
4. Listen/Repeat. This is an amazing time to get your hands on a copy of Michel Thomas or Pimsleur’s Chinese courses. They are available in most public libraries (use www.worldcat.org to check all the libraries near you) or for purchase. Be warned that they are pretty expensive. Also check out the amazing Openculture site as they have a listing of all the free Chinese courses currently available.
   1. Use a beginner’s audio course to start tuning your ear. You’ll need to get used to the sound of Chinese and the only way to do this is to listen to lots of Chinese! These audio courses (unlike textbook audio or videos) are purely audio, allowing you to really focus on listening.
   2. Start to use the words and phrases you pick up in the audio course with your language partner via HelloTalk/iTalki.

After a couple of weeks you should be pretty comfortable with very basic spoken Chinese. The main objective here is to not be surprised at a strange-sounding pronunciation. Once we start learning the characters your brain won’t have the time or energy to deal with pronunciation, tones and the seemingly random squiggly lines that are the characters.

Instead we’ve started the process on the right foot by making pronunciation and tones a little more familiar. When we start to learn the characters we will already have something to hang new knowledge on – we can start to connect the characters we learn to existing spoken words we’ve learned rather than trying to learn it all at the same time.

Plus, the first couple of weeks of your study (focusing on pronunciation, tones, spoken and listening) will have been a lot more fun than the traditional method, which would have had you copying out 你好 a couple of hundred times!

There’s plenty of time to learn how to write in Chinese, don’t you worry! Just take the first couple of weeks to learn some spoken Chinese, realize that Chinese is just a language like any other and that you can even begin to start having fun with the spoken language.

Once you are set with that we can start learning how to write in Chinese! Let’s get into that now.

How to Write in Chinese Phase 2: Knowledge about the Chinese characters.

OK so we’ve done all the preparation. Now we can just start grinding Chinese characters right? Grab a textbook, find a vocabulary list and start copying those suckers out by hand, one at a time, a couple hundred times.

Please please please don’t do this!

This is how Chinese children are taught. Write those characters again and again until they stick. And it works!

REUTERS/Claro Cortes IV (CHINA)

But of course it works! Chinese kids have a decade, almost two decades of time to commit to this process. Kids are time-rich unlike you as an adult learner. Kids are in school all day everyday and a large proportion of that time will be spent mastering the Chinese characters in some way. And homework? Guess what – exercise books filled with more characters.

Poor kids.

As an adult learner you have disadvantages and advantages. The main disadvantage is that you don’t have as much time as Chinese kids do to master the Chinese characters. Oh well.

The advantage is that, as an adult, you have access to different methods of language learning. We can understand how to write in Chinese characters much better than a child can.

Kids needs to use the listen/repeat rote learning methods used in schools because they aren’t as smart as adult learners! We often talk about how fast children are at learning a language but in apples-to-apples studies of language learning (where adults and children were given the same amount of language learning exposure each day) adults far surpassed the stoopid kids.

The reason adults seem slower is because we don’t have a 24/7 tutor (parent/guardian) and the stakes for if we don’t learn are very low. For a child the huge amount of attention they receive coupled with the fact that they have to learn in order to get things they want (“food”/”toy” etc.) sets them up for rapid language acquisition.

As an adult though we know “how to learn”. Quite apart from the fact that we’ve already learned one language (or even more) is the fact that we can understand more abstract concepts than a child can.

We can use our understanding of a language to learn faster than if we are just clumping together random words, phrases and sentences as a child does. We have access to the patterns of the language whereas a child needs to fumble around for years before it clicks.

Of course, this can be taken too far. Learning a language from a grammar book is a horrible idea – it means we only learn about a language and don’t actually practice speaking the language as a skill. Instead we want to know enough about the language to support our use of language as a skill. Beyond that book-learning only weighs us down.

In the case of Chinese characters knowing how they are constructed is invaluable for learning and remembering them quickly. Here’s a run down of the stuff you should know before plunging into months of solid character learning:

1. Individual strokes are the basis of all characters. There are only a certain number of strokes and combination strokes possible in Chinese, meaning that the form and structure of Chinese characters is limited. Knowing a little about the strokes allows you to recognize characters much better – as well as recognize when you’ve written a character incorrectly.
2. All Chinese characters are constructed of Components. You may know some of these components already – for instance 口，讠， 人， 水， 火. Every single character is composed of these same elements. They are the building blocks of every character.
3. There are only 214 components, of which the same ~100 or so make up most characters. So: every character is made of components + there are only 214 components = all characters are made of the same 214 components. Learning the components unlocks all of the characters – even if you don’t know the meaning or how to say a character you will at least recognize all the pieces inside of it, helping to make characters seem less like “random squiggles”.
4. Here’s the kicker: 90%+ of characters have one component that gives us a clue about the character’s meaning AND one component that gives us a clue about how to pronounce it.  Getting a grip on these is key to rapid progression. I’ve recorded about half an hour of video lessons about sound-meaning characters and why they are amazing..

Knowing (and using!) these four facts makes progression through the Chinese characters much faster and much more efficient especially when coupled with a system for utilizing this knowledge (which I’ll look at in the next section).

I talk a lot more about the Levels of Chinese and how to write in Chinese in this Chinese learning article on iwillteachyoualanguage.com.

It’s another in-depth but valuable read and well worth checking out.

How to Write in Chinese Phase 3: A systematic method for learning the Chinese characters

Here you are. Armed with basic spoken Chinese and an understanding of how Chinese characters work. You are now truly dangerous. The Chinese characters don’t stand a chance.

To top it off you’re going to use modern methods for learning and memorizing the Chinese characters. Don’t use old-school (literally) school methods to learn. Rote-learning of vocabulary lists is ridiculously time consuming and inefficient.

Instead you’re going to use a proper, thought out and tested system. Actually, you can have mine, the one I used to learn 75-100 characters per day with 90% recall after a week, reach literacy in Chinese within a year and start my first business in China. Very efficient!

The basic outline is this:

1. Break down the character into its constituent components. (Pleco dictionary has a built-in decomposition function).
2. Use the components to create a memory-aid; tell a story using the pieces. Hook the meaning and pronunciation of the character into this story. I personally use colours to signify the tones but there are lots of ways to use memory-aids to learn meaning, pronunciation and tones.
3. Add your new character + mnemonic to a flashcard or (preferably) into a Spaced Repetition System like Anki or, my preference, Pleco.
4. Review the new content using Spaced Repetition. If you get something wrong don’t just tap Wrong but re-learn the character (break it down and create a new mnemonic if necessary).
5. Each week remove a certain amount of material from the SRS and write Sentences of the Week. Make short sentences from the characters/words you now recognize on sight. Use Lang-8 to get the sentences corrected. Add the sentences into you flashcards/SRS as “grammar cards” to help you understand the structure of the language.
6. Use your Sentences of the Week in conversation using iTalki or HelloTalk or face-to-face. I prefer HelloTalk because it is so low-friction. You need to remove any barriers that would stop you from communicating regularly.
7. During Usage make note of new content you want to learn. This could be corrections to your existing sentences or completely random language nuggets you want to capture.
8. Loop the new material from Usage back to Step 1 above. Run through a similar process of breaking down, creating memory-aids, using SRS, writing sentences and then communicating.
9. Repeat.

Here’s a systems diagram! Because…I’m a nerd. And proud!

Is this the best way to learn how to write in Chinese? Probably not, no. But it’s a damn sight better than the traditional alternatives which rely on rote-memorization and book learning.

If you dig this kind of approach definitely check out my Sensible Chinese Character Course. It’s about ~7 hours of video content teaching all of this. It’s my magnum opus and I’m very happy that it’s helped thousands of people learn how to write in Chinese and work through the Chinese characters with much less angst.

By combining knowledge of spoken Chinese, how the characters work and then a system for learning the characters we can progress through Chinese much faster than if we try to learn without direction, without a set method.

