Believing the wrong things about learning Chinese can waste time and lead you astray. Let’s explore sixteen myths that might be holding you back!
Maybe you’re just getting started on your journey to learn Chinese, or maybe you’ve been travelling for years. Regardless, it’s important to have an accurate idea of what the road ahead looks like.
Believing in myths can be harmful in many ways. Some myths are about how to learn, suggesting that one method is useless and another is indispensable. If you believe the myth, you might discard a valid learning method or take an unnecessary detour.
Other myths are about how hard or easy it is to learn Chinese, whether in general or for specific aspects of the language. Having realistic expectations is important, because few things are more demotivating than trying something that’s supposed to be easy, only to realise that you find it hard.
I’ve written more about this here: 6 things in Chinese that are harder to learn than they seem
The opposite is probably the worst of all, however. By exaggerating how hard something is, people might be discouraged from starting to learn Chinese altogether.
Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episodes (#253 and #268):
Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube (part 1, part 2) and many other platforms!
16 myths about learning Chinese that are holding you back
In this article, I will discuss 16 myths about learning Chinese. I will explain each myth, include some common variants, and then debunk them. Sometimes, I will also include a mirror myth in case some people let the pendulum swing too far in the opposite direction.
- Chinese is impossible to learn as an adult
- It takes 10 years to become fluent in Chinese
- Courses, tests and textbooks are enough
- You must go to China to learn Mandarin
- A Chinese partner will automatically improve your Mandarin.
- Tones aren’t important; natives don’t use them when speaking quickly.
- Native speakers know everything about the Chinese language.
- The best way to learn characters is to write them again and again
- Learning about the language teaches you the language itself
- Chinese has no grammar
- The third tone is a dipping tone
- You need 250, 2,500 or 25,000 characters to understand written Chinese
- Chinese characters are pictures
- There are no shortcuts to learning Chinese
- Learning more words is always good
- Learning Chengyu will make your Chinese awesome
Myth #1: Chinese is impossible to learn as an adult
“Chinese is super hard; I could never learn it.”
“You have to be really smart to learn Chinese.”
“I’m too old to learn Chinese.”
“Adults learn more slowly than children.”
No, you’re not too old, but you may be too busy.
Adults can absolutely learn Chinese. I started learning when I was 23, for example, and I know many who started in their fifties and sixties. Adults are not worse language learners, but they have a tougher learning situation:
- Busy schedule; not enough time to learn Chinese
- Important commitments (family, friends, work) in other languages
- Greater social inhibitions and heightened self-awareness
- Lack of true integrative motivation (learning is optional)
You might be too lazy to learn Chinese, but you’re not too old
However, adults also have some advantages:
- Knowledge about the world
- More effective learning strategies
- Stronger analytical skills
- Greater self-discipline
Adults tend to learn much faster than children. Indeed, most native-speaking children don’t even talk during their first year or two, so any beginner adult will win by default.
My Chinese after five years was good enough to survive in a master’s degree programme taught entirely in Chinese, something which would be beyond any five-year-old native speaker.
Older children aren’t necessarily better learners than adults either, even though it’s more likely that they will attain native-level syntax and phonology if they start early enough.
Mirror myth: Learning Chinese is easy
Most people believe that Chinese is very difficult, which has led to a counter-movement where people claim that Chinese is in fact very easy. As John Pasden once said: “If someone is claiming Chinese is easy to learn, they’re probably trying to sell you something”.
Chinese is not impossible to learn, but it’s not easy either. It has some features making some aspects of the language easier to learn (no gender, no tenses, no verb conjugations, to name a few things), but there are other things that more than make up for that (tones, grammar particles, the lack of cognates, etc.).
I’ve explored in what way Chinese is difficult in detail here: Is Chinese difficult to learn?
Myth #2: It takes 10 years to become fluent in Chinese
“It requires 2,200 hours of instruction to reach professional working proficiency.”
“Becoming fluent in Chinese takes a lifetime.”
To untangle this myth, we need to look at a few different aspects of it. First, we’re going to look at the “X years” bit, then we’ll look at the “fluent” bit.
The main problem with saying that it takes three, five or twelve years to reach a certain level is that this says nothing about how much you actually study or engage with the language.
I spent more time learning Chinese in three months than I did studying French for seven years in school. When learning French, I only had a few hours per week, but I studied Chinese full time. Using years as the unit is downright silly.
To hammer home this point, I did a survey here on Hacking Chinese many years ago, asking readers a series of questions to figure out how much they had studied, counted in both years and hours. Some students studied ten times as much as some other students per year.
