Learning Mandarin

I began learning Mandarin soon after I met my friend Qinyue Zheng in the 2022 edition of COM-406 Foundations of Data Science at EPFL. We were chatting about science fiction and she told me about the Three Body Problem trilogy, which she held as some of the best fiction she had ever read. I purchased the first entry in the series a few days later and read it over the revision period; grades be damned. It was excellent.

This unlikely event became my gateway to Chinese language and culture. I maintain the interest as a hobby, and am slowly acquiring new words and characters every day. I found some really good resources and methods for language acquisition along the way, so I thought I should point to some here.

My methods

Writing

Let's talk about the elephant in the room. How do you learn the characters? Luckily this problem was solved a long time ago by J. Heisig's book Remembering The Hanzi, which presents an order for the characters that privileges interconnectedness rather than usefulness. For example, the common character for any kind of face 面 (mián) shows up at number 1406! But he teaches how to recognize and engrain deeply within yourself the building blocks of each character by visualising absurd situations.

The only thing that is lacking is the character's standard reading, which is relegated to the back of the book. This is unfortunate for characters that contain within themselves a hint for reading such as the character for political 政 (zhèng) where the left component is also pronounced as 正 (zhèng) on top of offering the symbolic sense of correct. What to do? Just download this Anki deck that combines the characters and the pronunciation. Following Heisig's advice, I would disable cards that only require you to recognise previous characters instead of drawing them from memory.

Reading

I invested some time up front in learning some basic grammar on the Chinese Grammar Wiki. This set me up for greatness by putting me in contact with the most basic vocabulary. I read up to the A2 level grammar, and moved on to some online graded reading at HSKreading. Most of my reading however is done by following subtitles on youtube videos. I find that this forces me to try recognize characters at high speed, though I don't usually understand what is written. That is fine by me, as I trust the process and I know it will eventually come together.

Listening

Parsing a new language into individual syntactic elements can appear to be an impenetrable task. In the initial stages, Qinyue and I would repeat French and Chinese words back and forth to improve our respective pronunciation. This helped me to realise which consonants and vowels were commonly paired up together. It was incredibly useful to focus hard on pronunciation at this time in order to notice the subtle differences between sounds like "c" / "z", or the triplet "j" / "q" / "x".

When I was reasonably confident I could distinguish different sounds, I spent a long time looking for good listening content. Unfortunately, there is little enjoyable listening content you can listen to naturally without a sizeable vocabulary. But you can try to notice the words you know when they come up, even if you are reading the subtitles the entire time. I recommend watching Mandarin Corner's street interviews or the excellent cartoon All Saint's Street. Nowadays I listen to a podcast called Dashu Mandarin, which features three uncles talking about life in China. Is it a little strange that I relate to them? Maybe, but they have great chemistry and I watch their videos every day.

Speaking

Make friends. If they happen to speak Chinese, that's really great! Otherwise, don't try to make friends in order to speak Chinese.

Some thoughts

Avoid the mistake of memorizing meaningless characters, lists of vocabulary or grammar. By meaningless I mean lack of connection to your own emotions, knowledge or imagination. Living and interacting in a Chinese speaking environment may appear ideal - your entire experience would be based in the language. This could allow you to connect sensations and situations to your new vocabulary. But this is not a necessary nor sufficient condition for learning the language.

The hardest part about learning Mandarin for me has not been Mandarin, but 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 fun. This is leveraging internal motivation, and is a strong foundation for building a studying habit.

In the past, I have tried relying on an external reward mechanism : Duolingo's daily quests and exp system. 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 terribly meaningless scenarios that they played on repeat.

By taking it slowly and consuming resources that are relevant and play to my interests, I hope to run the entire marathon. My ideal comprehension goal would be a level where I could understand overheard conversations, read comfortably, and have regular conversations with my Mandarin speaking colleagues.

To my present and future self: 加油！