I see so many people start Chinese, get excited, hit a brick wall and immediately quit. I write posts like this one to help get more people over that wall (or straight through it!). If you have any particular questions about learning Chinese drop them in the comments below and I’ll get back to you.

Kyle / 白马楷

The post How to Write in Chinese appeared first on Sensible Chinese.

Here are a few things I wish I had known about when I started to learn Chinese!

This is a BIG article! Or a small book – take your pick! Therefore it’s good to bookmark it (Ctrl + D or ⌘+D on a Mac) or download the PDF version of the article.

If you really want to explore these ideas then I recommend Benny Lewis’ Fluent in 3 Month’s package. His ideas are all focused around building up the confidence to just start talking as soon as possible, learning to embrace your mistakes and learning as fast as possible. Following this basic strategy he’s managed to get to conversational level in an impressive number of languages all whilst travelling around the world and running a blog that reaches over 100,000 people. Not bad!

He has a totally free email course which is available here.

If you want to go all in there’s also a premium package available here.

2.Work out Why you are Learning Chinese

Why learn Chinese? Specifically, why are you learning Chinese? Do you have a good reason?

Starting to learn Chinese without a good reason to do will likely end in failure. Take 5-10 minutes right now to work out why you want to learn Chinese. Write it down. Refine the reason to make it definite and attainable and then make sure you see your reason on a daily basis to help give you momentum.

My First Attempt

Learning Chinese is not as hard as you might think. However, it does take a long time to get to a level where you can communicate competently and even longer to get to anywhere near approaching fluency. It’s a long-haul language for sure, primarily because of the sheer number of characters that need to be learned.

The first time I tried to learn Chinese was when I was travelling and visited Hong Kong back when I was 18 – I picked up a textbook and gave a totally half-assed effort in trying to learn. Needless to say this attempt soon faltered. The reason, I know now, was that I had no great reason – no drive to learn –  Chinese at the time. I just thought it would be “cool,” which is nowhere near enough.

So What Are Your Reasons?

Because learning Chinese is a big project that will take a considerable amount of your time it’s important to know why you are learning Chinese.

This sounds simplistic – you want to learn Chinese so you can talk to Chinese people or perhaps do business in China in the future. China is about to become the world’s largest economy so learning Chinese just makes sense right?

These kind of general reasons sound fine but will not be sufficient to get you through the challenges that learning Chinese will present. You’re going to need something much more concrete and definite.

Write it Down

Take a moment away from your screen with a pen and paper and write down your reason for wanting to learn Chinese. It can be more than one but one good reason is far superior to 10 weak reasons.

The simple act of writing down your reason forces you to define your reasons much more clearly than if you keep the reason in your head. Translating your thoughts onto paper forces you to think about the particulars. Just externalizing the reason onto paper will therefore be a huge step in the right direction.

Now you’ve got the basic idea on paper take a step back and have a look at your reason. There are a couple of ways to make it better.

1. Make it Definite

First is to make it definite. Does your reason have a definable end point? A time at which you could potentially say “OK, I’ve done it”?

A non-definite reason is something like “I want to be able to talk to Chinese people”. A definite reason of the same ilk would be “I want to be able to talk to my in-laws parents in Chinese for 20 minutes without consulting a dictionary”.

One of Mark Zuckerberg’s reasons for learning Chinese was to be able to ask his girlfriend’s grandparents for permission to marry. That’s a definite reason.

Legitimate Reason. Good job!

2. Reasonable Time to Attainment

Second, the period of attainment. It’s important to have a reason that is attainable in the medium-term. Too short and you’ll achieve the target without having really got into Chinese properly.

An example of “too attainable” would be “learn to order food at the local Chinese restaurant”. Once you’ve learned “这个” you’ve pretty much achieved this one as you can just stab items in the menu and grunt “this one”. Job done!

Conversely, if you set a target like “be able to read the Four Classic Books of Chinese literature in classical script” when you’ve only just learned 你好 you’re in for a rough time.

That target will take a couple of years at least for most people, if not much longer. In the meantime you’ll likely run out of steam and give up on Chinese.

As such it’s a good idea to pick something reasonable that will take 6-12 months to achieve.

At this point you’ll be immersed in learning Chinese enough to want to keep going and can set some new targets now that you know a lot more about the language.

3. Keep Reminding Yourself

Third, make sure you are reminded of your reason for learning Chinese on a daily basis. Write your reason on paper and stick it on your wall. Set a phone reminder with your reason as the reminder text. Set your desktop wallpaper to an image containing your reason.

Whatever it takes make sure that you are reminded on a regular basis, do it.

This will also be helpful in the “dark times” when you are wondering why on earth you ever took up Chinese. Being able to see the reason written down in more rational times will help get you out of the rut and keep moving forward. 好好学习，天天向上！

To do now:

Starting to learn Chinese without a good reason to do so likely lead to failure. Take 5-10 minutes right now to work out why you want to learn Chinese. Write it down. Refine the reason to make it definite and attainable and then make sure you see your reason on a daily basis to help give you momentum.

3.Pronunciation and Pinyin

Update: Our free Sensible Pinyin Course is now available. First read through this article to see why Pinyin is so important and then head over to the Sensible Pinyin Course Introduction when you are ready! 

Before tackling Chinese characters make sure you have a firm grip on pinyin pronunciation and the tones. Trying to juggle pronunciation, tones AND characters all at the same time is a nightmare.

Make your first few weeks go a little smoother by nailing each skill individually and then combining them.

If you’ve started learning Chinese already you might know the horror of the first chapter of a Chinese textbook. The majority of textbooks start with a brief introduction to pronunciation and the tones and then immediately start throwing complete words and dialogues at you.

Before you can even say your first word – which will likely be 你好 – you need to understand pronunciation, tones and (depending on your book) struggle with the characters 你 and 好. Oh, and on top of that you’ve got two third tones in 你好. The third tone is already the most tricky but when you add two together we’ll have to learn some fun tone change rules too! And then the first phrase you’ll learn – 我很好 – three third tones! Surprise!

This is a lot to take in during your first ever lesson. Chinese is very front heavy in terms of difficult content. The traditional textbooks do not help to soften the blow. Some may introduce pinyin initials and finals gradually chapter by chapter but by then they’ve also been giving you words and dialogues every chapter! These first couple of weeks are rough!

Rest assured Chinese does actually get easier! However, getting through the beginner’s material of pronunciation, tones and working out the characters a bit is a struggle.

What to do?

One thing that I really wish I had done is to get a firm foundation in pronunciation. Then add the tones. With pronunciation and tones locked down it’s possible to start communicating and having a bit of fun with the language. Then, and only then, tackle the characters.

Trying to deal with pronunciation, tones and characters all at the same time is a nightmare. It’s certainly possible, and it’s the way we’ve all been learning for the most part. But it’s something that needs to be fixed to help ease the path towards learning Chinese.

First things first – Pinyin

First, get a good grasp of pinyin. There are a number of learning resources suggested in this article. In short, get yourself a pinyin chart and work on recognizing and being able to replicate all ~440 of the sounds. 440 isn’t too many because the vast majority are very simple and if you are an English speaker you already know the equivalent sounds. Instead it’ll be a small minority that will pose the majority of the difficulty.

Here’s a copy of the first three sheets from the Cheat Sheets from the Chinese Language Learning Pack – the PDF has a pinyin table, a pronunciation guide and a tone reference sheet. It’s available in Simplified and Traditional PDF. The full pack is available in the Sensible Chinese Language Learning Pack.

Here’s what it looks like:

Full  resolution version: Simplified and Traditional PDF.

Working with a teacher is the best way to do this. A couple of hours just drilling the pinyin table, getting corrections and improving your pronunciation is a great investment of your time and energy early on in learning Chinese. This should only take a few hours – I’m not advocating ignoring the tones and characters for weeks and weeks – this is just the first few hours of your Chinese education.

