If I Had to Learn Chinese Again From Scratch, Here's What I'd Do
Video Overview & Insights
Here are all the things I would change if I had to learn Mandarin all over again.
I am a Chinese person who wants to learn English. Therefore, I hope to find a foreign friend who also wants to learn Chinese. If you are interested, please reply to me. Thank you
Want to learn Chinese? Get textbooks + character notebooks + graded readers + other resources here: https://amzn.to/4oPTbjM
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I am starting today to learn basic conversational Chinese
MORE VIDEOS:
My Chinese language learning journey: https://youtu.be/tnYNI3iPtBw
You Chinese ivery very good.For my in Chinese.
Speaking ONLY Chinese for 3 mins: https://youtu.be/fu1cMPnhYzM
Why I think Chinese is easy (compared to English): https://youtu.be/LXo-qhzUb1o
When I learned Mandarin alone at home in 1992-1995, I only had tapes and a recording machine, with a workbook. I was listening to a dialogue or sentences, repeating and recording myself. The self-correction (hearing myself and correcting) works great. I used to record many times until I sounded as the original. Later, I did that with English at uni and if I had learned English like this in school, I would have such a better English accent! (I'm French)
大叔中文 Dashu Mandarin Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/0tm8TaWeI5DGLQIs5siFLk
聊聊东西 Talk to Me in Chinese: https://open.spotify.com/show/31VvYsaas7ijlHhR2dqB25
i dont recommend italky, hellotalk, tandem. My experience, we are hard to build connection there since they also have lot of of options, and just dissapear. Also the conversation might be less topic (usually only introduce ourselves and generic topics). Better to use AI or learn in random topics (in chinese community learning, or courses) since we need to learn broader topics. So no italki, that's bullshit
ChinesePod: https://open.spotify.com/show/2WfRQRTZ2ZzEx3SjdTDFjw
Chapters:
加油加油
0:00 Intro
0:51 Pronunciation
I plan to learn this in 3 months 😅
2:32 Chinese Characters
3:50 Reading
i lile your chinese its pleasant to hear
5:18 Speaking
6:51 Listening
Those are excellent points. However, what is the ultimate purpose of learning them? As people age, characters are easily forgotten, even by native Chinese speakers. Ultimately, if you are learning from scratch, it is essential to have a clear objective.
8:09 Outro
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There is so much AI and clickbait to filter on the tubes, it can be frustrating. Your looking for a vid that gets right to the point (no annoying intro), and provides helpful, useful info without a sales pitch. This was that, so thanks.
#chinese #mandarin #languagelearning #selfstudy #learnchinese #speakchinese #中文 #汉语
Great video!! I'd like to add a few things on grammar & Vocabulary to encourage new learners.
- For speakers of Indo-European languages, the grammar feels strange at first because Chinese doesn’t really have conjugation, tense endings, grammatical gender, case, or normal plural inflection. Words generally don’t change shape. Instead, a lot of grammatical meaning is handled through word order, particles, aspect markers, and function words like 了、过、着、的, etc. In that sense, Chinese grammar can almost feel like Markdown: the “formatting markers” do a lot of the grammatical work. For the verbs/nouns itself, you only need to learn its original form, there's nothing to conjugate.
- Vocabulary is similar. Chinese characters look very intimidating at first, but after you know maybe 2,000–3,000 common characters, many new words become guessable because advanced vocabulary is often built from basic Chinese morphemes. Unlike English, where many advanced words come from Latin, Greek, or French roots, Chinese technical words are often compounds made from familiar characters.
what i am ultimately suggesting is that Chinese starts hard, but after the initial wall, the difficulty curve can actually decline a lot. The beginning is brutal, but the system becomes more logical the deeper you go.
More User Perspectives
Stumbled across your video. The first thing you highlight is your "pronounciation". Literally your first problem right there. I burst out laughing and stopped watching. I wonder, are you the sort of person who says "lie-berry" instead of "library", or "excape" instead of "escape", too? Because yes, that can definitely get in the way.
@greggchambers9716I am not fluent in Mandarin. I do better in Spanish.
@angelachanelhuang1651As a native Chinese speaker, I plan to teach Chinese online for free in my spare time. Feel free to reach out if you are interested. Besides, English and Chinese teachers are welcome to cooperate with me. I have many friends who want to learn English.
@PipinoMakati-i3mI actually started with Audio courses by Pimsleur, ChinesePod and Paul Noble for about a year before I attended my first formal Chinese language course and I must say that my self-study was much more effective than the course.
