How I First Learned Chinese
For something a little bit different, I’ve decided to write a few things to expand on my most recent video.
You can watch the video here:
Now, what I didn’t mention here is that I started to learn a second foreign language while I was in Germany.
We met with a lot of people from mainland China, the vast majority of whom were foreign students at local universities. By “a lot,” I’m talking in terms of hundreds.
I actually counted once, and realized that my companion and I got to know at least 200 different Chinese students during the 12 weeks I was in Stuttgart at the end of my mission. I’ll let you figure out how many people I was meeting with a day.
Anyway, for obvious reasons, I decided to start learning Chinese while serving as a missionary in Germany. Of course, I didn’t exactly have the time or money to take actual language lessons. And so I kind of winged it to see where things would take me.
I spent about 10 Euros on a Chinese textbook that was written in German. It was pretty basic and wasn’t all that useful without audio tracks. However, it at least got me to understand some of the most basic grammatical principles.
A guy I knew in Augsburg gave me a huge Chinese-German dictionary, which also helped quite a bit. We had copies of the Book of Mormon in something like 60 different languages in our apartment, and so I started messing around with a simplified Chinese copy, seeing if I could figure out what a few words meant and trying to piece things together.
There was an older lady from Taiwan I knew in one of the congregations I served in. She had written up a very basic list of Chinese church vocabulary words that she gave to the missionaries, largely because we were meeting with so many Chinese students. I was also able to use that to gather some really basic vocabulary.
And then there were the native speakers that I knew pretty well, some of whom were members of the church. I’d ask them for help from time to time. That’s how I learned basic Chinese pronunciation, the tonal sandhi rules, and a few other basic odds and ends.
All of this was somewhat helpful, though it wasn’t magic. In fact, I wound up taking Chinese 101 in university after I returned and studied the language the proper way.
While it wasn’t perfect, there were a few things I learned that can help you if you’re trying to learn a language on your own:
Always find a native speaker to help. This was the most powerful tool I was able to use. If somebody is willing to listen to your feeble attempts to speak their language, you’ve really got it made. And you get bonus points if they actually correct what you say and don’t just try to make you feel good.
There’s always something you can do. If something doesn’t make sense, there’s usually a way you can at least try to figure it out. It was a lot harder in the days of paper dictionaries, of course. These days, you can always “cheat” and ask an AI chatbot for help when you encounter one of those phrases or sentences that just doesn’t make sense.
You can be immersed even if you’re not in the country. I was lucky in that there were so many foreign students from China that I could listen to their conversations pretty much anytime we were near the university campus. If you can get yourself into a position like that, your language skills will improve immensely. If you can’t, of course, you can always fake it, usually by watching television shows.
Anyway, there are a few pointers that might help you out. More to come in the future.