The bottom line is this: How much you learn is not determined by a stopwatch that starts counting up when you first start learning. It’s determined by what you do with the time since you started. This is counted in hours, or possibly minutes or seconds, although that would be cumbersome to count!
The second problem is the word “fluent”, which can mean basically anything. Some people use it to mean “near native” but other people use it to mean “can use what they have learnt effectively“.
The difference between these two could be a factor of one hundred or more in terms of time invested. What does it matter anyway? Learning Chinese is useful no matter how much or how little you learn.
Finally, any number you give, even if you specify what you mean by fluency and you count time in seconds, will be highly individual. The people at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) who reach an advanced level of Chinese after 2,200 hours of instruction are *not* studying the language under the same conditions that you are.
Myth #3: Courses, tests and textbooks are enough
“Enrolling in a course is guaranteed to teach me Mandarin.”
“If you finish a full series textbook, you’ll be fluent.”
“Self-study can’t replace a structured course.”
“If I just follow this course, curriculum or teacher, I will become fluent.”
“When I pass HSK 5, my Chinese will be great.”
There is a common misconception that formal language education in a sense equals language learning, giving rise to ideas such as textbooks being necessary to learn, formal courses giving you everything you need and tests like the HSK being reliable guides to learning Chinese.
None of these is true:
- Courses never teach you everything you need to know
- An HSK score does not indicate how good your Chinese is
- Textbooks can be useful, but have many downsides
Formal education makes language seem more well-behaved and manageable. Mastering the neatly arranged words and grammar patterns in your textbooks so you can regurgitate them on an exam does not prepare you for real-life conversations, even if they involve exactly the same words and grammar!
Indeed, many students learn Chinese like any other abstract subject, rather than treating it as a system for communicating. It’s not; don’t stay confined to a classroom or textbook, and don’t think that learning Chinese means working your way through the next HSK level.
Venturing outside the classroom was indeed the overarching advice in this overview article: Three things I wish I had known as a beginner student of Chinese: The time machine, part 1.
Mirror myth: Courses, tests and textbooks are useless
Some people go too far in the other direction, though, and when reading discussions about language learning online, it’s common to see advice like “throw away your textbook; it’s garbage anyway” or “I studied French in school for seven years and learnt nothing; formal language education is a scam”.
I already linked to articles where I discuss textbooks, courses and tests, which all gave what I hope is a balanced view on each topic, but just to make it clear: courses, tests and textbooks can provide valuable structure and guidance, as well as learning materials to study.
They save you from doing all this yourself, which is possible, but would take time away from actually learning the language. You probably shouldn’t unregister from your course, throw away your textbook, or never sign up for a proficiency exam.
You should take responsibility for your own learning, however.
Myth #4: You must go to China to learn Mandarin
“Immersion requires being in a Chinese-speaking environment.”
“Going or living abroad will automatically improve my proficiency.”
“You can’t learn Mandarin from home.”
“Travelling is the best way to learn a language.”
To put it bluntly: your physical coordinates on the Earth don’t determine how much Chinese you learn. This is instead determined by how much you engage with the language, which is only indirectly tied to where you live.
It is, in fact, very easy to disprove this myth. First, there are many people who have reached a high level of proficiency without leaving their home countries (see this interview with Carl Gene Fordham, for example). Second, there are many foreigners who have lived in China for years or even decades and still speak only rudimentary or no Chinese.
This is not strange at all. Learning Chinese requires dedication over time. If you have your work and social life in English and don’t study Chinese, you won’t learn much beyond common greetings and simple words and phrases.
With the aid of modern technology, you can immerse yourself in Chinese no matter where you live. When it comes to listening and reading, there’s so much online, even for beginners, that where you live hardly matters.
The 10 best free Chinese listening resources for beginner, intermediate and advanced learners
The 10 best free Chinese listening resources for beginner, intermediate and advanced learners
The 10 best free Chinese reading resources for beginner, intermediate and advanced learners
The 10 best free Chinese reading resources for beginner, intermediate and advanced learners
When it comes to speaking, you need to be much more active to find opportunities to practise, but this is not hard to achieve online, if nothing else then with a tutor (LINK).
Even though the main difference between immersing at home and abroad is how effortful it is, some things are hard or impossible to replicate at home.
The key difference is that when immersing at home, you are always the one who initiates contact with the language. You choose what to listen to, when to listen and what to do with it, just to mention one example.
