The best time to start learning Chinese is now: A guide for expats

How much Chinese you learn is not determined by where you live, but by what you do.

If you’ve lived in China for a long time but still don’t speak the language, this doesn’t mean that you’re stupid or lazy; it just means you’ve been doing other things.

If you want to learn Chinese, you need to change what you do, but what and how?

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The second best time to start learning Chinese is now

As the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, but the second best time is now.

Likewise, the best time to start learning Chinese might have been years ago, but the second best time is now.

Since time travel is not possible, you can’t influence what has been, but you can influence what will be by making the right choices today. Try to look forward instead of back!

I’ve talked to many expats who have lived in China for years without learning much beyond basic greetings and some commonly used words and phrases, and many feel bad about the fact that they don’t know more Chinese.

If you’re such an expat, this article is for you. Try not to feel too bad about the situation. As I said above, you don’t learn Chinese simply by living in China. Sure, some things are easier if you live in China, but that assumes that you seek out these opportunities!

You won’t learn Chinese simply by living abroad

Why you haven’t just absorbed Chinese automatically

When learning a language close to your own, say, if a speaker of German moved to my native Sweden, or a native speaker of Spanish moved to Italy, they might absorb the language simply by immersing in it.

When learning a language which has almost no overlap at all in vocabulary with other languages you know, such as Chinese, you won’t learn much by just hearing and seeing the language around you.

This is because we learn when we are able to make form-meaning connections. In short, when you hear something and understand what it means (listening), or when you see something and understand what it means (reading).

You need comprehensible input, not just input.

Learning Chinese through comprehensible input

I have never studied German, but since the overlap in vocabulary with Swedish is large, I can often guess the meaning of completely unknown words and phrases. I can even do this in Spanish and Italian, partly because I know English, but also because I’ve studied French.

This opens the gate to understanding for both reading and writing, but this just doesn’t work in Chinese. If you don’t understand anything, you don’t learn anything. Before you reach a minimum threshold of comprehension, living in the country simply doesn’t help much.

Even a thousand-mile journey starts with a single step

Instead of thinking about how awesome your Chinese would be now if you had started learning years ago, you should think about how to get started now. This start will probably not be awesome, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you get moving.

Building great habits is essential for success with any long-term project, and learning Chinese is no exception. When forming habits, frequency (how often you do something) is much more important than intensity (how much you do).

Thus, try to focus on Chinese at least once per day. It doesn’t matter that it’s five minutes; the important thing is that you do it.

Expanding that five minutes to ten minutes, then twenty, is much easier than establishing the habit of doing anything in the first place.

Pick one daily routine and gradually convert it to Chinese

You might also have habits that can prevent you from learning Chinese. You go to that shop where you know someone speaks English, you hang out mostly with other expats, and you avoid buying things at the market because there is less information in English.

Pick something you do often, perhaps something you do every day, and gradually start converting it to Chinese.

In the tea shop, learn how to order one thing in Chinese, or part of one thing (maybe the name of the drink, but not details about how hot, how much sugar, and so on). In the market, try buying one specific thing. Stick with this and gradually expand.

Listening and reading before speaking and writing

If you feel deeply anxious about using Chinese in your everyday life with real people, focus on listening and reading first. This is not a bad approach to language learning in general, and it might be especially good in your case. Having lived in China for a while might also have taught you more words than you realise, which will come in handy.

While there is a debate to be had about whether or not input (listening and reading) alone is enough for language development, everybody agrees that input is essential. Nobody gets anywhere in a language without lots of listening and reading.

Listening and reading are also lower-stakes activities compared to speaking, in particular, but also somewhat to writing.

Listening and reading in Chinese is hard when you start, but it gets easier

As mentioned earlier, before you reach a certain comprehension threshold, you won’t benefit much from living in China.

Sure, you will understand everyday words and greetings, but learning to understand spoken Mandarin simply by listening to native speakers is almost impossible for an adult, or it would be prohibitively time-consuming

If this worked, you would already be fluent.

Thus, don’t hesitate to use graded learning materials aimed at beginners. I have plenty of recommendations for both listening and reading here:

The 10 best free Chinese listening resources for beginner, intermediate and advanced learners

I have also discussed listening and reading for beginners in more detail here:

Unplug your ears, unglue your eyes

Naturally, you should also open your ears and eyes to the Chinese around you.

Put your earphones away when on public transport and listen to what people say. It will be hard to understand whole conversations, but you will catch words, and just being exposed to the language helps!

Also, unglue your eyes from your phone. See if you can spot familiar characters around you on billboards or signs. It won’t be long until you understand more than just fragments!

Digital devices and media have made it much easier to maintain an expat bubble. While it’s convenient to keep listening to podcasts and using your phone in English, this also raises a barrier between you and the Chinese around you.

