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My tips on speaking Mandarin fluently | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6518 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes  2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 1 of 19 10 July 2011 at 6:10am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Hello all,
some of my friends have been asking me to provide a more detailed explanation on how I learned Mandarin but at the time I didn’t feel competent enough to give any advice because I wasn’t fluent enough myself and I had to wait to find out what actually worked for me and what didn’t. There is unfortunately no step-by-step manual on how to become fluent in Mandarin, but I will try to write down in brief what I think worked for me. Goes without saying that what worked for me might not work for the next person and this is really only my personal opinion based on my experience and the experience of other students I know. In this article I am often using the imperative mood “you should, you should not” and similar expressions but the purpose is not to sound commanding of course, it is just that it is much easier for me to write in English this way rather than adding “in my opinion” after every sentence. Without any specific order of importance, these are the key points that helped me learn Mandarin to Advanced fluency (almost advanced to be really honest): Your learning process should follow this following pattern, whether it comes to your overall learning strategy or learning of new single words or expressions: 1. understand 2. speak 3. read /type 5. handwrite I was so tired and demotivated by constantly learning and forgetting new vocabulary that I decided to stop writing down new words altogether and see what happens. I rarely remembered new words after hearing or repeating them only once or twice and it didn’t seem to work at first but it unexpectedly started showing results. When I heard a new word, say 尷尬 and asked what it meant, after people explained it to me, I probably forgot it in about 5 minutes, maybe later that day I asked how to say “embarrassing” but forgot it again. The next day I heard尷尬in a discussion and it sounded very familiar, however now I didn’t remember what it meant, when told what it was, that was mostly the moment when the sound-meaning association “clicked”. Now I could recognize the word automatically in real time speech and since I associated the sound with its meaning directly and not through pinyin, the association was very strong and fast. Learning how to say the same word happened in pretty much the same manner. I was in a situation where I wanted to say “embarrassing” in Chinese, but couldn’t quite remember how to say it, someone helped me and I said.. damn why can’t I remember how to say this word when I know what it means is when I hear it? Believe it or not, this is actually a very important moment, because that is when the brain realizes that this word is important. After 2-3 situations like this, the word became a part of my active vocabulary. On average one word or expression took me 5 days to get into my active vocabulary. It seems like a very long time, but when I was bulk learning vocabulary, at the end of the day, after a week of studies, I passively memorized maybe 300-400 expressions, but getting them into my active vocabulary was very difficult and often very unsuccessful. All I had to do was take a week off and I forgot two thirds of those expressions, not to mention the characters. If you learn 5 solid expressions per day and get them into your active vocabulary, you will literally “own” them, you will have a much better “new vocab per week” result in the end, sounding like a native (or close). Mandarin takes a long time to learn any way I look at it, so the way I see things is, that you will have to spend a lot of time on your studies and you unfortunately will progress slowly. You can choose to spend this long time anyway you like, but in my opinion, since there is no bulk-learning shortcut to Mandarin, slowly but steadily learning 5 expressions per day will get you much further in the long run. You should also try to talk to as many different people as you can, as much as you can and use your “safe” expressions in many situations to solidify your active vocabulary learning slowly but steadily as you go. Whenever I didn’t know how to express something, I asked how it should be said and didn’t try to improvise, because I found out that as much as I tried in my improvisations, they never matched the Chinese set-phrase that should be used in this or that particular situation. After becoming conversationally fluent I started to read comic books in Chinese. They consist of 80% direct speech which is virtually the same as spoken Mandarin and will help you enhance your speaking abilities. The descriptive parts however are mostly different from spoken Mandarin, will not enhance your speaking abilities and are the reason why regular books are much harder to read. After being able to read comic books, I started to read regular books. For me, reading proved and proves to be the best way to broaden my vocabulary and helps make my expressions become more standard and educated. When I read, I don’t translate every word I don’t know, only the key ones that I cannot move on without. I circle in the word I don’t know with a pen, pull a line to the side of the page and write the translation