Then add the tones

Once you’ve got a grip on the basic pronunciation it is time to add the tones. The basic idea is to go through the pinyin table again (I know!) but adding the tone sounds until you can replicate them all. Again, this might take a couple of hours to really nail but it’s a wonderful investment.

After this it is time to move away from isolated sounds. This requires knowing a little about tone change rules (especially the 3rd tone) which is a stumbling block for early learners. This is just something you need to learn and practice I’m afraid. Thankfully there are only a couple of rules.

This blog article introduces the basics of Chinese tones and the idea of tone-pair drills.

It’s possible to do all of this in person with a teacher (or Chinese speaking friend) with a pinyin chart and then word lists. This is the best way to get human feedback. Without feedback there’s no way to correct your errors.

Once you have these skills nailed down you can begin to communicate with people. Communicating should be prioritized over the characters for now. Being able to have fun with the language by chatting to people, listening to music and other non-character based methods is important.

Learning the characters is a more solitary process for the most part. Just you and your paper or Spaced Repetition System, drilling and memorizing them. You’ll be spending a lot of time with the characters – don’t worry! – so enjoy your time without the characters for now and use this time to get a real feel for the language.

There are lots of other resources on this site about pronunciation and tones. For now work with a pinyin chart with a native speaker to get the basics down before worrying about all the small details.

4.Tackling the Tones

Chinese Tones are one of the most challenging aspects of Chinese. The good news is that with enough practice, like any skill, you’ll be able to master Chinese Tones.

Additionally, you already use tones in English, just in a very different way to in Chinese – we’ll look at how to transfer these existing tones to Chinese.

To really get a grip on Chinese requires spending some time up-front familiarizing yourself with the tones followed by practice specifically tailored to tone learning, especially tone-pair based practice.
A lot of textbooks cover the tones in the first couple of lessons and move on.

This hasty and inadequate approach is part of the reason Chinese is so hard to get a grip on in the early stages of learning. Getting a solid grasp on tones will make your life a lot easier in the long run.

Why are tones important?

Tones are important in Chinese because they alter meaning
at a character level. We do actually have tones in English (and other European languages) but they are used very differently to those in Chinese.
In English we generally use tone to alter meaning at a sentence level rather than the character/word level. We might call this “tone of voice” or “inflection” but the concept is basically the same.
Compare the two languages. In a ten character sentence in Chinese you have ten chances to mess up the tone and be misunderstood – in an Equivalent English sentence if you muck up the tone/inflection you may change the emphasis or the mood of the sentence but will probably still be understood.

But I will still be understood right?

You might hear the claim that even if you don’t nail the tones you’ll likely be understood because of the context of the sentence. People debate this point back and forth but I think do so misses the point.

For one, neglecting the tones is a bit irresponsible – it puts the burden of comprehension on the Chinese listener rather than on you as a speaker. That’s lazy and detrimental to your continued progress.

Even if you are understood, chances are people won’t want to speak toyou as much as if you are easy to understand. Your progress is dependent on continuing to communicate in Chinese as much as possible. If you are “that guy” who is really hard to understand people won’t engage in as many conversations and you’ll progress slower.

Second, the claim that the context of the sentence will save you depends on the assumption that you’ve got the rest of the sentence correct!

An incorrect tone may be understood by a native speaker if you get all the other tones around it correct. You need to get the rest of the context correct in the first place to save that failed tone!

Chances are, if you’ve followed the advice that tones aren’t that important, most of if not all of the other tones in the sentence will also be wrong! The context you were relying on won’t be there!

This reminds me a bit of the Morcambe & Wise comedy sketch where Eric Morcambe enthusiastically plays a Grieg piano concerto, getting everything horribly wrong and making ruining the whole orchestral performance.

When confronted about his dire performance he calmly states “I’m playing all the right notes—but not necessarily in the right order”.

Don’t be the Eric Morcambe of Chinese tones!

Tone equivalents in English

If you are reading this then chances are English is either your first language or you have learned English to a high level. These equivalencies occurs in other European languages but I’ll focus on English.

When we use tone in English we apply it on a phrase or sentence based level, rather than on an individual sound. The good news is that once we realize we use these tones already we can transport them over to Chinese and work on applying them in this new context – this is one way to get up and running with the tones quickly.

This great graphic by France Fu hits the nail on the head:

The first tone is like singing a musical note, high and level. Run a quick Do, Re, Mi and chances are that you’ll be using the first tone automatically.

The second tone (rising) is pronounced as a questioning tone that we would normally use at the end of a interrogative sentence in English. For example “Do you speak English?” That rise on “English” is equivalent to the second tone in Chinese.

The biggest difficulty here is divorcing that upward lilt from the concept of questioning. Some beginners will find that they inflect 吗 upwards at the end of sentence because they are so used to inflecting questions. So 你好吗 comes out as nǐhǎo má? This is a confusion of sentence level and character level tones – applying existing English intonation to Chinese.

The fourth tone (falling) is similar to the way we express annoyance in English. Like “What?” when we are angry, the tone falls sharply.
Another (highly specific!) instance is when we are whispering loudly to attract someone’s attention – like a stage whisper: “Hey, Kyle, hey, psst, hey Kyle, over here!” Imagine you are back in school and your friend is trying to get your attention, whispering but getting louder and louder and more insistent – that’s the fourth tone “stage whisper”!

Those of you paying attention may notice that I skipped the third tone. That’s because the third tone is … tricky.

For one, we don’t have an equivalent in English. Also, the traditional falling/rising conception of the third tone is a useful approximation but not quite accurate. Here is a much more detailed article about this particular problem.

Finally, the third tone is also very liable to be changed by the tone that follows it. This means that the sound of the third tone in isolation is very different how it is pronounced in words and sentences.

This means that learning the third tone will take up most of your time when learning Chinese. One piece of advice is not to worry too much about how the third tone sounds in isolation (the rising-falling conception).

Instead focus on how it sounds with other tones inside words. This is the idea behind tone-pairs.

Tone Pairs

We covered the basics of how to learn Chinese pronunciation and tones above. In short, get a pinyin chart or use a more sophisticated piece of software like Standard Mandarin or Pin Pin on iPhone/Android.

Once you’ve nailed the tones in isolation move as quickly as possible to tone-pair combinations. The vast majority of Chinese words are two characters so pairs of characters are the best method for practice.

When starting to learn Chinese I spent far too long focusing on sounds and tones in isolation. Because the vast majority of words in Chinese are two characters this practice was not as helpful as focusing on two-character words and tone pairs.

Lingomi’s blog has a useful table of tone pairs. This is taken from their website, which has lots of other useful tone and pronunciation information.

Source: Lingomi.com

These are all of the tone pairs possible in Chinese. You’ll never see a neutral tone preceding another tone which is the reason why this is not a 5 x 5 grid.

The basic idea behind tone-pair drills is to practice saying these phrases until your tongue (and brain) are trained. Because these are all of the possible tone pair combinations in Chinese, when you learn new vocabulary you’ll be able to hook the new pronunciation to the existing tone pair framework that you’ve been practicing.

For instance if you learn 学习 (xuéxí) it’s tone pattern is the same as 没来 （méilái) in this chart. If you know how the 2-2 pattern sounds and feels you’ll be able to transfer it from one word to another.

Pay particular attention to those that include the third tone due to the third tone change rules. For instance 3-3 你走 will be pronounced nízǒu rather than nǐzǒu.

Spending some time drilling the tone-pairs is much more worthwhile than practicing the tones in isolation. Tone-pair drills are not taught as often as they should be and are a very valuable method for achieving native-like pronunciation.

To practice tone pairs either use the chart above and repeat, repeat, repeat. Alternatively get your own vocabulary from a textbook or other source and order it by the 2 tones in each word to make lists of words to practice.