You shouldn’t learn Chinese on your own

One of the biggest advantages of living in China is that you have a billion Chinese speakers around you. Not all of them are interested in helping you, but then again, you don’t need a billion people to help you either; you just need a few.

If you have Chinese friends, it’s likely that you speak English with them. Tell them that you’ve committed to learning Chinese and ask if they’d like to help.

To begin with, this will be very limited. They are probably not teachers and might not be interested in helping you too much, but just letting them know what you’re doing can help. See how they react and take it from there.

Some won’t be interested at all, some will be okay with at least trying something in Chinese, and others might surprise you by how much they want to help.

As you learn more Chinese, communicating will be easier, and people will also become less likely to switch to English all the time.

I’ve written more about not learning Chinese alone here: You shouldn’t walk the road to Chinese fluency alone

You shouldn’t walk the road to Chinese fluency alone

Hire a private teacher for conversation practice

Even if you have friends who are willing to help, I still recommend finding a good teacher.

In particular, you want someone who can speak Chinese to you on your level so you understand, without relying on English. You do not want someone who explains the Chinese language to you in English.

This is probably the best type of practice you can find, so make use of it as much as you can afford, both in terms of money and invested time.

Finding a good teacher might not be simple even if you live in a major city, but fortunately, I have a comprehensive guide covering how to identify a good teacher, where to find them and how to get the most out of one once you have found them.

How to find the perfect Mandarin tutor for you: A complete guide

Learning Chinese in the long term: Motivation

Motivation is a tricky beast, something I’ve written about on Hacking Chinese before. In general, you should try to make sure that you learn in a way that satisfies the three basic needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness.

How to learn Chinese in the long term with intrinsic motivation

Here is an excerpt from the article linked to above:

Autonomy is about being in control of your learning situation and your actions within it. For independent learners, this is rarely a problem, but if you’re locked into a course with a curriculum that doesn’t closely match your own goals for learning Chinese, or if you have a teacher who makes all the decisions for you, autonomy can be severely lacking. This is one of the major issues in formal education.
Competence is about feeling that you’re able to operate effectively within the activities you perform. This is only indirectly linked to language proficiency, as how competent you feel is much more about the tasks you engage in and your expectations, not how good your Chinese is on some kind of objective scale. As some teachers are fond of saying, it’s not about how difficult the language is, but what you ask students to do with it.
Relatedness is about connecting with other people and finding meaning through social relationships. This can be with your teacher, fellow learners or with native speakers of Chinese. The desire to fit into a social situation, integrative motivation, can be powerful, but also elusive if you’re studying in your home country.

If you’ve read this far, you probably have autonomy covered. You already own your learning and set your own goals.

Competence can be a major hurdle, as you will constantly feel that you ought to be better.

Relatedness can also be an issue, because not all your meaningful relationships are in Chinese.

Imagine yourself as a successful user of Mandarin

Another useful way of thinking of motivation is Dörnyei’s L2 Motivational Self System (no pop quiz coming, but if you want to know more, I wrote about it here: A practical guide to your ideal Mandarin self: Build motivation that lasts.

A practical guide to your ideal Mandarin self: Build motivation that lasts

The core of this model is an ideal future you, a vision of yourself where you have already learnt Chinese to a satisfactory level. Think about it. What does this mean? How does it feel? What does it enable you to do? What is it like?

There are many ways to work on your ideal future you. For example, you could write a letter from a future version of yourself to your current self. You could also write a detailed, vivid description of that future you, perhaps based on the questions in the previous paragraph.

Another way to make this vision come to life is to find role models who have done what you have.

Don’t choose people like me who studied full-time from day one or people who moved to China with the sole intent to learn Chinese. Instead, can you find people to look up to who didn’t learn early on, just like you, but succeeded anyway?

Bridging the gap from current you to future you

For this to work, you must feel that the future ideal you is realistic and achievable. This can be more about how you frame it than whether or not it’s actually realistic.

For example, if you spend some time mapping the space between where you are now and where you want to be, identify some milestones, and set some reasonable medium-term goals, the whole project will feel much more doable than if you just aim for the stars and hope for the best.

The forking path: Learn Chinese one small decision at a time

The only time you can start learning Chinese is now. If you think about it, the past only exists as memories in your brain, and you certainly can’t change anything about what’s already happened without a time machine. The future hasn’t happened yet, so you can’t make decisions there either.

You can only make decisions in the present.

From now on, make more decisions that involve Chinese.

This doesn’t mean you should do everything in Chinese; that’s hardly realistic, but whenever you can, choose to do things in Chinese or with Chinese rather than another language you know better.

For more about this approach to learning Chinese, see The forking path: A human approach to learning Chinese.

This way, you get the ball rolling and build momentum. A few years from now, you will be looking back at this day and be happy that you started today, and didn’t push the decision years into the future.

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