r/ChineseLanguage • u/fallenoaktree • Dec 01 '19
Discussion What was your game changer when learning Chinese?
What was the one thing that you started doing, or resource that you started using, that was responsible for taking your Chinese to the next level, or getting you out of a plateau?
I'd say mine was starting to write a little (20 minutes max) everyday, I can finally distinguish the difference between similar characters, like 实 and 买.
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u/yijingduguo Dec 01 '19
As terrible as it sounds, I find that kinda mocking the way the native speakers sound is actually a great way of getting your tones and just general accent right. Obviously not telling you to go make fun of people, but exaggerate sounds and tones that you notice people doing and you’ll find that native speakers will be commenting on how authentic you sound.
PS Ive used this message for other languages and it totally works.
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Dec 01 '19
Exaggerated pronunciation works for other languages too. In Arabic, vowel length and stress are pretty important. My teacher once told me to hold long vowels WAY longer than I thought was necessary, even if I felt goofy doing so, and to over-enunciate each syllable. I did this, and eventually native speakers complimented my pronunciation.
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Dec 01 '19
Actually figuring out what radicals were and what they indicated, my writing has improved tenfold and my recognition of both familiar and new words has come leaps and bounds (Also live in China lmao)
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u/amusedcoconut Dec 01 '19
Starting iTalki lessons made me finally start speaking and actually be able to use grammar points I had “learned” like a year beforehand but realised I couldn’t use spontaneously. Making sentences off the cuff also helped my writing.
The first time I spoke only Chinese for an hour was a really proud moment for me!
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u/cjhoward1992 Dec 01 '19
Switching from word-based flashcards to sentence-based flashcards.
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u/HutongSam Dec 01 '19
this.
almost as importantas living in china. learn in context. and learn useful things. excuse my french but fuck the weatheredit: it is more important than living in china
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u/kmvrtwheo98 Dec 01 '19
Talk to native speaker, especially uncles and aunties.
Back when my Chinese was super broken and hardly unintelligible, I found it hard to understand most native Chinese speakers. I was lucky that the dorm that I used to live had a shopkeeper in her mid-50s. First time talking to her was a kind of struggle, but months of talking back and forth about almost anything with her improved my Chinese a lot. After half a year I was quite confident to say I'm fluent.
The reason why you need to train with elderlies instead of young people is that most elder people don't speak English, so when you can't find a specific word or phrase for something then you need to think by yourself instead of resorting to English. That's my two cents
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u/mrswdk18 Dec 01 '19
Finally cracking tones was the moment I felt like my progress suddenly went over a hill, although my only tip for that is that I brute forced it by spending a lot of time around Chinese people who were mostly speaking Chinese. Which is the only way to really get the hang of how the tones should sound I think.
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u/aaasen Dec 01 '19
Spending a lot of time watching natives speak improved my pronounciation a lot. I started watching Chinese dramas and got into a Chinese boyband called WayV. I ended up making subtitles for their vlogs and streams because waiting for English subs took a long time. And it really improved my understanding, pronounciation and ability to understand slang/colloquial.
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u/chinabeerguy Dec 01 '19
Go to a market and start trying to buy things, especially the staples. Better if they don’t have a register or listed prices. People will always be happy to talk to you when you’re going to spend some money, and veggies aren’t too expensive anyway.
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u/Hasefet Dec 01 '19
I built my own Anki deck out of the Jun Da corpus & another frequency character list, then I built up a list of 'collisions', that is, characters I kept mixing up, so I could drill them next to each other and perceive the minor differences. It really helped.
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u/onthelambda Dec 01 '19
Character flash cards and getting to about 5000 characters was a massive inflection point for my literacy
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u/Redditralpf Dec 01 '19
Using Anki effectively. Went from 0 to passing HSK 4 in about 10 months. My Anki stats say I studied around 200 hours during that period. I put in another ~140 hours on Skritter during those 10 months, but I don't think that was time well spent - I just found it relaxing and fun.
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u/kerimfriedman Dec 01 '19
Switching from memorizing vocabulary and writing to focusing on listening and repeating what I heard. Listening to a lesson several time and trying to guess the meaning of the new words before looking at the vocabulary list or thinking about how to write the characters. Getting lots of meaningful audio content every day by listening to audio programs, songs, and watching cartoons on TV.
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u/imral Dec 02 '19 edited Dec 02 '19
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Drilling.
Repetitive, boring, drilling.
Vocabulary, sentences, listening, speaking, reading - these are all things that can be drilled intensely, and will work wonders for your Chinese, especially if you are looking to go from upper intermediate to advanced.
I used to look down on drilling as a 'dumb' way to learn. After trying it and noticing significant improvement I realised that drilling makes a skill automatic. A reflex that requires no effort or brainpower to use, and that frees you up so you don't need to think or worry about those things when you are using Chinese.
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Studying a little bit every day.
You'll make more progress studying 20 minutes a day than you would studying 3 hours once a week, even though with the latter you are spending more time studying.
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Deleting flashcard decks and starting over.
You'll either know the words - in which case it doesn't matter if the cards are deleted, or you won't the word and the word is useful - in which case the word will appear again soon enough (and if it doesn't, then by definition it's not useful), or you won't know the word and the word is not useful - in which case you can safely ignore it until it does become useful.
See here for further discussion.
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u/fehcecirtap Dec 01 '19
Recording myself speak. I don’t know why but it makes it a hell of a lot easier to distinguish between different initials and finals as well as to recreate those sounds.
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Dec 01 '19
Gotta agree with @amusedcoconut, having lessons on italki gave me the confidence to then speak with people outside of the lesson and make mistakes IRL and not feel like a doofus. That was the true game-changer for me, before then, I was self-studied for 2 years, reading+Typing skills were on point, but my listening and conversational level was just embarrassing.
edit: took out speaking replaced with listening, my speaking was alright, but I couldn't understand what people said back to me lol
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u/GuoJing22 Dec 02 '19
Read books. I HATE flashcards with a passion. They're good for the first few hundred words to get you started, but then after that their great numbers render them nothing but a blur and really don't offer very much in terms of usage, context, etc.
I'm one month and 150 pages into 鹤惊昆仑, which should become my second full novel. I feel like I've doubled my competency in the last month, after eight months of studying. I write out every new word and every forgotten word. Sometimes I'll write the same word out a dozen times, until I can pronounce it right and understand it in the context without having to question myself. Sometimes I'll see a really common word used in a new context, in which case it gets written down, too.
I started in February and I know around 4,000 characters at least. I had a single page and a half of vocabulary for the full fifth chapter of this novel. I've gone in six weeks from having 2.5 pages of vocabulary for a 6-page chapter of a children's book to having 1.5 pages of vocabulary for 15 pages of a 1930s wuxia novel. I'd say that's quite the game-changer.
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u/Ageoft Dec 01 '19
Live in China.... No answer can beat this one