Finally, you might want to check out Sensible Chinese Pronunciation Package which contains a whole book of tone pair exercises. It’s available as part of the Sensible Chinese Language Learning Pack.

5.Getting your phone/computer set up for Chinese

A question that comes up a lot is how to type in Chinese.

I’m a big fan of Chinese typing as it allows you to start communicating in written Chinese really fast. Getting to a similar level of communicative ability using handwriting can take many months if not years.

The process of typing in Chinese generally surprises people – it is very simple. Typing in Chinese is generally called 打拼音 dǎ pīnyīn (to type pinyin).

The basic idea is that you simply type the pinyin of the characters you want to write and then select the characters as they pop on screen. This is much like predictive text in English, as you type a word like C-h-i- your phone might throw up the suggestion “Chinese”.

In Chinese if you simply type n-i-h-a-o your phone/computer will suggest 你好. In fact you can even take shortcuts and type n-h and get the same result.

The ease and speed improvement over written characters means that the vast, vast majority of written correspondence in China is typed. This makes perfect sense. Apart from note taking, signing your name, birthday cards and maybe shopping lists chances are you don’t hand-write in English all that much. And even if you do the volume of handwritten to typed is likely very low.

So – don’t be afraid of typing in Chinese. It’s how Chinese native speakers communicate via the written word and it’ll allow you to start communicating ASAP. In fact, immediately, today!

I want to cover two things:

1. How to Set up a Chinese keyboard

2. How to start using your new Chinese keyboard immediately

Setting up a Chinese keyboard

How you set up your keyboard depends on what device you are using. Also, these instructions will inevitably change over time as software updates. As such here are a couple of links to keyboard set up for the main devices. I’ll update these links as the software is updated.

iPhone (Official instructions) / iPhone Step by Step (Also applicable for iPad)

Android

Macintosh

Windows 10 / Windows 8 / Windows 7

How to start using your Chinese keyboard immediately

Now you have your nice new keyboard set up how to start using it?

If you are on iPhone/Android I’d recommend you download HelloTalk.

HelloTalk is totally FREE app for language exchange. Short text messages are used as the main form of communication making this a great place to start testing out your keyboard.

Most excitingly though you’ll get responses! This means you can start using the written Chinese language to actually communicate immediately. Very cool stuff indeed – not requiring weeks practicing your handwriting and having only a Chinese teacher reading your work.

Instead you can communicate with real people right now. This is how you can genuinely acquire a language fast. So don’t hang around – grab the app and you can send your first 你好 in minutes. Just type “nihao” and select the 你好 characters and you’ve started!

If you are on a PC/Mac then the best alternative right now is Lang-8. Lang-8 is another free language exchange platform that allows you to write and receive corrections from native speakers.

Go ahead and sign up and use your new keyboard to write your first entry – just introduce yourself using whatever Chinese you know. Copy a script from Lesson 1 of your textbook if that helps but adapt it to introduce yourself.

Whatever platform you use it’s important to start practicing with your Chinese keyboard. This will help you get a feel for how much you can type before the predictive ability of the software gives us.

In some cases you will be able to write whole sentences, in others you’ll only manage a couple of characters before having to select the correct meaning. Play around with the keyboard through actual usage and you’ll get a feel for it very quickly.

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6.Pattern based grammar

Chinese grammar is highly “pattern-based”. Learn these patterns and you’ll be able to communicate much faster than if you try to bolt together your own sentences.

 First things first – let’s deal with the idea that Chinese doesn’t have grammar. This is nonsense. Chinese does have grammar -otherwise you could put a word in a sentence in any order and be understood, which you cannot. Chinese grammar is however very different to the grammar of European languages.

 Chinese grammar does not include a lot of the elements we associate with the word “grammar” – namely verb conjugations, agreements, tenses and the like. We think of these as grammar because that’s what we spend the majority of time learning when we study a language like French or Spanish.

Source: Sheldoncomics.com

Chinese grammar instead relies on particles and structures that seem very foreign to us. The particle 了 is a good example. For one, it doesn’t really have a very good English translation because we don’t have anything like it. Broadly, it can be used as an aspectual particle and a modal particle.

Don’t know what a modal or aspectual particles is? This is the great thing about Chinese grammar: it doesn’t really matter. You can learn to use them by paying attention to their usage in patterns of speech and copying, as we’ll look at below.

If you are interested in grammar then AllSet Learning’s Chinese Grammar Wiki is your Shangri-La. It’s an amazing resource and well worth bookmarking.

The Chinese Sentence Magic Formula

The first (and most important) pattern to learn is that of the general Chinese sentence. There’s a relatively rigid structure that if you follow you won’t make errors.

Here it is:

Subject + When + How + Where + Negation + Auxiliary + Verb + Complement + Object

Follow that order – placing the different parts of the sentence into the right “place”- and you’ll be understood.

This is not the place to go into detail about what each of these is. This magic formula is adapted from this super useful and in-depth article over at East Asia Student. A lot more detail about what these components are is available there.

Supplemental Patterns

After the basic sentence pattern there are a number of supplemental patterns. These are the patterns you’ll find in the grammar section at the end of your textbook chapters. You know, those boring looking bits you tend to skip over?

The important thing is to realize that these patterns are very important. There are patterns in other foreign languages but they tend to be less set than in Chinese. If you learn the Chinese patterns and nail them then communicating becomes very simple – you simply replace parts of the pattern (subject, object, place, time etc.).

In European languages this would necessitate changes in verb conjugation and sometimes even in the structure of the sentence. This makes the patterns less useful, which may be why we tend to ignore them in Chinese as well! In Chinese it’s most often a matter of simply switching out a word which makes these set patterns very useful.

Want to know who is doing the action? Simply replace the subject with the word 谁 “who” and you are good to go – no further changes to the sentence required. This is what makes the patterns of Chinese grammar so powerful.

A lot of these patterns are used to cover things like conditionality (if this then that), emphasis and time concepts. These patterns take up the slack left by not having tenses (in the European sense) or conjugations. It’s just a different method to what we are used to.

You’ve probably seen some of these already: 是…的 for emphasis, 如果…就 for “if this then that”, 要是…就 for “if only this then that”, 但是…而且 for “not only this but that” etc.

How to Learn the Patterns

It’s hard to give a summary of all of these patterns so the best I can say at this time is to pay attention to them.

There are actually whole books based on learning these patterns. The best is probably Basic Patterns of Chinese Grammar: A Student’s Guide to Correct Structures and Common Errors. Another is Common Chinese Patterns 330.

The second has more patterns but they aren’t in any particular order. Therefore it’s difficult to tell which ones are worth learning and which to ignore. Therefore it’s better as  reference book. The first book has less content but goes through the patterns in a much more sensible textbook-like fashion.

Your current textbook is also a great source of this sentence patterns. If you already make flashcards for characters and vocabulary definitely think about adding flashcards for whole patterns. Go back through your old textbooks too and pick out the example sentences.

Practice switching out the elements (subject, object, where, when, how, verb etc.) of the pattern until you can quickly and rapidly makes these changes without having to think about it. The patterns will become a framework into which you can add meaning and be very easily understood.

Get the patterns mastered and your ability to communicate in Chinese will sky-rocket.

Extra Resources

Hacking Chinese’s very in-depth discussion with experts about how best to learn Chinese grammar.

A FluentU article on the basic Chinese sentence structure

AllSet Learning’s excellent Chinese Grammar Wiki 

Zhongwen Browser Plugin for Chrome/Firefox (now with built-in references to the Chinese Grammar Wiki)

7.Radicals

Every single character in Chinese, both Traditional and Simplified, is made up of around 200 small “pieces” that act very roughly like an alphabet. Learn these 200 pieces and you’ll be able to easily identify and remember meanings as well as get clues about how to pronounce the character.

Every character! Even this monster:  面 “biángbiáng” noodles.

