How to speak fluent Mandarin Chinese

Hello all,

some of my friends have been asking me to provide a more detailed explanation on how to learn Mandarin Chinese but at the time I didn’t feel competent enough to give any advice because I wasn’t fluent enough myself and I had to wait to find out what actually worked for me and what didn’t.

There is unfortunately no step-by-step manual on how to become fluent in Mandarin Chinese, but I will try to write down in brief what I think worked for me. Goes without saying that what worked for me might not work for the next person and this is really only my personal opinion based on my own experience and the experience of other students I know.

Without any specific order of importance, these are the key points that helped me learn Mandarin Chinese to Advanced fluency:

Mandarin studies review after having changed my approach - 1 year

It's been quite a while, since I made a language related entry into my blog and since it's been around a year since I changed my approach to my Mandarin studies so I thought it might be a good time to review a little and see where I stand with Mandarin at this point in time.

It's almost unbelievable that I can say this, but I feel my Mandarin is finally getting somewhere! It's been more than a year and a half since I've been in Taiwan and more than a year since I've completely changed my approach and I think it has definitely paid off. When I speak Mandarin now, I am not tired at all, I don't think about pronunciation and often I can choose from more than a couple of ways of how to say the same thing. The sentences that I produce - since I repeat what I hear around me, are structurally Mandarin-spot on and after such a long time, I finally start getting the gist of the logic of Mandarin and can improvise in situations where I haven't heard or said similar sentences/sentence structures before. I finished reading a 12 book series of 死亡筆記本 and towards the end of the series (book 10,11,12), when I got used to the vocabulary I was reading it almost at natural speed, which made me incredibly happy. Now I'm reading a fat 400 page detective story (黑暗的回聲) and try to keep a pace of 40 pages a day without a dictionary. Well, see how that goes. I usually understand every word when it comes to direct speech dialogues in these books. When it comes to descriptive sections, sometimes I understand every word, sometimes just enough to get the gist and sometimes I don't get the entire sentence.

Hiking in Taiwan - 陽明山 (Yangming mountain)

I went to Yangming mountain last week but took no camera and was later pretty sad, because there were some nice things worth taking pictures of. Since the place is not that far from Taipei city, I decided to go there again, just to take some pictures and try a different route.

陽明山 (Yangming mountain) is actually a complex of hills and peaks with the main peak called Qixing peak which is 1120 m above the sea level and the view from it is quite nice. It took me around an hour to get from the Yangming mountain station tourist center to the top, but I was taking pictures and resting so I think it could be done in 30-40 minutes of active walking.

The last time I went there I started at the Miaopu entrance, hiked all the way up to the Qixing peak and went down the other side to Xiaoyoukeng  and then took the bus back to the Yangming mountain terminal station. This time I started at the same place, but then went to Lengshuikeng, because I heard there’s nice waterfall there. The waterfall was nice, but unfortunately there was a fence and signs saying that it was dangerous to approach it. Being as hot as it was, that waterfall could’ve made my day. The waterfall started a nice little stream which eventually turned into a river. The hiking trails were always far up high from the stream, so it seemed impossible to get closer to it at first,  but I managed to find a small entrance, got off the hiking trail and made my way through the jungle directly to the river. I was so sad that I didn’t have river tracing shoes, because I would’ve traced the stream right back to the waterfall. On the other hand, I was alone and pretty far from the hiking trail, the rocks were slippery so I think it’s a better idea to go there next time.

Hiking in Taiwan - 紅淡山 (Hongdan mountain)

In a desperate attempt to escape the Taipei city pollution and noise (and boredom), after my last week's trip to the wonderful 陽明山 (Yangming mountain) and inspired by the this fantastic blog by Stu Dawson, I decided to start discovering the Taiwanese mountains and jungle on a regular basis! A lot of Taiwanese would laugh and say that there is no jungle in Taiwan, but compared to where I come from, what they have here definitely IS jungle :)

My plan is to climb a different mountain every week (well...... that's the plan) so hopefully I will write an article about 陽明山 later. My ultimate goal is to go to the top of the tallest mountains in Taiwan. There are 164 mountains/peaks that are taller than 3000 meters in Taiwan, with 玉山 (Jade mountain) being the tallest mountain in East Asia and the 4th tallest mountain on an island. There are so many things to see here, I can't believe I've been in Taiwan for such a long time and I've been missing out on all of this.

Learning a difficult language – Part 2.

Learning a difficult language – Mandarin, Part 2.

By Vladimir Skultety MA., BC.

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For more information see Part 1

Pronunciation

Mandarin pronunciation is difficult and important at the same time. Mandarin is a syllabic language. Every syllable is a morpheme, so simply put every syllable has a meaning (please see typology of Chinese for further info). But what makes Mandarin pronunciation so difficult and important? It is difficult, because almost every sound in Mandarin within the syllables is different from the sounds we have in our European languages so you have to learn how to pronounce and recognize a whole deal of new sounds. Some sounds differ only slightly, some I cannot get down until the present day. And why is pronunciation important? Because as I mentioned since every syllable in Mandarin is a bearer of information and words usually consist of only one or two syllables, even a slight change in sound that you might not notice as a beginner might make others not understand you. It is not the problem of not being able to get your point across, it is the problem of not being understood at all. If you mumble a word in a western language or mispronounce a great deal of it, because of the fact, that western language words are usually pretty long and not every syllable is a bearer of information, you have a very high chance of being understood, but since Mandarin words are so short, every sound counts.