@PopDasKornI'm a native Chinese. I'm learning English. If you're a native English speaker, we can help each other.
@fuzijunguitarPronunciation, not pronounciation, great points!
@crybllrdI think "Chinese comprehensible input" is the best way. Every little child learns the mother tongue by this method: hearing, listening, again and again. There are a lot of YouTube videos about this. The most natural way ...
@ulrichgeiger9351Excellent Chinese. But in English the word is "proNUNciation", NOT "pronunciation".
@JMaxwell1000My problem is the tones, I could never get them right😭
@sammiixbro，Your pronunciation is already very standard，how did you learn so well?
@吴磊吴-q8wI’m learning Chinese as well
@oliviaarteaga4092Thank you very much!
@JackieHamilton51Such an insightful video. Absolutely agree on choosing the right reading material. As I teach Chinese, I would always recommend news articles with strong elements of culture so you're getting the sentence structure, vocab, the general zeitgeist and current cultural slang (they change so quickly!) all in one
@getkamomiDo you (or anyone on this channel) notice any difference between people who can speak well and the amound of characters they know? Because I've memorized a lot of characters but my speaking lags behind. Personally I concentrated on character recognition because it helps me see patterns and I need the characters for reading signs, filling out forms and general navigation.. Some say that we should learn words and not individual characters, I say both. And I have fun memorizing characters. Oh and let me point out that learing 2,3 or 5 characters a day does not work because once you've gotten to 300+ words and characters you have to review, and the more charaters you learn the longer it takes you to review because you will forget many.
@ModernMandarinExcellent tips. Thank you! And for the love of god, it's pronunciation not pronounciation.
@FacesofEvil666❤❤
@Wanggenxue12Tess youre amazing! Thank you
@ns1999-r6pgot spanish down, moving to chinese
@coopa_troopa0192Even coming from a Korean background where we share a long history with Chinese characters, I still find Chinese highly challenging—it’s like a whole different game.
It's so impressive that you’ve managed to master it as a native English speaker! ❤
woah
@Paul20661From a Chinese perspective, I think your Chinese is already very good, and your pronunciation is very standard! If you talk about areas that need to be improved, mention a little bit of areas that need improvement: 1) It is too standard and lacks some more everyday colloquial expressions; 2) The speed of speech is slower than that of the Chinese; To achieve the above two points, there is basically no difference from the Chinese.
@dugang139Starting today! Thank you so much ❤🎉
@thecreativesparks-fly我要中国人朋友。 请
@kazu7108I have to read chinese novels directly from the source,I have to learn
@moonprincess0000im a Chinese native speaker I cannnnnn helpppp anybody wants to talk to me ? :3
@chloeeeee-o8fAny chinese who wants to learn english and teach chinese instead?
@_Monazza_I am fluent in English, and kick starting my journey to learn Mandarin. Anyone up to be mutual tutor?
@Schanyong-np5uq说实话，说的很好了
@Martine-t7jI'll come back in a year to see by future me
@CallmeDawiiiThe irony of pronouncing pronunciation as pronounciation ^_^ just teasing
@CivilDefenseEngineerOK, but how would you perfect your pronunciation? It's not actually that helpful to say, "If I were to learn Chinese again, I would simply do it perfectly this time." I don't study Chinese, but if I did, I would want to know a) what the most difficult problems are and b) how to tackle them effectively.
@ultimaforsan899honestly chinese is the hardest language ever
@chinese_mercyyou clearly have Australian accent, but you use that murican vocal fry at the end of the sentences, which is annoying AZ HE11!!! Please, stop for the love of God!
@FULLTILTSWIFFHi there! I'm a beginner in English from China. I'm eager to practice my spoken English. If you're interested, please contact me!
@gaoxiao-x4sSo Bess, rather than sharing how you would do this or that differently, if you were to start over from scratch, how about put your money in your mouth and take your own advice by learning a new language that is of interest to you! Then make a follow up video on that new language!
@JFox29i restarted my mandarin learning since march 1st and what am i doing it first learning the characters in traditional way... plz let me know if i can do anything else to. speed it up
@sheakespeare100so i should learn to read write speak and listen? seriously? thats all? thanks for narrowing it down. holy nothingburger
@grqfesHi I am a native Chinese and I am working on my English. I use whatsapp, facebook and instagram.
@zikanglei7777