Break it down

When first starting to learn Chinese each and every character looks utterly different.  The only similarity was that they all looked super complex and totally unlearn-able!

Thankfully this is not the case. There are in fact a limited number of “pieces” that make up each and every character in the Chinese language. Once you realize that the written language is made up of these pieces, and that there is a relatively limited number of these pieces the language becomes a lot more understandable and logical.

So what are these pieces? Let’s look at an example before getting stuck in detail.

One of the first words you will learn in Chinese is 你好　nǐhǎo meaning “hello”. This word is made up of two characters 你 (“you”) and 好 (“good”) – let’s just take the character 好.

好, as you may know, is made up of two piece – 女 and 子, “woman” and “child”. The 女 is a little bit squished up in 好 but it’s still 女.

好 is a simple example that a lot of people know so maybe this isn’t too impressive. What you may not realize though is that every single character in the Chinese language works this way and that there are only ~200 of these pieces in total.

Check out Wikipedia’s list of Radicals to find out what all of these pieces are and check the bottom of the article to find a lot more useful resources. 

Also download our Chinese Radicals Poster here (5MB PDF)

Example with 矿物

We could do this with any character in Chinese. Let’s go for a random yet relatively difficult one. Here’s a word I’ve picked at random: 矿物 (kuàngwù) which means “mineral”.  The traditional version is 礦物，which we’ll get to shortly, mainly to show the main differences between simplified and traditional.

The first character of 矿物 is 矿 kuàng which means “mine” or “ore”. 矿 has two pieces – one on the left and one one the right. This left-right structure is very very common in Chinese. We saw it above with 好. On the left of 矿 is 石 which means “stone” and one the left is 广 which means “wide”.

Neat! – an ORE MINE is a place with a WIDE expanse of STONE. That makes sense! So the character “mine” in Chinese is made up of the smaller pieces “stone” and “wide”.

The second character in 矿物 is 物 which generally means “thing”, especially a physical “thing”. On the left is 牛 which means “cow” and on the right is 勿 which means “must not”.

Huh. This one is a bit more tricky! COW + MUST NOT = physical THING.

Pardon the slight vulgarity (though vulgarity will help you remember!) : Hey! Guy! You MUST NOT BULL (cow) me! I want to see the real PHYSICAL THING before you get the cash!

So now we have 矿物 which means “mineral” and know that it is made up of 矿　”ore”/”mine” and 物 “physical thing”. But by realizing that every Chinese character has further pieces we can break down “ore”/”mine” into STONE + WIDE and “physical thing” into COW + MUST NOT.

This is not because I happened to choose a word that this works with. We can do this with every single character in the Chinese language.

And here’s the thing I really wish I knew : there are only around 200 of these “pieces” that make up every single character.

It’s almost like a (albeit very complicated) alphabet. I hesitate to use the word as it is misleading but I think still a useful metaphor – each character can be decomposed into these ~200 pieces much like every English word in made of the 26 letters. Don’t take this too far though – Chinese doesn’t have an alphabet!

Radicals vs. Components vs. Pieces

Sometimes you’ll hear about Chinese radicals – these are the 214 official “pieces” set by an old Chinese dictionary. However when we are decomposing characters the pieces we get are not always these radicals, sometimes it will just be a character (which is in turn made of radicals).

The difference is not that important and only argued by people who care too much about these kind of things (I’m one of them…). The main thing to know is that every single character can be broken into smaller pieces and that there are only around 200 of these small pieces.

When you realize this and start to learn and recognize some of these pieces suddenly Chinese characters are not so scary. Even characters you don’t know you’ll be able to look at and say ‘Oh, that has “water” and “mouth” in it. I don’t know what it is but I recognize those pieces at least.”

Suddenly Chinese becomes less foreign and terrifying. Once you really get a grasp of these pieces you can unlock some very powerful tools – namely being able to guess at the meaning and, drum-roll, being able to guess at how it is pronounced. This is the topic of the next article in this series though on phono-semantic characters.

Interested in Traditional characters? If not skip ahead to where we discuss How to Learn these Pieces.

What about Traditional Chinese characters?

Here’s an aside on the difference between Simplified and Traditional characters. If you are learning Traditional then this will show how we break down 礦物 as we did with the simplified 矿物 above. Even if you aren’t learning Traditional this should be useful.

First, the 物 in 礦物 in both Simplified and Traditional is exactly the same. This happens with a lot of characters, which makes the difference between the two scripts more manageable.

The difference appears in the 礦. In Traditional there is an extra “piece” under the 广. In Simplified the word for “wide” is simply 广. In Traditional it is 廣. Therefore in the character 礦 in Traditional script the “wide” piece is different.

We can still consider this one piece with the meaning wide, so we can still think of the character as STONE + WIDE.

The piece 广 in Traditional itself has two pieces. Aha! In Traditional 广 is composed of 广 “wide” and
黄 “yellow”. All that has happened when the Chinese script was simplified was that the 黄 piece was
removed.

Simplified characters are just Traditional characters with less pieces in order to make them easier to write. Vitally important though is the fact that the pieces, even though there may be less of them used in a Simplified character, are the same.

There are a few cases where the radicals themselves are different ( 讠 in Simplified vs. 言 in Traditional) but this is a very small number that can be learned in 5 minutes.

The vast majority of variance is instead from simply having less of the same pieces per character.

Therefore if you focus on learning the pieces that make up Chinese characters you can apply this knowledge to both Simplified and Traditional scripts and also more easily transition between the two. Chinese is giving you a break for once!

How to Learn

Basically as long as you are aware that all of the characters are made of these pieces you will start to notice them more and more. For now check out these tools and websites to find out more about the structure and process of Chinese characters.

Play around with HanziCraft to prove to yourself that all the characters can be broken down.

Read this series of great articles from Hacking Chinese on building a language toolkit

Check out Wikipedia’s list of Radicals

Get our Radical WallChart to print out and stick on your wall

8. Sound Meaning Characters

If you are a native English speaker learning a European language for the most part you can look at writing in that language and make a guess about how to read it out loud. If you are lucky it may be similar enough to actually know the meaning – like “le menu” in French. This gives us more of a fighting chance when learning languages with the Roman alphabet.

“Tourist Hotel” – Pfft! French is Easy! I’ve got this.

First day in China? Try to do this? Haha, sorry buddy you’re illiterate! In Chinese it at first seems like this is impossible.

Yay! We’ve arrived at the hotel! I think…

How can you look at a sign in the street and guess its meaning and how to say it? The surprising thing is that you can.

I was so excited when I realized this as it allowed me to order totally random items on menu by being able to (more or less!) sound out the name of the menu item without knowing the characters beforehand.

Introducing the Phono-Semantic Character

Above we looked at how characters are actually composed of smaller pieces that have their own meaning. One thing I held back on was the fact that these pieces can also give us a hint about how we say the character!

What is this black magic you ask? The secret: phono-semantic characters.

Unfortunately phono-semantic characters is an awful name, making a relatively simple concept sound really difficult. Phono-semantic is a fancy way of saying Sound-Meaning, which is exactly what these characters gives us. We get both a hint to the meaning of a character as well as how to pronounce it. I think that part of the reason more people don’t know about them is the rubbish name.

So these can’t be that frequent right? Otherwise you would have heard of them. Well actually 90-95% of characters in Chinese are phono-semantic in some way. They are the single largest set of character types.

The other types include characters that look like what they are (like 木 for tree and 火 for fire) and characters that represent concepts ( like 休 “to rest” looks like a man leaning against a tree). These are the type of characters that are first learned because they are really cool!

These type of characters also makes Chinese seem really easy – it’s all just pictures right!? These characters make up only around 5% of the language though, the rest being phono-semantic. Thankfully phono-semantic characters actually make the language easier than if it was all picture-based because it allows for a more logical structure.