there. After 10 pages or so I review. I circle in the words because they are easy to find when I review the pages and I write the translation far from the words in text at the side of the page, because if the translation is written right next to the unknown word, reviewing vocab is impossible. When it comes to tones, it helped me a lot that I always learned syllable pairs and not single syllables. It is much easier to learn a syllable pair (basically most of Mandarin words 說話, 看書 and so on) rather than to learn isolated syllables like 我, 他, 去 and so on. Learning words this way, you have a relation of two sounds that are either in contrast or are the same and it is much easier to remember them rather than trying to remember the sound of a single syllable. Subsequently it is also much easier to isolate a syllable from a syllable pair and then use it in a different word remembering its sound (for instance you learn the sound of 說話, then isolate the 話 and use it in 普通話). While learning a syllable pair – if I havea problem reproducing it, I only try to pinpoint, which of the two syllables is higher and whether the tone was flat or you had to “get up to it” in pitch in order to match it. The neutral tone is very important. I realized that a lot of my expressions sounded off because of a wrong neutral tone. For instance I always thought that I just could not correctly pronounce the Mandarin “a”, most notably in expressions like 真的嗎? Turned out it wasn’t the “a” sound that was the problem, but the pitch of the neutral tone in 嗎. A lot of foreigners, even though they are very fluent, still don’t get this one right. The best teacher is not a native speaker but a native like speaking foreigner. He will understand your problems much better and will point them out to you in a much clearer way. For instance I was trying to pronounce the word 茄子 in Taiwanese but couldn’t get it right for a very long time. I was asking my Taiwanese friends to tell me what I was doing wrong and they were always trying to correct my pitch and tones. It turned out that it was not the tones at all but it was the initial sounds that were off and a foreigner had to tell me that. When it comes to the pronunciation of difficult initials and finals in syllables, be very critical of yourself and never believe a Chinese person when he or she says your pronunciation is great. The native like speaking foreigner is the key again. If you can’t get the sounds down by purely imitating them, try hundreds of different positions of your tongue until you find something that you are satisfied with. Then memorize the position of the tongue, force it into that position the first couple of days until it becomes natural There is also sort of a basic “starting mouth position” for Mandarin, which is different in every language. It is the position of the tongue, lips and teeth before you even start speaking. If you find that position, keep your month that way, expand and get back to this starting position as you speak. It will be much easier for you to pronounce Mandarin sounds correctly, but it takes time to find this position. In Taiwanese Mandarin, in the starting position the tip of the tongue is a bit down front in the mouth touching the lower teeth and the lips are very relaxed, the mouth almost seems as if it were a bit opened, the back of your tongue is a bit higher, approaching the soft palate. It is very difficult to explain it this way, so you just have to experiment a little and try and try and try. Give each syllable its proper length. Some syllables are actually much longer and elaborated than I thought. The 先, 片 – ian final cluster actually almost seems like two syllables “-i+an” and not a monosyllabic “yan”. I didn’t want to talk about tones as a matter of policy, but as I said, height is very important, so concentrate on the fact that there are three high tones (as in the words 天, 明, 去 – deliberately not mentioning the number of the tone here) and one low tone (as in the word 起). It is a good rule of thumb to set the天, 明, 去 group much higher than the 起 group if you are a girl and set the 起 lower than the 天, 明, 去 group when you’re a boy. If you are a boy and start speaking too high you will sound funny, that’s why it is better to go lower with the 起 and staying in place with 天, 明, 去. But this is very individual. The thing to do, as I said before is to concentrate on sound only and forget about tonal changes. If you repeat what you hear it will sound much more natural and will be much easier to reproduce than having to consciously concentrate on how to adjust your vocal chords. This 天, 明, 去 Vs. 起 distinction is only here to help you if you think you are mispronouncing a word that has tones from both groups and you don’t know why. The reason probably is that you are not separating the two groups enough, the 起 should be low and 天, 明, 去 should be high. Move to a Chinese speaking country for at least one year Find a Chinese speaking girlfriend/boyfriend Listen to people who have a voice similar to your own Imitate people with a voice similar to your own Try to find sort of a “soul mate”, someone who has similar values and copycat his Mandarin. His/her Mandarin speech will probably be something very similar to your speech in your native language. I had a Japanese friend who learned to speak almost native like Mandarin in one year without a pen and paper or going to classes only because he literally “became” the copy of