This is different from living abroad, because then the language intrudes into your life. Your toilet stops working and you need to get a plumber, you need to sort out bureaucracy related to bank accounts, you randomly encounter people and events when outside.
You can learn a lot from afar, but learning about the culture is simply not the same. You can watch movies where people experience life in China, for example, but this is not the same thing as being there yourself.
Still, you can get pretty far by studying at home. For example, I have only spent a total of around one month in English-speaking countries, so all my English was learnt in school or at home.
I’ve written more about this myth here:
- You won’t learn Chinese simply by living abroad
- Why not going to China now could actually be good for your Chinese
Myth #5: A Chinese partner will automatically improve your Mandarin.
“Oh, your partner is Chinese, that’s why your Mandarin is so good!”
“Dating a native speaker is the best way to learn Chinese.”
“I want to find a Chinese girlfriend or boyfriend to really learn the language.”
“Living with a Chinese person is like having a tutor 24/7.”
This myth is in many regards similar to the previous one about your geographical location being less important than people think. Just like your coordinates on the Earth don’t determine how much you learn, whom you date or marry doesn’t either.
In both cases, it’s about how much you engage with the language. Most of the mixed Chinese-foreigner couples I know don’t even use Mandarin as their primary language, even if the foreigner is trying to learn it.
The reason is simple: Life is about more than language learning. People just want to communicate, and if that can be best achieved using one language (usually English), it requires a lot of effort to deliberately downgrade communication to another language (Chinese in this case).
Assuming that you are the foreigner, you might be terribly interested in learning Chinese and want to speak it more with your partner, but nothing guarantees that they are good at teaching you the language or that they are even interested in doing so.
So, just like living abroad, having a Chinese-speaking significant other can be great, but only if you actually speak Chinese with them. This requires your level to be very good already or enormous amounts of patience on the side of your partner.
I wrote more about this here, including some tips for how to increase the amount of Chinese you speak with your partner: Love and language: Challenges and opportunities in learning Chinese with a partner.
Love and language: Challenges and opportunities in learning Chinese with a partner
Myth #6: Tones aren’t important; natives don’t use them when speaking quickly.
“Mandarin speakers will understand you even if your tones are wrong.”
“Speaking fast is more important than getting the tones right.”
“My teacher/friend/wife understands me, so my tones must be okay.”
“I’ll sound more natural if I stop worrying about tones.”
Tones are an integral part of Chinese phonology. The best way to think about it for those of us whose first language is not tonal is to think of it as other kinds of vowel variation, such as vowel length or quality.
Ignoring tones is then a bit like ignoring similar vowels in English and saying “bit” instead of “beat”, or otherwise mixing them up (which is actually rather common for Chinese people learning English).
You can probably understand someone who messes up their vowels like this, but I think you’d agree that it’s a step too far to say that that means that vowels are not important in English.
For much more about what tones are and how to learn them, check The Hacking Chinese guide to Mandarin tones.
The reason people can understand you even if you make mistakes is that listening comprehension is not just about the sounds you utter, but also about context, what the listener already knows and how they can rely on this to guess what you say.
If your teacher, friend or wife can understand you, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your tones are great, or that it’s okay to have bad tones, it just means that they know you well enough to be able to guess what you want to say anyway. I explored this question more thoroughly here: The importance of tones is inversely proportional to the predictability of what you say.
This is similar to other forms of accuracy. It should be obvious that an occasional tpyo doesn’t make your otherwise fabulously well-written article unintelligible, but few would claim that it’s good to ignore spelling when learning English.
So, tones are important and native speakers use them. This does not, however, mean that tones always sound the same. Like all other speech sounds, they are influenced by where they appear and by rate of speech.
Thus, you shouldn’t expect tones (or any other aspect of pronunciation, actually) to sound exactly like in your textbook. This does not mean that native speakers don’t use tones. A good example might be the third tone, which is often taught and understood to be a dipping tone, but which is in fact usually just a low tone. I’ve listed this as a separate myth below!
When it comes to rate of speech, if you care about being able to communicate well, rather than impress people who don’t speak Chinese, you should focus on a reasonable level of accuracy before you deliberately try to speak faster.
You’ll be much easier to understand, and learning something properly and then speeding it up is considerably easier than learning something fast and then having to relearn it when you want to speak clearly, which is actually necessary sometimes.
