5 Steps To Become An Advanced Chinese Student
For those of you who are curious about improving your own Chinese language skills, I’ve got a few tips that have helped me in my own language journey.
And the secret is that this applies to all languages, not just Chinese. Regardless of the language you’re learning, these five tips will help you advance more quickly from the beginning level to more advanced and interesting levels of the language.
Talk with normal people. This means somebody other than your teacher. Languages are living things, and were created to be spoken. This is even true of “dead” languages like Latin; your best bet with that language is to use a series like Lingua Latina and find a community to speak with.
There’s no reason to worry about speaking with highly educated people for this step. In fact, you’ll make a lot more progress if you speak with ordinary people who don’t feel the need to lecture you or try to teach you at every step.
Learn how to write. Most Chinese students don’t want to do this step, but it’s absolutely important that you do. Chinese simply is not the sort of language you can learn just by looking at the characters and guessing. Many of the characters look very similar, and the approach that works best is to make the characters an integral part of you. The easiest way to do that is to simply write the characters out.
I still do this every day, even though I’ve been learning Chinese for 20 years now. I doubt I’ll ever stop. The more you write, the more affection you develop for Chinese characters.
Read stuff you’re interested in. Stop limiting yourself to the textbook. You want to start reading things that are actually interesting to you. Trust me; when you get to a certain point with these languages, you’d rather poke your eyes out than read another article from some stuffy textbook.
At some point in time you’ll want to broaden your horizons. I recommend trying to find literary anthologies and similar books to expose yourself to a wide variety of written texts. The more widely you read, the more interesting the language will become.
Watch television and movies. If you grew up in a house like mine, you probably stay away from popular entertainment as a sort of natural reaction. However, when it comes to language study, watching TV and checking out hit movies will actually do wonders for your linguistic skills.
In all honesty, watching television is like a cheat code, especially if you get soap operas or shows with a “slice of life” aspect to them. It’s a cheat code because you can hear how actual native speakers speak in authentic situations, almost as if you were sitting in the living room observing.
Remember that books cannot speak to you. Television shows and movies can.
Use Anki. Use Anki or similar spatial memory software.
If you set up Anki correctly, you can create a system that will effectively manage your language memory skills with extremely little input. This really comes in handy when you try to learn rarely used language or try to figure out the right way to remember important and unusual poetic characters.