I am a lesswrong user interested in learning Mandarin and living in China. My goal is understanding Chinese culture more broadly and geopolitics and Chinese tech policy more specifically. I could get CELTA and get a teaching job in China (not difficult), but it seems like I would gain far more value if I actually learned Mandarin.
Do you have recommendations on what’s the fastest way to learn Mandarin?
Yours sincerely
<redacted>
I’m posting my answer on Less Wrong so that the commenters can correct me in the comments. Do hear that everyone except <redacted>? Tell <redacted> why I’m wrong!
Dear <redacted>,
There is no fast way to learn Mandarin. But some ways are faster than others.
The first thing you should do is go live in China. (A teaching job via CELTA is fine.) This may or may not help you learn Chinese faster. Then why do it? Because learning Mandarin takes years. If you want to learn about Chinese culture then you should go to China now and start learning Mandarin after you get there.
The second reason to live in China is that the Chinese tech world is isolated from the rest of the world. It’s not just websites that require a Chinese IP address and phone number. Paying for lunch with WeChat is something you should do in China itself.
If you were from America or Europe then the second thing I would suggest is you buy a subscription to Foreign Affairs Journal. That still might be the right way for you to do things, but I don’t know how affordable it is to someone living in India.
Now that you’re no longer using “I don’t speak Mandarin” as an excuse to postpone your dreams, we can get into learning Mandarin.
[Disclaimer: AI is revolutionizing how language-learning works. This is very good for language-learners. However, the field of AI-assisted language learning is changing so rapidly that anything I write here could be out-of-date in three months. When it comes to using AI to learn Chinese, just use your imagination and try stuff out.]
Here are the old-school pre-AGI instructions….
Step 0: A Plan
First watch these videos about how to learn Japanese:
Everything Trenton says about Japanese applies equally to Chinese. There’s just one exception: Trenton says to ignore kanji. I think ignoring kanji is good advice for Japanese and bad advice for Chinese.
That aside, YouTuber Trenton’s basic thesis is that sheer volume of immersion to Chinese will get you to learn the language. You must do this entirely in Chinese. Watching a soap opera in Chinese with Chinese subtitles is fine, even if you understand very little. Watching the same soap opera in Chinese with English subtitles will not cause you to learn Chinese. Consulting English reference material is fine.
Step 1: Phonomes
The first step to learning Chinese is learning to parse the sounds. Basically every sound in Mandarin falls onto this table.
It’s also got one of four tones (five including neutral tone). Watch a video to learn how the tones work and then learn to identify them.
Listen to videos in Chinese. Ignore the meaning of what they’re saying. Just learn to parse the phonemes, including the tones. When you can transcribe 90% of slowly-spoken Chinese into pinyin, you’re done with this step.
Step 2: Phrasebook Chinese
Learn basic commonly-used phrases. In the beginning, most of your conversations will follow this script..
I love how it’s possible to use Anki audio flashcards to learn how to recognize words by ear. In my experience this doesn’t work very well for Chinese, because there are too many homonyms.
In most languages, it’s best to learn to listen to the spoken language before you learn to read. (This is especially good for keeping your accent from being too awful.) For Chinese, due to the plethora of homonyms + how well its etymology is preserved in the writing system, I prefer to prioritize reading at least as high as listening. [Disagree? Roast me in the comments.]
Chinese vocabulary can be approached via characters and/or via words. Most words are exactly two characters long. For example, “car” is written “汽车” which means “gas” + “vehicle”.
Learning the meanings of characters makes learning the characters much easier. When you learn a character, you should try to learn a few words it’s in. So when you learn the character “车”, you should also acquaint yourself with words like “汽车” and “摩托车”.
Two years ago, the way to do this was to use regexes in a website like mdbg.net but that trick has been rendered obsolete by ChatGPT.
What order should you learn characters in? There’s two schools of thought on this:
Learn characters in frequency order, most common characters first.
Learn characters in etymological order, simplest radicals first (this usually means older characters first).
I recommend you start with frequency order for 100 or 200 characters, then get a general gist of the radicals, and then go back to frequency order.
My favorite book for learning Chinese etymology is Reading & Writing Chinese. The book has a lot of typos, but this is surprisingly unimportant because they’re really obvious.
The best way to memorize characters is via immersion, but it’s often necessary to bootstrap yourself with rote memorization to get to immersion. Anki is one way, but for reading Chinese characters I personally prefer the ancient approach.