Mirror myth: One tone mistake will make my Chinese incomprehensible
Having said all that, there’s also a mirror myth word discussing, namely that tone errors make you impossible to understand. You might, for example, have heard that you should be careful when pronouncing “panda”, because you might mix up:
- xióngmāo (熊猫, “panda”)
- xiōngmáo (胸毛, “chest hair”
However, while amusing, listening comprehension is more robust than that. Missing a tone or two is unlikely to cause much problems, at least if the context is reasonably clear and the listener is prepared (for example knowing that you’re a foreigner who speaks strangely).
They’re much more likely to think that you said “panda” with the wrong tones than wondering why on earth you start talking about “chest hair” in the middle of your story about going to the zoo.
Mirror mirror myth: Single tone mistakes don’t matter
There are cases when a single tone mistake really does matter, though.
First, we have some words that differ only in tone and can be hard to differentiate in a conversation. For example, if you say mǎi (买/買, “to buy”) when you mean mài (卖/賣, “to sell”), it can be genuinely confusing. I listed and discussed more examples here: Tone errors in Mandarin that actually can cause misunderstandings.
Tone errors in Mandarin that actually can cause misunderstandings
Second, as your Chinese improves, people’s tolerance towards mistakes can actually decrease. I have been in many situations where one single tone mistake, which ought to be obvious by context, caused a native speaker to fail to understand the whole utterance.
Myth #7: Native speakers know everything about the Chinese language.
“My Chinese partner said this is right, so it has to be.”
“If a native speaker says it, it must be correct.”
“Native speakers usually know the best way to explain their language.”
“99% of native speakers pronounce this word incorrectly”.
“I’m from Beijing, so my pronunciation is the standard.”
Native speakers are experts in the language they’ve grown up with. They learn at home, in school and then in the wider society. This means they build a very solid feel for how the language works, which they rely on to speak and write themselves, but also to tell you as a learner what’s right and wrong.
However, this is not the only type of knowledge one can have about a language. Being able to use a grammar pattern correctly yourself doesn’t mean that you can explain it. Being able to say that someone’s pronunciation is weird doesn’t mean that you can list what mistakes they are making.
This is the difference between implicit and explicit knowledge. Native speakers have a huge advantage over second-language learners when it comes to the former, but not the latter.
Normal people (i.e. non-linguists) tend to idolise native speakers, however, without realising that there are many things they don’t know. Here are three, whereof one we’ve already mentioned:
- Explicit knowledge about the language. This comes from directly studying the language as a subject, or studying Chinese linguistics, in other words. Native speakers typically don’t do that, and so lack this type of knowledge.
- Familiarity with the Chinese language in all its glorious variety. Native speakers know the language they came in contact with where they grew up, but this is not the same in all parts of the world; it’s not even the same within one province or city. People speak differently and have different ideas about what’s right and wrong.
- Knowledge of the standard language. Almost nobody in China speaks perfectly standard Mandarin in their everyday lives. Some native speakers, especially in Beijing, think that they speak standard Mandarin, but don’t. Most native speakers need to study to pass pronunciation exams.
So, native speakers know much. Some native speakers have studied a lot and know both the standard language and how to explain it, but most haven’t.
It’s also worth noting that the less someone has studied language as a subject and cares about it in and of itself, the more sure they tend to be that they Know How It Works.
Read more: What native speakers know about Chinese (and what they don’t)
What native speakers know about Chinese (and what they don’t)
Mirror myth: Native speakers are often wrong
We’re now ready to explain the mirror myth that native speakers are often wrong, or that there are words that 99% of native speakers pronounce incorrectly.
This is based on the assumption that “right” means “according to the official standard”. It should be obvious by now why this statement is not terribly interesting; the standard simply isn’t how people normally speak, so unless they’ve made a point of studying the standard language, they will say xiàzǎi instead of xiàzài for 下载/下載, “to download”.
This is only wrong in a very specific sense of the word “wrong”. It could, and should, in my opinion, be argued that if 99% of the population says A and not B, A is right and B is, in fact, wrong.
Myth #8: The best way to learn characters is to write them again and again
“Writing characters over and over to build muscle memory is the only way.”
“Mnemonics are shortcuts that don’t work long-term.”
“Writing by hand is the only way to really learn a character.”
Writing a Chinese character mindlessly over and over is probably one of the worst methods for long-term retention (read more about bad methods here). Rote learning of Chinese characters has several serious problems:
- It involves only superficial processing, leading to worse results. If you see the full character as you write it, you don’t even have to try to remember how to write it. This is terrible for committing new information to memory. Use active recall instead: see if you can recall how to write the character without looking; peek only when you have to. I wrote more about learning to write Chinese characters here.
