Beginner

Situation: You have just started learning Chinese or plan to do so in the near future. If you feel that you can already understand elementary Chinese and communicate on a basic level, I consider you to be an intermediate learner. I consider anything below CEFR B1 to be beginner level.

Goal: Be able to use Chinese to communicate with natives about school, work, life and leisure or other things which aren’t strictly personal, but still related to your world of experience.

Here are some questions we will look at:

• I’m a beginner, how do I study Chinese?
• What should I do first? What can wait a bit?
• What indispensable tools and resources are there?

Before we look at the articles relevant for beginners, there are some very important things I would like to talk about first. Below, I have selected seven particularly important things that beginners should pay attention to.

1. Organise what you learn

One thing you should do as early as possible is to develop a system to keep track of what you learn. The best way of doing this is using what’s called spaced repetition software, which can be installed both on your computer and your phone. It might seem like a daunting task, but in order to learn Chinese, you not only have to learn new things all the time, you also have to remember what you have already studied. I suggest you use Anki for this. If you are taking a course in Chinese, it sometimes isn’t required of you to remember what you did two months ago, but this is vital if you have any serious plans of learning the language! Schools and teachers seldom test everything you need to know.

2. Avoid perfectionism

You’ve just set out on a journey of a thousand miles, so the important thing isn’t to make every step perfect, but to keep moving. Avoid aiming for 100%, 90% is usually enough (except for pronunciation), the important thing is that you’re moving with a purpose and a goal. The reason why perfectionism isn’t good for you is that you will end up spending huge amounts of time gaining those few last percentage points. You should instead spend this time learning other things and expanding your horizons. It’s more efficient to perfect something once your level is considerably higher than it is now.

3. Start looking for learning outside the classroom

Your textbook might be the best on the market and your teacher the coolest guy around, but you should start looking for secondary language sources from the very start. If possible, find native speakers, but there are also loads of computer software, radio shows, film clips on YouTube and so on, to help you get started. I suggest checking out a beginner-friendly podcast immediately (I used ChinesePod). Buying an extra textbook might also be a good idea, but remember that you shouldn’t read that one to learn everything, just to see things from another angle. Finally, you should start using Chinese to communicate immediately. Don’t isolate yourself in the classroom.

4. Find friends for help and cooperation

To start with, allying yourself with a fellow student is a good idea, but this isn’t specific for studying Chinese. Having somebody on the same ambition level as yourself can be an incredible boost to your learning speed. Furthermore, at some point you want to find native speakers to actually help you develop quicker. It’s very easy to find Chinese people online who want to learn English, so if you can’t find anything else, this might be a good idea (be careful, though, just because they are native speakers doesn’t mean their Chinese is perfect). The best way is of course to find native speakers who you can meet and make friends with in the usual manner. I’ve found that an explicit language-based relationship (language exchange) is sometimes preferable, but to each his own.

5. Embrace that which is distinctively Chinese

Regardless if you have studied other foreign languages before, Chinese presents some unique challenges (I even have a special category with articles about this). The most important thing of all is to understand that your attitude affects your learning. If you think Chinese is weird and stupid, you will start hating it, making it very unlikely that your learning will be either enjoyable or effective (these are intimately connected). You should instead open your mind and embrace the uniqueness of the Chinese language. Learning Chinese is definitely possible, but don’t make it harder than it already is by adopting the wrong attitude. Depending on how you look at it, Chinese is sometimes really easy!

6. Examine your goals and motivations

Why do you want to learn Chinese? Do you have any specific plans for how to use the language in the future? These are very, very important questions you should keep on asking yourself, because your learning strategy is intimately related to the answers to those questions. For instance, if your goal is to be able to travel in China and chat with Chinese people, learning to write five thousand characters by hand is a waste of time, but on the other hand, if you plan to teach Chinese, you probably have no choice. You have to know what you want in order to achieve it. You also have to know what you want in order to be able to evaluate if your studying method is working.

7. Enjoy yourself

This is not a cliche to make you feel good, but rather a serious word of warning. Make sure that you like what you are doing, regardless of whether it’s language exchange with a native speaker, listening to audio lessons or writing characters. If you don’t enjoy yourself, you will never master Chinese (or any other language for that matter). The project ahead of you requires an insane amount of time to accomplish and if you don’t enjoy it, you will never be able to invest the amount of time and energy required. So, try different ways, find whatever strategy seems to work best for you and go with it. Good luck!