Here’s how it works: You write a character carefully, neatly and properly by hand while thinking of its meaning, saying its pronunciation out loud, and contemplating its etymology. Do this several times for a single character or word. Then move onto the next character and word. I filled hundreds of pages with this stuff.
China makes paper specifically for this practice, but it’s not always so easy to get outside of China. You can use graph paper or dot journals instead. Special brush pens exist for drawing Chinese characters, but I prefer Uniball Deluxe and G2 roller pens.
Step 3.2: Listening
Find something in Chinese you like and watch it without English subtitles. Trenton recommends podcasts, but I feel video is better for beginners because there’s more context.
Step 3.3: Conversation Practice
There are two ways to do this: commercially and non-commercially.
The commercial way to do this is to hire a Chinese teacher.
The noncommercial way is called “conversation exchange”. I like it a lot. It’s a great way to make friends. Conversation Exchange is where two people who want to learn each other’s language meet up and take turns with the language they speak. If you’re in China, the best way to make a conversation exchange friend is at an English-studying meetup. (Every major city I’ve visited has them.)
When you’re texting back-and-forth with your conversation partner, do it by typing into a pinyin-based keyboard.
Step 3.4: Grammar
Chinese grammar is…not very important. First of all, it’s very simple. There’s no singular/plural distinction. There’s (arguably) no verb conjugation either. Sentence order is subject-verb-object, just like English. Even if you do mess up grammar, people usually know what you’re saying. Vocabulary is more important than grammar.
That said, Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar by Claudia Ross is a good book on Mandarin grammar. I don’t know what YouTube resources are available―they may be even better than that book.
Wrapping up
Those are my basic tips. If you know of other resources I didn’t mention, then please leave them in the comments.
If you disagree with my opinions here, then please leave them in the comments too! Different language-learning approaches work for different people. Try out different stuff and see what works best for you.
[Letter] Chinese Quickstart
Dear lsusr,
I am a lesswrong user interested in learning Mandarin and living in China. My goal is understanding Chinese culture more broadly and geopolitics and Chinese tech policy more specifically. I could get CELTA and get a teaching job in China (not difficult), but it seems like I would gain far more value if I actually learned Mandarin.
Do you have recommendations on what’s the fastest way to learn Mandarin?
Yours sincerely
<redacted>
I’m posting my answer on Less Wrong so that the commenters can correct me in the comments. Do hear that everyone except <redacted>? Tell <redacted> why I’m wrong!
Dear <redacted>,
There is no fast way to learn Mandarin. But some ways are faster than others.
The first thing you should do is go live in China. (A teaching job via CELTA is fine.) This may or may not help you learn Chinese faster. Then why do it? Because learning Mandarin takes years. If you want to learn about Chinese culture then you should go to China now and start learning Mandarin after you get there.
The second reason to live in China is that the Chinese tech world is isolated from the rest of the world. It’s not just websites that require a Chinese IP address and phone number. Paying for lunch with WeChat is something you should do in China itself.
If you were from America or Europe then the second thing I would suggest is you buy a subscription to Foreign Affairs Journal. That still might be the right way for you to do things, but I don’t know how affordable it is to someone living in India.
Now that you’re no longer using “I don’t speak Mandarin” as an excuse to postpone your dreams, we can get into learning Mandarin.
[Disclaimer: AI is revolutionizing how language-learning works. This is very good for language-learners. However, the field of AI-assisted language learning is changing so rapidly that anything I write here could be out-of-date in three months. When it comes to using AI to learn Chinese, just use your imagination and try stuff out.]
Here are the old-school pre-AGI instructions….
Step 0: A Plan
First watch these videos about how to learn Japanese:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fvCb5_Nzq4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPKiMlCOeMc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFnc-OktAdQ
Everything Trenton says about Japanese applies equally to Chinese. There’s just one exception: Trenton says to ignore kanji. I think ignoring kanji is good advice for Japanese and bad advice for Chinese.
That aside, YouTuber Trenton’s basic thesis is that sheer volume of immersion to Chinese will get you to learn the language. You must do this entirely in Chinese. Watching a soap opera in Chinese with Chinese subtitles is fine, even if you understand very little. Watching the same soap opera in Chinese with English subtitles will not cause you to learn Chinese. Consulting English reference material is fine.
