Learning Mandarin

Note, June 14th 2024. I heavily edited this post to reflect my current understanding of how language acquisition is best done.

My gateway.

In COM-406 Foundations of Data Science, I met my friend Qinyue Zheng. She loves science fiction, and she told me to read the Three Body Problem trilogy. After reading the first novel, I had the desire to know more about the country they both came from. This was my gateway to Chinese language and culture.

So, how's it going?

I am thoroughly addicted, and I wanted to share some of the lessons I learned while trying to acquire the language.

Baby steps

Parsings a new language into its basic phonetic elements feels impossible. At first, Mandarin sounded to me like a long chain of strange and sometimes funny onomatopoeia. However, after spending just a small amount of time with the pronunciation of its romanisation, pinyin, I could start to recognise and differentiate certain sounds that I hadn't noticed before.

One quirk of pinyin that really stood out to me was how consonants could be pronounced slightly differently depending on whether they are featured at the start or middle of a word. Experimenting with Qinyue I found that she couldn't hear any difference between my glided or glottal-stopped versions of the word 英语 (yīngyǔ). In English it would be perceived as quite strange if I said I was studying the principles of ing and ang.

At the same time, I tried to notice how syllables could be pitch modulated into one of four tones: flat, rising, dipped, and falling. I also tried to notice how pairs of subsequent affected each other together or how the pitch could be chained or cut short. I made considerable efforts at this time to be able to reproduce as least single syllables as close as I could to the original Chinese.

Many steps

So there's a lot of characters to learn, something like 3000 to read comfortably, I'm told. My first attempts at this was to just write down the ones that appeared often, hoping that the connections would stick. They didn't at first, but I noticed that the characters were designed with a combination of semantic, phonetic, and aesthetic composition rules. Therefore, if you had to choose in which order to study each of the 3000 characters, some orders would be more painless than others. One such order was designed by James Heisig in Remembering the Hanzi. He puts a lot of emphasis on visual imagination for memorisation. I have learned the writing and pronunciation of about 1000 characters in a year and a half with his method. I place my imagined scenarios in different rooms of a house: one room for each of the four tones.

The one rule

Besides pronunciation and writing, everything else about learning Chinese could be said about any other language. Really the one rule of language acquisition is, to quote Stephen Krashen famous lecture, "comprehensible input in a low anxiety environment". Unfortunately, I made the error of skipping the "comprehensible" part of comprehensible input and going straight for natural conversations by listening to the strangely relatable advanced-level podcast Dashu Zhongwen. Today I am having a much better time watching Little Fox childrens' cartoons on Youtube.

The actual hard part

The hardest part about learning Mandarin for me has not been the Mandarin language. In fact, the largest obstace has been myself. If you are anything like me, you take on a million projects without care for whether there are enough hours in the day to allocate to all of them. So what helped for me was slowly eliminating distractions and side projects and giving myself the time to become so bored that learning a foreign language looked like the most fun thing I could be doing. I feel that this helped to set a strong foundation for my studying habit.

Thoughts on gamification

In the past, I had tried relying on an external reward mechanism to fuel my habit: Duolingo. I found the dopaminergic play to be highly addictive, which kept me coming back, but I always burned out after a few weeks when I was faced with my own lack of foundational knowledge and the boring scenarios that they played on repeat. My contention with Duolingo is not that it isn't effective, but that it isn't truly meaningful. Long-term users of the application most appear to me to find a sense of accomplishment from keeping up a streak or reaching a certain amount of experience points per day. But in the end, the language is presented as utterly separate from the culture that evolved to use it. One emerges from Duolingo with the ability to translate basic sentences, but not a single seed of curiosity about the world around it.

Final thoughts

I will return to university after my internship at Ubisoft to continue my studies. I will begin a Chinese language study group at EPFL. In one year from now I would like to have reached an intermediate level of Chinese.

To my present and future self: 加油！