- It does not encourage understanding of how the writing system works. The most fundamental principle for successful learning is understanding. It’s simply much easier to remember something that you also understand, and the Chinese writing system is no exception. If you regard characters as a jumble of strokes, you stand no chance of learning thousands of characters. Instead, learn the basics of how characters work.
- It masses repetitions together, but research clearly shows that spaced repetition is better. This is a no-brainer and very obvious if you’ve compared the two methods for long-term retention. Almost any form of learning benefits from spacing review or practice over time, and vocabulary acquisition is no exception. Use spaced repetition software, or if you really don’t like it, then make sure you read and listen more for natural spaced repetition.
- It ignores powerful memory techniques that are well suited for learning characters. Our memory is built to remember concrete things that stand out, but Chinese characters are neither. We can, however, convert them to something which is easier to remember by using mnemonics or memory techniques. You don’t have to use them to learn characters, but it can make it much easier to remember tricky cases.
The only situation where I would consider writing a character over and over is if your goal is to improve your penmanship. This might be a good idea when you first start learning to write by hand to get a feel for how it works, or later on your journey if you want to improve your handwriting. Massed repetition is terrible if your goal is to remember how to write the characters.
Read more: My best advice on how to learn Chinese characters
Myth #9: “Learning about the language teaches you the language itself.”
“Memorising a grammar rule will enable you to use it fluently.”
“Being able to explain the difference between similar words is essential.”
“Learning about Mandarin sounds is enough to learn to use them.”
Both students and teachers tend to believe that studying and memorising things like grammar or learning about the Chinese language leads directly to proficiency in Chinese.
This myth stems from the assumption that explicit knowledge automatically translates into implicit knowledge.
In other words, studying a grammar rule so you can explain it and apply it in a drill has a direct effect on your internal model of how Chinese works (your interlanguage), allowing you to use it in spontaneous interactions.
The problem is that this connection is not as clear-cut as most people believe. In second language acquisition (SLA) research, this is sometimes called “the interface problem”.
There are basically three stances:
- Learning a language is like any other complex skill. This would entail that learning a grammar rule can lead to students being able to apply it in their own production, much like many students and teachers believe. Robert DeKeyser is a well-known researcher who holds this position.
- There’s a limited or indirect link between implicit and explicit knowledge. This position is the mainstream in SLA research, held by researchers like Rod Ellis and Michael Long. How much of an effect explicit instruction or studying can have depends, as do the theories around the mechanisms that allow this to take place. A common idea is that explicit knowledge helps students notice certain structures in subsequent input, which in turn updates their internal language model.
- Explicit knowledge has no effect on implicit knowledge. Taken to an extreme, this would mean that studying a grammar rule has zero impact on your ability to use it, beyond the input you get, for example by reading sentences or hearing your teacher use the target structure. Learning (explicit) does not lead to acquisition (implicit). The most well-known proponent of this idea is Stephen Krashen.
I’m not a cutting-edge SLA researcher, but here’s what I think based on everything I’ve read and experienced as a student and teacher.
First, comprehensible input is essential. You can learn a language as an adult mostly through input, but you can’t learn a language without input. For more advanced proficiency, huge amounts of input are the only game in town.
Second, treating language as any other complex skill doesn’t sit well with me. The role of input is much more important than in other types of skill development. You don’t learn to play the guitar by listening to music, but you can learn Chinese mostly by listening to it. Learning Chinese is not like learning to unicycle.
Still, unlike Krashen, I do believe that explicit studying and instruction, as well as output and interaction, can be helpful, indeed essential. Let’s debunk a mirror myth!
Mirror myth: Input is all you need
While you can get very far relying exclusively on input, this doesn’t mean that it’s the best option. In some cases, I believe it’s far from optimal. For example:
- Without noticing that the third tone is actually a low tone, it would have taken me many more years to fix my pronunciation. I might still be pronouncing it incorrectly to this day for all I know.
- Without people pointing out that I’m using words incorrectly, it would take forever to fix them. Figuring out how words are not used requires a ludicrous amount of input, or it can be addressed more directly via feedback on output.
- Without having real conversations, I think it’s impossible to develop the necessary strategies to be a good communicator. You can listen and read all you want, but if you can’t ask for clarification when needed, ask someone to slow down or otherwise negotiate meaning, you won’t get very far. This takes practice. No student I’ve met has been able to do this spontaneously in their first conversation.