This actually makes sense. As the language progressed and more complicated concepts were required it must have been really hard trying to think of ways to draw the concept or try to represent it symbolically. Drawing the sun, the moon or a woman is easy – drawing things like modesty, religion and justice is much harder.

Instead a character like 谦 “modest” is phono-semantic. On the left is the semantic part – in this case 讠meaning “speech” (or 言 in Traditional) which tells us that the character has something to do with speech. In this case it is probably because modesty is considered an aspect of speech – to talk
modestly.

On the right is 兼 which means “unite”/”combine”. We’re less interested in the meaning here though than we are with its pronunciation. 兼 is pronounced jiān. 谦 “modesty” is pronounced qiān. Both contain the same final -ian and are said with the same first tone. Nice!

This can’t be common right?

This is not a fluke. Don’t trustme? Head to HanziCraft, which is a neat character decomposition tool, and try it yourself. In fact, even if you do trust me go try it out anyway to get a feel for how extensive this is.

Stick in a few characters to see if the pronunciation of the pieces of a character resemble the whole character’s pronunciation. It could be a similarity in the initial (b-,p-,m-,f- etc.), in the final (-a, -i, -o, -iao etc.) or in the tone. If you are lucky it will be more than one of these.

The phonetic (sound) piece of a character gives us a hint. When we are very lucky we’ll get lots of help – 青 is an example of this. If it appears in a character (晴，情，请，清） then chances are that the pronunciation will be qing, though it won’t tell you the tone.

Other hints are less useful but still get you in the right kind of area. Instead of guessing between 440 initial/final combinations multiplied by 5 tones (including the neutral) which is about 2,200 possibilities you’ll suddenly be in the right ballpark.

Ordering food using phono-semantics

Getting into the ballpark is all you need, especially if you know any of the characters around the character that you don’t know. This is what will allow you to really get away with bluffing! Say you are trying to order something on a menu like 干煸豆角.

This is the first thing I ordered by guessing a character. In this case I already knew 干， 豆 and 角 but not the 煸 (biǎn). I did however know that 篇 (“chapter”) was said piān and 遍 (measure word for “occurrence”) was pronounced biàn.

Recognizing the 扁 allowed an educated guess that the second character in 干煸豆角 was -ian and probably b or a p. I had no idea of the character so used a first tone (incorrectly). By using the guessed character in the context of the rest of the word though I was understood immediately and the dish was successfully ordered.

This may seem like cheating or at least fudging it a bit. And it is! But it’s a way to begin communicating in Chinese as quickly as possible. Instead of just pointing at the menu and saying “one of those please” I was able to give it a shot and be understood.

I then asked the waitress to repeat the word back for me, which allowed me to get the tone correct for next time. Much better than checking in the dictionary and disrupting the flow of communication or, much worse, not communicating at all!

I could go through lists of characters that have these phono-semantic pieces. However, because these characters make up 95% of the language I’d basically be delivering you a dictionary. I suggest you go play around in a dictionary that has decomposition abilities (Pleco or YellowBridge) or do some decompositions on HanziCraft to prove to yourself that this really exists.

As you become more familiar with using the pieces that make up Chinese characters you’ll become better and better at guessing both meaning and pronunciation. A virtuous cycle!

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The key with listening is to be able to process the vocabulary you are learning at conversational speed.

It’s not enough to just learn vocabulary and hope to pick it out whilst listening to a native speaker. You need to be able to do this fast. As fast as the speaker is talking.

How to build Chinese listening speed?

Listening resources tend to come in two flavours: either from textbooks or from native materials (TV, radio, youtube etc.)

Textbook audio goes nice and slowly and you’ll have a script (in the book) to read along with. It’s a good place to start.

Our goal however is to work towards native materials as this is closest to how native speakers communicate.

However it’s often difficult to find material that helps us move from basic textbook dialogues to conversational spoken Chinese.

I want to give you a few suggestions about this sort of material – material that helps us move from textbooks to conversation.

In Chinese we have 3 main options:

1. A conversation-based audio course
2. Chinesepod
3. FluentU

1. Conversation-based audio courses

These audio course are very different to textbooks: They don’t rely on written scripts, instead allowing us to focus on the sound of the spoken language.

This is especially important with Chinese because of pinyin, which is misleadingly similar to English and causes confusion. At the early stages it is important to “tune the ear” to the sound of Chinese without pinyin interfering too much!

There are two courses in particular that I recommend because they don’t rely on written pinyin but instead focus on spoken Chinese.

These are the Pimsleur course and the Michel Thomas course.

drpimsleur

michelthomas

Both use spaced-repetition to reinforce what has already been taught. By following the courses you’ll be constantly reinforcing what you’ve already learned. This is super important for listening – by reinforcing certain words and phrases by repeated listening they’ll be easy to hear in native conversation later. Your brain will be up to speed with these elements of the language already, allowing you to focus on other parts of the sentence that you don’t understand.

By making some parts of listening instinctual and automatic you free up more brain space for working out the parts you don’t know. This is the key to effective listening – nail down the basics until they become automatic. 

Pimsleur and Michel Thomas use the same basic method of listen/repeat, reinforced with spaced-repetition. The main difference is that Michel Thomas uses a “virtual classroom” approach – you as the listener are in “class” with two other students who are learning at the same time.

These students are on the recording so you can hear their difficulties. It makes the process more human than Pimsleur but it also means that there is less Chinese spoken per minute of audio. This is not a huge problem unless you are listening multiple times to a recording – at this point it becomes annoying.

Pimsleur on the other hand feels a lot more rigorous but also drier. It’s less human than Michel Thomas but the trade-off is that you’ll hear a lot more Chinese.

There are other notable mentions like Glossika and Assimil. Glossika is much better at the intermediate stage of learning to polish up listening skills through massive audio input. Assimil (a French method, less seen in the US than in Europe) is normally great but the Mandarin Chinese book/audio is one of the weakest in the series. Therefore I can’t recommend it.

All of these products have free samples. Rather than discuss the relative merits it is better if you go ahead and listen to the introductory lessons of each and see which style you prefer. If you find Pimsleur too dry you’ll like Michel Thomas. If Michel Thomas has too much filler for you then you’ll like Pimsleur.

In terms of pricing Pimsleur can get expensive, especially if you wanted all four levels. You can get a little bit off by using the code SAVENOW (10% off mp3 version and 25% off the CD version) but Pimsleur is still expensive!

Therefore definitely check out your local library. You can use WorldCat to check all the local libraries around you for a copy. For some reason public libraries seem to be well stocked with Pimsleur products so it’s normally easy to find a copy.

Michel Thomas is much more affordable. The first level is around $15 and is money well-spent for listening skill reinforcement.

You can get sample lessons at these sites:
Michel Thomas
Pimsleur (need email for sample) or Soundcloud (no email required via Lingholic)

2. Chinesepod

As Chinese learners we are very lucky to have Chinesepod. I’ve learned a lot of languages and few have such a rich listening resource as Chinese does with Chinesepod.

In short Chinesepod has a huge library of several thousand podcasts, ranging from absolute beginner to advanced native levels.

Most of the podcasts have a central dialogue, much like a textbook, but the real value comes from the discussion and explanation around the dialogue. The native Chinese hosts will explain a little about the language and give more context about the dialogue’s contents. Around the intermediate level all of this additional discussion is carried out in Chinese, which means the whole podcast is conducted in Chinese rather than slipping back into English.

If you use your email to sign-up for a free account you can get access to 100 lessons straight away. You can do that here: https://sensiblechinese.com/recommends/chinesepod

However, if you don’t want to even sign up for a free account there are some unlocked free lessons I’ve found for you. Those will give you a taste of the style and quality of the content and hopefully convince you that it is worth signing up for the free 100 lessons.