The articles in this category

If you’ve only studied for while or haven’t even started yet, these articles are for you. In short, they will tell you things that I wished someone had told me when I was at this level, but no-one ever did and I only found out on my own much later. Many of these articles will be useful to intermediate students as well (scroll down to see all of them in a text-only list):

All articles
If you can only stay abroad for a short time, don’t go immediately
Chinese is fascinating and exciting, not weird and stupid
Learning Chinese is easy
The importance of knowing many words
Mental models and making mistakes
Learning Chinese through social media
The art of being corrected
Creating a powerful toolkit: Character components
The virtues of language exchanges
Spaced repetition software and why you should use it
Creating a powerful toolkit: Characters and words
Learning Chinese words really fast
Listening ability, a matter of practice?
Pros and cons with travelling to learn a language
Take responsibility for your own learning now
Anki, the best of spaced repetition software
A smart method to discover problems with tones
Learning pronunciation as a beginner
Why you should use more than one textbook
Diversified learning is smart learning
Goals and motivation, part 1 – Introduction
Goals and motivation, part 2 – Long-term goals
Goals and motivation, part 3 – Short-term goals
Goals and motivation, part 4 – Micro goals
You won’t learn Chinese simply by living abroad
Spaced repetition isn’t rote learning
Make sure listening isn’t a practical problem
Escaping the convenience trap
Time quality: Studying the right thing at the right time
Dealing with tricky vocabulary: Killing leeches
Vocabulary in your pocket
Memory aids and mnemonics to enhance learning
Four different kinds of mistakes: Problem analysis
Growing up in Chinese
How to find more time to practise listening
Learning the third tone
Don’t be a tourist
Achieving the impossible by being inspired
Holistic language learning: Integrating knowledge
The kamikaze approach to learning Chinese
Enjoying the journey while focusing on the destination
Timeboxing Chinese
About opening doors and the paths beyond
Playing word games to practise fluency
Tones are more important than you think
If you want to master Chinese, make long-term investments
Can you become fluent in Chinese in three months?
Learn by exaggerating: Slow, then fast; big, then small
Learning efficiently vs. learning quickly
Learning simplified and traditional Chinese
Advancing in spite of praise
When perfectionism becomes an obstacle to progress
Use the benefits of teaching to boost your own learning
The 10,000 hour rule – Blood, sweat and tears
The importance of counting what counts
Defining Language Hacking: Lessons Learned From Hacking Chinese
Answer buttons and how to use SRS
Language question triage – General guidelines
Don’t try to improve everything at once, limit your focus
Listening strategies: An introduction
Listening strategies: Problem analysis
Listening strategies: Background listening
Practising sports to learn Chinese and make friends
Listening strategies: Passive listening
Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2: Playing computer games in Chinese
Using Lang-8 to improve your Chinese
Listening strategies: Active listening
Language is communication, not only an abstract subject to study
Listening strategies: Improving listening speed
Improving writing ability: Common problems and how to tackle them
Listening strategies: Deliberate practice and i+2
Chinese Language Learner Interview Series – Olle Linge
Recording yourself to improve speaking ability
A language learner’s guide to reading comics in Chinese
31 Twitter feeds to help you learn Chinese
Why learning Chinese through music is underrated
Study according to your current productivity level
Kickstart your character learning with the 100 most common radicals
The time barrel: Or why you have more time than you think
Extending mnemonics: Tones and pronunciation
12 songs to learn Chinese and expand your horizons
The importance of tones is inversely proportional to the predictability of what you say
Don’t just read about learning methods, actually try them as well
A guide to Pinyin traps and pitfalls
Vocalise more to learn more Chinese
Learning styles: Use with caution!
Chat your way to better Chinese
Learning Chinese in the shower with me
Is it necessary to learn to write Chinese characters by hand?
13 more songs to learn Chinese and expand your horizons
Have fun learning Chinese or else…
Measurable progress is a double-edged sword
Why you really should use a Chinese notebook
You can’t learn Chinese characters by rote
Chinese character challenge: Towards a more sensible way of learning to write Chinese
Remembering is a skill you can learn
Sensible character learning: Progress, reminders and reflections
How to create mnemonics for general or abstract character components
Don’t use mnemonics for everything
The Cthulhu bubble and studying Chinese
Horizontal vocabulary learning
21 essential dictionaries and corpora for learning Chinese
14 extra songs to learn Chinese and expand your horizons
You shouldn’t walk the road to Chinese fluency alone
The question you have to ask about your Chinese teacher or course
Learning the right chengyu the right way
Immersion at home or: Why you don’t have to go abroad to learn Chinese
You might be too lazy to learn Chinese, but you’re not too old
Adding tone marks (w/o Pinyin) above characters to practise tones
Using Audacity to learn Chinese (speaking and listening)