- Speaking and writing help you identify your strengths and weaknesses. You get to test your hypotheses about how the language works and can get feedback from more proficient language users. Realising where your weaknesses lie can guide your learning.
In addition to this, every person I have met who has learnt a foreign language at an astounding pace (usually dedicated polyglots, military translators and the like) has used explicit studying and instruction in combination with input.
My conclusion is that you should learn Chinese implicitly through exposure with a seasoning of explicit instruction.
Myth #10: Chinese has no grammar
“Chinese is just a bunch of words strung together.”
“Mastering Chinese grammar is trivial.”
“Chinese grammar is about memorising phrases.”
This myth is widespread, but not hard to explain. It’s a misunderstanding of what the word “grammar” means, based on studies of other foreign languages, such as Spanish, French or German.
In school, when studying these languages, grammar is all about inflecting verbs, keeping track of who did what to whom when and how that needs to be reflected in pronunciation or spelling. There’s also gender, articles, case grammar and much more.
Then, when people look at Chinese and notice that it has none of these things, they say, “Wow, Chinese has no grammar!” Which is true, if you take it to mean that you don’t need to memorise verb tables or keep track of what gender a noun has.
This is not what “grammar” actually means, though. A basic definition of grammar is that it’s a set of (often implicit) rules that govern how a language is structured.
All languages have grammar. Without grammar, a language would just be a word soup, and it would be impossible to understand or convey anything complex.
Since Chinese scientists have landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon, we can assume that Chinese can be used to communicate complex information.
Here are some important aspects of Chinese grammar:
- Word order: Since Chinese generally doesn’t inflect words, word order becomes extremely important. In English, “I love her” and “her I love” both convey the same meaning, but in Chinese, 我爱她 and 她爱我 mean different things. And the importance of word order doesn’t end there!
- Information structure: Chinese often prefers a topic-comment structure rather than direct subject-verb-object sentences such as 我爱你. Essentially, you mention something known to the listener first, then you add a comment, usually new information you want to convey. For example, 这个问题，我不能回答 rather than 我不能回答这个问题. But when to use which? And what’s the difference?
- Aspect markers: While Chinese doesn’t have tenses, it does have aspect (briefly put, tense is about when something happens on a timeline; aspect is the state of the action). Learning how to use 了, 过, and 着 properly is not easy. Especially 了 is elusive!
- Measure words: As mentioned, when learning Chinese, you don’t have to memorise what gender each noun has, but you do have to learn which measure word(s) go with it. This is not arbitrary, but it’s not transparent enough to be easy either. Sure, 张 is used for flat things or things with a surface, but few speakers of English would sort tables, stools, faces and mouths.
Naturally, there’s more to Chinese grammar than this, but I think that should be enough to show that yes, Chinese definitely has grammar, and learning it is not trivial.
Some (such as John Pasden) argue that Chinese grammar is easy initially, but ramps up in difficulty as your proficiency level increases. This might contribute to the myth about Chinese not having grammar or Chinese grammar being easy.
Myth #11: The third tone is a dipping tone
“Third tones usually go down, then up.”
“The only rule I need to learn is the one for two third tones in a row.”
The third tone in Mandarin is traditionally taught as a dipping tone. However, it’s almost never pronounced as a dipping tone. Instead, it’s much better to think of the third tone as a low tone, without the rise at the end.
Before a first, second, or fourth tone, the third tone remains low, but when followed by another third tone, it changes to a rising tone. With this description, you only need to apply one rule for cases like nǐhǎo (你好, “hello”).
If you instead think of the third tone as a dipping tone, you need to apply some kind of rule almost every time you say it (in front of any other tone, and often even at the end of sentences).
The dipping tone contour is typically only used in isolation, in heavily stressed syllables or occasionally at the end of an utterance.
If this doesn’t seem to make sense or you’d like to learn more, I explored this in more detail here: Learning the third tone in Mandarin.
Myth #12: You need 250, 2,500 or 25,000 characters to understand written Chinese
“Knowing 2,500 characters means you can understand 98% of Chinese text.”
“Understanding 60% of written Chinese requires only 250 characters.”
“Native speakers know 25,000 characters.”
There are many statements, graphs and infographics floating around the internet showing how much Chinese you can understand given a certain number of characters.
I’ve arbitrarily picked 250, 2,500 and 25,000 to show three different problems, but as we shall see, the numbers in themselves are not important.
The low number, 250, is often used to encourage students, saying things like “while there are many thousands of characters, you only need 250 characters to be able to understand 60% of a Chinese text.”