Step 1: Phonomes
The first step to learning Chinese is learning to parse the sounds. Basically every sound in Mandarin falls onto this table.
It’s also got one of four tones (five including neutral tone). Watch a video to learn how the tones work and then learn to identify them.
Listen to videos in Chinese. Ignore the meaning of what they’re saying. Just learn to parse the phonemes, including the tones. When you can transcribe 90% of slowly-spoken Chinese into pinyin, you’re done with this step.
Step 2: Phrasebook Chinese
Learn basic commonly-used phrases. In the beginning, most of your conversations will follow this script..
Learn to say “谢谢”, “不好意思”, etc.
Step 3: Actually learning Chinese
There are four aspects to this:
Vocabulary
Pure listening practice
Conversation practice
Grammar [doesn’t really matter]
Step 3.1: Vocabulary
I love how it’s possible to use Anki audio flashcards to learn how to recognize words by ear. In my experience this doesn’t work very well for Chinese, because there are too many homonyms.
In most languages, it’s best to learn to listen to the spoken language before you learn to read. (This is especially good for keeping your accent from being too awful.) For Chinese, due to the plethora of homonyms + how well its etymology is preserved in the writing system, I prefer to prioritize reading at least as high as listening. [Disagree? Roast me in the comments.]
Chinese vocabulary can be approached via characters and/or via words. Most words are exactly two characters long. For example, “car” is written “汽车” which means “gas” + “vehicle”.
Learning the meanings of characters makes learning the characters much easier. When you learn a character, you should try to learn a few words it’s in. So when you learn the character “车”, you should also acquaint yourself with words like “汽车” and “摩托车”.
Two years ago, the way to do this was to use regexes in a website like mdbg.net but that trick has been rendered obsolete by ChatGPT.
What order should you learn characters in? There’s two schools of thought on this:
Learn characters in frequency order, most common characters first.
Learn characters in etymological order, simplest radicals first (this usually means older characters first).
I recommend you start with frequency order for 100 or 200 characters, then get a general gist of the radicals, and then go back to frequency order.
My favorite book for learning Chinese etymology is Reading & Writing Chinese. The book has a lot of typos, but this is surprisingly unimportant because they’re really obvious.
The best way to memorize characters is via immersion, but it’s often necessary to bootstrap yourself with rote memorization to get to immersion. Anki is one way, but for reading Chinese characters I personally prefer the ancient approach.
Here’s how it works: You write a character carefully, neatly and properly by hand while thinking of its meaning, saying its pronunciation out loud, and contemplating its etymology. Do this several times for a single character or word. Then move onto the next character and word. I filled hundreds of pages with this stuff.
China makes paper specifically for this practice, but it’s not always so easy to get outside of China. You can use graph paper or dot journals instead. Special brush pens exist for drawing Chinese characters, but I prefer Uniball Deluxe and G2 roller pens.
Step 3.2: Listening
Find something in Chinese you like and watch it without English subtitles. Trenton recommends podcasts, but I feel video is better for beginners because there’s more context.
Step 3.3: Conversation Practice
There are two ways to do this: commercially and non-commercially.
The commercial way to do this is to hire a Chinese teacher.
The noncommercial way is called “conversation exchange”. I like it a lot. It’s a great way to make friends. Conversation Exchange is where two people who want to learn each other’s language meet up and take turns with the language they speak. If you’re in China, the best way to make a conversation exchange friend is at an English-studying meetup. (Every major city I’ve visited has them.)
If you’re not in China, I like https://www.conversationexchange.com/.
When you’re texting back-and-forth with your conversation partner, do it by typing into a pinyin-based keyboard.
Step 3.4: Grammar
Chinese grammar is…not very important. First of all, it’s very simple. There’s no singular/plural distinction. There’s (arguably) no verb conjugation either. Sentence order is subject-verb-object, just like English. Even if you do mess up grammar, people usually know what you’re saying. Vocabulary is more important than grammar.
That said, Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar by Claudia Ross is a good book on Mandarin grammar. I don’t know what YouTube resources are available―they may be even better than that book.
Wrapping up
Those are my basic tips. If you know of other resources I didn’t mention, then please leave them in the comments.
If you disagree with my opinions here, then please leave them in the comments too! Different language-learning approaches work for different people. Try out different stuff and see what works best for you.
万岁