The free (no email needed) lessons are here: https://sensiblechinese.com/recommends/chinesepodfree/

3. FluentU

FluentU is a new kid on the block compared to the other methods I’ve been talking about.

If you haven’t seen it yet FluentU is basically Youtube with foreign language videos that have been carefully subtitled and ordered by difficulty.

If you’ve ever tried to find a Chinese video you can watch on Youtube (or Youku, the Chinese version) you’ll know it’s frustrating to find the right level of difficulty to match your level.

Also, lots of videos on Youtube won’t have subtitles or perhaps will have subtitles in Traditional whilst you are learning Simplified (or vice-versa).

FluentU has gone ahead and made the process of finding video content for language learning much easier. There’s lots of free content and you can sign up here: FluentU

Working with video is actually a smart way to improve your listening. Video gives you more context than audio alone – you can see the facial expressions and non-verbal clues of the people speaking which gives you more information.

Is this cheating? Not really – a lot of the time you’ll be talking to actual people in Chinese and you’ll have these non-verbal clues to rely on. Unless you intend on only using your Chinese on the phone video is a better learning tool than audio.

Like Chinesepod, FluentU has a lot of beginner’s material to help you get started. Where it really gets interesting though is when it moves into native material.

By analyzing this native material and the words used FluentU have managed to categorize by difficulty, meaning you can ease yourself into native material much more gradually than if you simply turn on Chinese TV. This is invaluable.

Summing Up

These resources will give you enough material to take your listening from beginner to advanced native level.

In what order should you tackle the material? It’s really up to your preferences but I’ll give you my personal suggestion:

1. Michel Thomas Introduction ($15)
2. Pimsleur I (library)
3. Newbie level Chinesepod/Beginner FluentU (free)
4. Pimsleur II/III (library)
5. Continue with Chinesepod and/or FluentU (subscription)
6. Native material 

Working with audio from different sources may seem messy. Actually, it is messy. But that’s what you need to help reinforce your listening ability!

Talking with native speakers is messy. They’ll have different accents, different speeds. Sometimes they’ll have bad colds! They won’t always sound like crystal clear textbook recordings.

Getting used to variety of spoken language (by working with a whole bunch of different resources) will prepare you for this randomness.

Also, working from different methods at different points in your study will stop you getting bored. The very idea of sitting down and working from Pimsleur Level I to level III bores me. Being able to switch back and forward keeps your learning interesting, makes you more likely to stick at it and reach fluency.

What are your experiences with these or any other listening materials? What do you find difficult about Chinese listening? I’d love to hear in the comments! 

The post Chinese Listening Resources appeared first on Sensible Chinese.

In a language that uses an alphabet (like English, French or German) we can simply look up words in alphabetical order. We just need to now the order of the alphabet which, thankfully, in most European languages mirrors the a,b,c,d we learn in English.

In Chinese though we have to work out how to look up a character. This is a much trickier proposition. Indeed using a paper dictionary in Chinese is difficult.

The basic process requires knowing the main radical (“piece”) of the character and then counting the remaining strokes. For example 好 has the 女 radical + 3 additional strokes (the three strokes of 子). We’d then look in the 女 + 3 section of the dictionary to find 好.

Honestly, it’s a pain. In fact it is so challenging that Chinese school children have competition to see who can find characters the fastest in a dictionary! When something is tricky enough to become a competitive sport then it’s probably a beginner probably doesn’t want to concern themselves too much with!

Getting started in Chinese is hard enough. We already have new pronunciation, tones and the characters to deal with. Let’s not add to the early “hump” by torturing ourselves with a paper based dictionary.

Making life easier: Digital Dictionaries

Let’s make life a little easier and give ourselves more time to focus on communicating in Chinese rather than poring through a dictionary!

Electronic dictionaries make looking up Chinese much. much easier.

If you are using a computer to look up characters then the website mdbg.net and Pin Pin Dictionary are your friends. They are both free and will cover all of your desktop computer-based needs.

Pin Pin Dictionary

MDGB.net

However, ideally you need a dictionary that you can look up characters and words with on-the-fly. Hands-down the best mobile (iPhone and Android) dictionary is Pleco.

The basic Pleco dictionary is free and there are a number of upgrades to extend Pleco’s functionality. The upgrades seem expensive but when compared to the cost of a paper based dictionary (rather than comparing the $0.99 app pricing!) then the value is clearer.

Pleco is the only Chinese app I use on a daily basis and I can’t recommend it enough. I’m not the only one who raves about Pleco though. In this survey of the top Chinese language learning bloggers/websites Pleco comes out as a clear “must-have”: How to Learn Chinese: 50+ Top Bloggers tell You How

Once you have Pleco how do you actually go about looking up a character?

There are a couple of different situations here:

1. You know the English and want to find the Chinese

2. You know the Chinese pronunciation

3. You only know the Chinese character

English to Chinese

In the first case, where you know the English, looking up characters is easy. You simply type in the English and Pleco will spit out Chinese words and characters that match.

One problem here is that Chinese often has many characters for each English word. You’ll see this reduplication a lot in Chinese and it’s hard to tell which Chinese character you should be using. The dictionary will tell you all of the characters that translate to the English concept but this will include classical usage, literary usage, spoken usage, informal slang usage etc. etc. This makes it tricky to tell which characters to use.

You could look up the frequency (ie. how “common” the character is) in a tool like hanzicraft.com but honestly this is a little too much trouble and the results are often inaccurate. The best way to check which character to use is to…you guessed it…ask a native Chinese speaker!

Use HelloTalk or iTalki or some other free service to connect with a speaking partner. A native will be able to guide you to the correct characters in seconds.

Chinese pronunciation to character

The second case is quite simple. This is where you’ve heard a word in speech and want to look up and check which characters are being used in this particular word.

To do so you can search in Pleco using pinyin. If you heard 你好 nǐhǎo and wanted to check the characters you can simply type nihao into Pleco and you’ll get what you are looking for.

If you can give tone information then Pleco will be able to narrow down the character results. To do this tap the numbers at the top of the Pleco keyboard to add tone markers. nǐhǎo would therefore be typed as ni3hao3. This sort of search will remove all the other words that have different tones.

Chinese character only

This is the most interesting function of digital dictionaries. Let’s say you see a new item on a Chinese menu and don’t know its meaning or how to pronounce it. What do you do?

A few years ago, unless you were carrying around your paper dictionary, you’d be in trouble.

Now you can whip out Pleco and draw the character on screen using your finger tip.

To do so you need the handwriting recognizing module. At the time of writing the small version is free and the full-screen version is a paid add-on. You can also use your phone’s built in handwriting recognition if you have your phone set up for Chinese characters. Here’s an article about doing just that if you have not yet.

Even if you don’t know the stroke order and the character looks an absolute mess chances are Pleco will guess which character you mean. Pleco will present a number of different options that it thinks you are writing and you just pick out the matching character to get its dictionary entry.

One very nice (paid) addition is the OCR or optical character recognition. This turns your phone’s camera into a Chinese character reader. You capture the Chinese characters in your viewfinder and Pleco will automatically translate what it sees. It’s pretty magical and it’s better to see in action rather than read my explanation. Here’s an old official video from Pleco – the features are actually more robust and user friendly now so think this + 100% extra magic sauce:

Summing Up

You can save hours of your life by using a digital rather than a paper based Chinese dictionary. With those saved hours you can spend more time using and enjoying the Chinese language.

My earliest and most oft-repeated advice to early beginners is to download Pleco and learn how to use it ASAP. You’ll use it countless times over your Chinese learning journey and be thankful that you got it so early!

Image source: https://flic.kr/p/5YTZAG with added text-overlay. Share-a-like Creative Commons.

The post How to Use a Chinese Dictionary appeared first on Sensible Chinese.

I’m a big fan of Chinese typing as it allows you to start communicating in written Chinese really fast. Getting to a similar level of communicative ability using handwriting can take many months if not years.