The fundamental issue here is that reading comprehension is not about the number of characters you know. Meaning in modern Chinese is conveyed through words, and a vast majority of words have more than one character.
Characters are the building blocks of the written language, but being able to read requires you to combine characters into words and words into phrases and sentences.
Some compounds can be guessed by knowing the characters:
- 电话 (diànhuà) = electricity + words = telephone
- 飞机 (fēijī) = fly + machine = aeroplane
- 同学 (tóngxué) = same + study = classmate
However, seeing these words for the first time in an unfamiliar context can be confusing, especially since Chinese doesn’t use spacing between words.
Most compounds can’t be guessed based on superficial knowledge of the compound characters either:
- 明天 (míngtiān) = bright + day = tomorrow
- 东西 (dōngxi) = east + west = things
- 星期 (xīngqī) = star + period = week
It should also be noted that knowing the basic meaning of a character is not enough. Most characters have many meanings and sometimes many pronunciations too, linked to different words in the spoken language.
Even if you knew all the words that can be formed with a given set of characters, you still wouldn’t be able to read much with only this knowledge. You also need grammar to understand how the words fit together (see myth number 10).
This myth is not only wrong because 250 is clearly too low. In fact, knowing 2,500 or 5,000 characters is not enough either, not because the number is not high enough, but because knowing a certain percentage of a text does not mean that you’d understand that percentage of the text.
If you know 95% or 99% of the vocabulary in a text, that could lead to 0% comprehension if you lack some of the key words. In other cases, not knowing certain words might not influence comprehension much at all.
So, the bottom line is that knowledge of characters cannot be translated to reading ability. Knowing 25,000 characters will in itself not allow you to read anything in Chinese.
And before we move on to the next myth, no one knows 25,000 characters. Educated native speakers might know around 4,000 to 5,000 simplified characters, and a few thousand more than that if they’ve learnt traditional characters (there are simply more of them).
Learn more about how the Chinese writing system works in the series of articles and podcast episodes starting here: The building blocks of Chinese, part 1: Chinese characters and words in a nutshell.
The building blocks of Chinese, part 1: Chinese characters and words in a nutshell
Myth #13: Chinese characters are pictures
It’s popular to create products for learning characters that make it look like the Chinese writing system consists of pictures. This is not the case.
While it’s true that many basic Chinese characters started out as direct depictions of objects, this doesn’t mean that the modern writing system is pictographic. Beliving that’s the case will do greivous harm to your long-trem prospects of becoming literate in Chinese.
A big majority of characters are compounds, where most are sound-meaning compounds, where one component gives meaning and the other sound.
For example, in the character 妈 (mǎ, “mother”), the left part 女 (nǚ, “woman”) is related to the meaning of the compound, whereas the right part 马 (mǎ, “horse”) is related to the sound (same syllable, different tone).
That being said, these two components can also be used independently, meaning “woman” and “horse”, and these are both pictographic. But this is not how most characters work! The more characters you learn, the less likely you are to run into truly pictographic characters.
Additionally, many characters that are pictographic actually don’t mean what they used to, or aren’t used in that way anymore. For example, while 日 depicts the sun (it started out as a circle with a dot in it), it usually means “day” in modern Chinese. Another example is 大, which shows a person, but means “big”.
As mentioned, I’ve written a series of articles that will teach you most of what you need to know about the Chinese writing system to be able to learn it effectively, starting here: The building blocks of Chinese, part 1: Chinese characters and words in a nutshell.
The building blocks of Chinese, part 1: Chinese characters and words in a nutshell
You can also check out this course I helped create for Skritter.
Myth #14: There are no shortcuts to learning Chinese
“There are no shortcuts; you just need to put in the effort.”
“Looking for better ways of learning just means you’re lazy.”
When asking about better ways of learning Mandarin online, students are sometimes met with a “there are no shortcuts; buckle down or get out” attitude.
Is this true? Are there really no shortcuts?
That depends on what you mean. If you’re looking for a secret method that will allow you to effortlessly learn Chinese, then you’re going to be disappointed.
For example, learning thousands of characters takes time. How the writing system works is largely out of your control and no shortcut will enable you to bypass it unless you forego learning to read and write entirely.
But if you’re asking if there are different approaches to learning Chinese and wonder which will yield the best results for you, then you’ve come to the right place; Hacking Chinese is for you!
In short, I think there are three types of shortcuts:
- Methods that allow you to learn faster. Example: Spaced repetition for learning vocabulary instead of massed repetition.