Vast unknown vocabulary

Learning a difficult language – Part 1.

Learning a difficult language – Mandarin

By Vladimir Skultety MA., BC.

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Table of contents

Introduction

General reasons

The difference of Mandarin

Inner logic of Mandarin

Specific reasons

Sounds

Tones

Pronunciation

Vast unknown vocabulary

Grammar

Writing system
Memorizing characters
Hand-writing characters

Conclusion

Introduction

Hello everyone and welcome to my podcast. First of all I’d like to apologize, for the fact, that it took me a while to upload this article, but there are a number of reasons for that. I originally wanted to continue my recordings with the “Learning intermediate languages” series, but didn’t have that much inspiration in the past few weeks and had much better ideas for a recording about difficult languages instead, so in the following series I would like to talk about learning difficult languages. Unfortunately since Mandarin is the only difficult language I’ve learned, these episodes will be about Mandarin only and will relate to learning difficult languages as a whole only to a certain extent. Another reason for publishing my recording so late is, that I didn’t want to record an episode only for the sake of putting something online and as it takes me some time to write a presentable article, it took me almost 3 weeks to publish this one. In this first episode of the Learning a difficult language series, I will try to talk a little about what I personally think makes a language difficult and why I consider Mandarin to be a difficult language. In the episodes to come, if possible, I will try to look back at my studies and step by step develop a learning strategy for us westerners on how to learn Mandarin from scratch which will be based on listening and speaking only.

溫人之周

I didn’t write any Classical Chinese text analyses for quite a while and I thought I’d analyze this following text from the book 戰國策 – The Warring states, which is called 溫人之周 – A man from the state of Wen went to Zhou. I like the story which if you are a bit familiar with the history of the Warring states has this nice contemporary feel. The grammar can get a bit complicated but still relatively easy compared to some of the more difficult texts in Classical Chinese (the unreadable 易經 for instance).

Text:

溫人之周

溫人之周，周不納客。問之曰：客耶？ 對曰：主人。問其巷而不知也，吏因囚之，君使人問之曰：子非周人也，而自謂非客，何也？對曰：臣少而誦詩。曰：普天之下，莫非王土；率土之濱，莫非王臣。今君天子，則我天子之臣也。豈有為人之臣而又為之客哉？故曰：主人也。君使出之。

Learning a simple language - Part 3

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Hello everyone,

last week I did a recording on how I would learn a simple language (Slovene) and because the recording got a little bit too long, I divided it into two parts. This is the second part of the recording. Enjoy.

1. The reason for doing all of this listening work is to be able to understand 95% of everything that is said before you go to Slovenia. Like I said in the earlier recordings, speaking is something that you can only learn well in the country where the language is spoken (for the most part) and so you eventually will have to go there anyway but this way you will save lots and lots of time and energy.
2. I would continue listening to the newscasts until I get to a point where I would not need a dictionary anymore, because I would understand the words that I hadn’t heard before out of context. And I would just keep listening to the newscasts for the pleasure of listening and information itself and get deeper into the language. Understand how some of the more complicated wordings are used, under what circumstances and so on.

Learning a simple language - Part 2

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I said in the last recording that the language learning process should be natural and no “textbook science” should be used to explain it to the learner as I think language learning is no science just a very natural process that should be expanded to its maximal potential and I think the brain should do most of the work on its own. This doesn’t mean that one should not take the advantage of all the shortcuts to help him understand the language better and learn it faster. These shortcuts – grammar tables, word lists, mnemonics, sound recorder and so on can speed up the process a lot. In this recording I would like expand this thought a little and in order to make it as demonstrative as possible, I would like to talk about how I would go about learning a simple language, because I think explaining something on a specific example is the best thing to do.

1. First of all I would not learn a language just to learn a language. I mean there has to be more to it than just to learn a language for the sake of learning so if I were to start learning a new language I would already have a very good reason to do it like for instance I really liked a song in that language, or the culture of Japanese manga and so on, because correct and lasting motivation is very very important.
2. As we are talking about learning a simple language, let's say I would like to learn Slovenian, because when I was in Slovenia it was fascinating to turn on the Slovene radio and feeling like they were speaking Slovak I just didn’t understand anything. I loved the sound of the language, the signs written in Slovene and so on. I also for instance heard that Slovenian is one of the most conservative Slavic languages in terms of grammar, which all is quite a good motivation to start with. Learning a language for securing a better financial future is not enough.

Learning a simple language

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Hello everyone,

as I said many many times, I am very sure that there are people out there who have much more experience with language learning or language tutoring than me and I do not consider myself to be an expert in this field at all. People sometimes ask me, how to start learning a foreign language, but truly, I don't know how to answer and I really don't think that I am the most competent person to do so too. I have not read any book on how people learn or should learn languages, and I have only some teaching experience. The few things that I've read about how we learn languages or new things in general were mostly online and almost everything that I've learned myself I learned by trying and trying until something eventually worked (doing a lot of thinking during the trial and error process of course), so I don't know how many people would be interested in listening to my rants on language learning, since they only might work for me and might not work for the next person.

But, maybe there will be someone out there who might get some new ideas from what I say and I can be only happy about that so I will try to make this small introduction to language learning today, starting with a "how to learn a simple language" podcast. Enjoy.

Continue to Part II.