The process of typing in Chinese generally surprises people – it is very simple. Typing in Chinese is generally called 打拼音 dǎ pīnyīn (to type pinyin).

The basic idea is that you simply type the pinyin of the characters you want to write and then select the characters as they pop on screen. This is much like predictive text in English, as you type a word like C-h-i- your phone might throw up the suggestion “Chinese”.

In Chinese if you simply type n-i-h-a-o your phone/computer will suggest 你好. In fact you can even take shortcuts and type n-h and get the same result.

The ease and speed improvement over written characters means that the vast, vast majority of written correspondence in China is typed. This makes perfect sense. Apart from note taking, signing your name, birthday cards and maybe shopping lists chances are you don’t hand-write in English all that much. And even if you do the volume of handwritten to typed is likely very low.

So – don’t be afraid of typing in Chinese. It’s how Chinese native speakers communicate via the written word and it’ll allow you to start communicating ASAP. In fact, immediately, today!

I want to cover two things:

1. How to Set up a Chinese keyboard

2. How to start using your new Chinese keyboard immediately

Setting up a Chinese keyboard

How you set up your keyboard depends on what device you are using. Also, these instructions will inevitably change over time as software updates. As such here are a couple of links to keyboard set up for the main devices. I’ll update these links as the software is updated.

iPhone (Official instructions) / iPhone Step by Step (Also applicable for iPad)

Android

Macintosh

Windows 10 / Windows 8 / Windows 7

How to start using your Chinese keyboard immediately

Now you have your nice new keyboard set up how to start using it?

If you are on iPhone/Android I’d recommend you download HelloTalk.

HelloTalk is totally FREE app for language exchange. Short text messages are used as the main form of communication making this a great place to start testing out your keyboard.

Most excitingly though you’ll get responses! This means you can start using the written Chinese language to actually communicate immediately. Very cool stuff indeed – not requiring weeks practicing your handwriting and having only a Chinese teacher reading your work.

Instead you can communicate with real people right now. This is how you can genuinely acquire a language fast. So don’t hang around – grab the app and you can send your first 你好 in minutes. Just type “nihao” and select the 你好 characters and you’ve started!

If you are on a PC/Mac then the best alternative right now is Lang-8. Lang-8 is another free language exchange platform that allows you to write and receive corrections from native speakers.

Go ahead and sign up and use your new keyboard to write your first entry – just introduce yourself using whatever Chinese you know. Copy a script from Lesson 1 of your textbook if that helps but adapt it to introduce yourself.

Whatever platform you use it’s important to start practicing with your Chinese keyboard. This will help you get a feel for how much you can type before the predictive ability of the software gives us.

In some cases you will be able to write whole sentences, in others you’ll only manage a couple of characters before having to select the correct meaning. Play around with the keyboard through actual usage and you’ll get a feel for it very quickly.

The post How to Type in Chinese appeared first on Sensible Chinese.

Here’s a video to go along with the ideas in the article:

All three of these steps are totally free and will form the foundation of a great speaking practice habit.

These three steps are:

Each of these steps takes less than 2 minutes to complete. Just by completing these three small actions today you’ll have set yourself up for success in your spoken Chinese studies.

Let’s look at all three and flesh out your action plan.

Step 1: Commit to Speaking from Day 1

“Speaking from Day 1” is a concept I’m cribbing from Benny Lewis, the Irish Polyglot.

One of Benny’s critically important messages for language learners is to get away from your textbooks ASAP and start speaking to native speakers.

In fact it’s only when you start talking to native language speaker that you can really start to learn the language. Everything else is either a waste of time or at the very best vastly inefficient compared to talking with native speakers.

Following this logic the best time to start speaking Chinese with native speakers is… Day 1!

And if you have been studying and haven’t yet started speaking with Chinese native speakers then the best day to start speaking to them is… today! Not tomorrow, not some time next week and certainly not “after I’ve studied more Chinese”. The best time is right now.

It’s only by making mistakes and receiving correction and feedback that you can ever hope to improve. This is in fact the definition of learning –  learning is really a process of getting stuff wrong, receiving a correction and doing better next time.

So right now I want you to commit to the idea of speaking to native speakers.

If you want to get over the blocks and fear you might feel when thinking about this then Benny Lewis has a free email based course that is worth your time.

It’s a series of daily emails to bust through the fear and get you talking, no matter your level. You can get the free email course here.

I bet you feel resistance to the idea of speaking with a Chinese person in Chinese today. In your head it’ll be rationalized as “I’m not ready” or “I need to study more” or “I won’t be understood”.

These are ways of your brain rationalizing the fear of trying something new, something that will be difficult. But talking with Chinese people in Chinese is the only way you are ever going to learn Chinese. The sooner you get over the resistance and starting the talking the faster you will reach your language goals.

Action #1

So your action point right now is to make the simple decision: “I will speak Chinese today”.

If you aren’t ready for this (you are, you just don’t know it yet) then your action point today is to sign up to get the free email course mentioned above.

That course will bust straight through your resistance and get you to a place of confidence where you can declare that “I will speak Chinese today”. Then and only then should you move to Step 2.

Step 2: Download HelloTalk

Now that you’ve made the decision that you will speak Chinese today you need someone to speak to!

If you have Chinese friends or family around you good job! Start talking to them in Chinese today.

If you don’t (or even if you do!) grab your phone and download HelloTalk.

You can download the app and set up a free account in a few minutes and have at your fingertips thousands if not tens of thousands of Chinese speakers looking for language exchange.

To learn more about the functionality and best practices for HelloTalk check this review/guide over on I Will Teach You a Language.

Once you are set up with the app, start speaking! And no cheating here – remember we’ve pledged that we will be speaking; not typing which is much easier!

In the bottom right of the chat screen there’s a small icon of a microphone. Tap that to bring up the recording interface. Tap record, speak Chinese, tap send and that’s it – you’ve successfully spoken in Chinese to a Chinese native. Job done!

The time from reading this article to successfully sending a voice message to a Chinese native can be done in less than 5 minutes.

Do it now. 5 minutes from now you would have achieved your goal of speaking Chinese today.

Technology has made it possible to talk to people anywhere in the world instantly so the excuse of “oh, well there are no Chinese speakers in my area” is no longer allowed!

Action #2

So your action point is to download HelloTalk on your phone, set up an account and send your first message.

Step 3: Set up an iTalki account

HelloTalk is amazing for short informal chats you can fit in during your normal life. But you’ll also need to practice speaking for more extended period of time. This is where the wonderful iTalki comes in.

iTalki is similar to HelloTalk in that it gives you access to thousands of native Chinese speakers who want to talk to you.

It’s different to HelloTalk in because the normal way of communicating is via a Skype call. This means the interaction is longer than simple voice messages sent back and forth on HelloTalk.

This extended interaction is a better way to practice your spoken Chinese because in most cases you’ll be using Chinese in extended conversations rather than 30 second bursts. Always make sure your practice matches your language goals!

iTalki is totally free to use for finding conversation exchange partners and very cheap for finding professional teachers ($5-10/hour).

Once you’ve set up an account and a profile the friend and language exchange requests will come flooding in – just take some time to go through them and arrange some times to talk. These extended Skype sessions with language exchange partners are the fastest way to get practicing immediately and reach communicative fluency.

Action #3

Your action point right now is simply to head over to iTalki.com to set up an account.

If you are serious about learning spoken Chinese these are the three single most effective steps you can take today.

Each will take less than 5 minutes and all are totally free.

Therefore the excuses of “not enough time!” and “not enough money!” no longer work.

Taking these three steps will put you on the path to Chinese spoken fluency. So, what are you waiting for?

Action #1 : Decide that you will Speak Chinese today. If you keep making excuses get the free email course mentioned above and break the resistance.

Action #2: Download HelloTalk on your phone.

Action #3: Head over to iTalki.com to set up an account.

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