- Insights that enable you to skip ahead. Examples: Understanding the role of sound components in Chinese characters, and realising that the third tone is a low tone.
- Avoiding detours, wasting time learning things you don’t need to learn. Examples: Learning which component is the radical in every character, memorising the stroke names in characters.
I’ve written about shortcuts for learning Chinese in more detail in this article: Are there any shortcuts for learning Chinese?
Myth #15: Learning more words is always good
Vocabulary is extremely important when learning a foreign language, and Chinese is no exception. As Daniel Williams put it:
“Without grammar, very little can be conveyed; without vocabulary, nothing can be conveyed.”
Because of the lack of overlap between Chinese and English, it could be argued that learning more words is even more important because you can’t rely on guessing the meaning of new words based on words you know in other languages.
This, however, does not mean that learning new words should be the main focus of every learning activity. Indeed, it can be argued that how well you know the words you do know is even more important when using the language:
- When listening, being able to quickly identify words and connect them to meaning stored in long-term memory is essential. This requires you to have heard them in different contexts many, many times.
- When speaking, you don’t actually need that many words to get your meaning across. I once wrote an article on Hacking Chinese using only 1,000 English words and was able to discuss language acquisition just fine. But you do need to know how to use the words you do know well!
- When writing, the same principle applies. While knowing more words will help you convey more complex ideas and make your text more interesting to read, it’s not strictly necessary.
- When reading, you actually do need to know a lot of words!
To be honest, knowing a lot of words is often important, especially for listening and reading, but the point here is that knowing them well is often even more important.
How well (and how quickly) you know what you know is indeed part of the definition of fluency I like most. Essentially, fluency is about being able to use what you know effectively, and this requires speed and mastery.
Fluency development is one of the strands in Paul Nation’s four strands model. It’s probably the most neglected aspect of language learning in formal courses or whenever teachers are involved.
Many teachers and tutors seem to have a motto: “The more new words I can teach the students, the better I am as a teacher.” If you’ve ever had a tutor or private teacher, or been enrolled in a formal course, you’ve probably felt the full force of the onslaught of unfamiliar vocabulary.
The problem is that this doesn’t make you fluent. To practise fluency, you need to stick to mostly what you already know, so including unfamiliar vocabulary is directly counterproductive.
Two of the other strands in Nation’s model are supposed to be “meaning-focused”, which also requires the dose of new words and grammar to be very low. It’s simply not possible to focus on what someone says or convey meaning to someone else if there are too many things you can’t say or don’t understand.
Thus, learning more words is not always the best option. Instead, most of your time should be spent on extensive reading and listening and other forms of fluency development or meaning-focused listening, speaking, reading or writing.
Myth #16: Learning Chengyu will make your Chinese awesome
Since I started learning Chinese, I’ve heard many times that learning 成语 (chéngyǔ) is important. In particular, if you want to sound advanced, mastering Chengyu is a must.
This is nonsense. You can speak Chinese at a very advanced level without using any Chengyu. Will it impress native speakers if you use them correctly? Yes, absolutely!
There are two problems:
- First, Chengyu are hard to use. This means that most students who try to use them do so incorrectly, so while native speakers might think it’s cute that you try, it’s only impressive if you get it right. And the likelihood is that you won’t.
- Second, most Chengyu are rare, and you are better off learning higher-frequency vocabulary first. Your Chinese needs to be very advanced indeed before active mastery of Chengyu is what you should focus on.
Naturally, while you can choose not to use Chengyu yourself, you can’t control what other people say. Native speakers certainly use Chengyu, some only occasionally, others all the time.
This means that as an advanced learner, and probably even at an intermediate level, you need to understand the most common Chengyu. These are rarely the ones with the most interesting or profound stories, but they are useful!
For a list of actually useful Chengyu, see this list on Carl Gene Fordham’s blog.
So, Chengyu isn’t a magic key to anything. Study Chengyu stories if you find them interesting; it’s great reading and listening practice, but the Chengyu themselves are not as useful as many people make them out to be.
For more about this topic, including some examples, please refer to Chengyu, a magic key to Chinese language and culture, or a waste of time?
Chengyu, a magic key to Chinese language and culture, or a waste of time?
16 myths about learning Chinese that are holding you back
So, those were sixteen myths about learning Chinese that might be holding you back. While it’s unlikely that you believed or had even heard of all of them before reading this article, I’ve encountered all of them many times.
What myths did I miss? What did you think about those I did cover? Please let me know in the comment section!