his Taiwanese roommate. The problem was that he was no longer himself when he was speaking Mandarin and talking to him was almost like talking to his roommate. That’s why finding a more suitable “soul mate” is quite important :) Find a conversation partner who has a similar voice to your own. If you’re a girl, find a girl, if you’re a boy find a boy. Chinese pod for instance is great but has unfortunately very few male native speakers and thus could not help my pronunciation You should not learn how to handwrite characters in the first one or two years of your studies, only learn how to handwrite the 50 or so most basic ones to learn the writing basics. It is an incredible loss of time and energy. What helped me a lot was, that I only learned how to recognize characters for words that I already knew the sound of and knew how to use. I saved a lot of time and could concentrate on other things instead. Learning how to read something you know how to say is much easier and faster. Later I dropped learning new characters altogether, concentrated only onspeaking and understanding, waited until I was fluent and then started to learn how to read and write I dropped my conscious concentration on the tones and started to concentrate on the sound only. I was trying to imitate people as good as I could. I was learning whole expressions instead of just words I stopped bulk-learning characters I stopped bulk-learning new vocabulary that I didn’t know how to use I was learning vocabulary on the go without writing it down, only remembering it by the sound I was/am trying to speak slowly I was not using Anki or any other SRS programs I was doing a lot of listening, preferably to a large variety of different types of voices that are as close to my voice as possible I was listening to good music in Mandarin I was watching a lot of TV shows in Mandarin When I suddenly didn’t know how to say something, rather than asking for a direct translation of what I wanted to say, I asked for the expression that a Taiwanese person would use in that situation. The two were often very different. I tried to be able to understand as much of the Chinese pod intermediate podcasts as possible before comming to Taiwan. I pause-rewinded them over and over again and listened to them over and over again until I could understan them at natural speed word by word. I was chatting a lot in Chinese on skype. This is a very good practice actually. Sometimes even much better than talking to someone in person. On skype, you constantly have to talk, constantly have to describe concrete or abstract situations in detail. You talk in bigger chunks. In person, sometimes you only drop a few sentences, on skype you often have to talk for minutes on your own, structuring your speech and so on. Talking to 2 people is better than talking to only one person, because you can see how these two people interact and learn a lot from it. When you talk to a person, try to look at his mouth a lot. I think you can consciously or subconsciously learn a lot about pronunciation this way. I think little babies do the same thing, because the mouth is the only thing that moves on a persons face and must be very interesting for the small child. Try to record yourself periodically as you talk to other people and analyze the recordings later. You should be able to notice a whole deal of things that you usually don’t. Chatting a lot on MSN is a great exercise. It should help you solidify your spoken Chinese and give it more structure. I didn’t write down any vocabulary that I learned during the day, but it was a pretty good idea to wait until the end of that day and try to write down off the top of my head the words that I’ve learned during that day. Chances were that the words that I remembered at the end of that particular day were important and were already at least in my passive vocabulary. Edited by Vlad on 12 July 2011 at 4:00am 32 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6484 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 2 of 19 10 July 2011 at 6:34am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Some good stuff here. You are still the man.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| jasoninchina Senior Member China Joined 5165 days ago 221 posts - 306 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Italian | Message 3 of 19 10 July 2011 at 6:50am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Do you have a favorite(s)? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6518 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 4 of 19 10 July 2011 at 7:03am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Leosmith,
thank you very much. Do you think that this sort of naturalistic approach could be used to learn Japanese? Jasoninchina, My absolute favorite up until now would definitely be Ikebukuro west gate park - chinese transaltion (池袋西口公園) there are apparently more versions, some are very cheesy, but I read this one: http://www.mangatraders.com/manga/series/3429 There is unfortunately only one episode. I would definitely like to read more of this. I also liked Death note (死亡筆記本) very much. It got a little too complicated at one point but I managed to somehow read the entire series. I liked GTO too, but sometimes it was really too 誇張. Edited by Vlad on 10 July 2011 at 8:28am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6313 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 19 10 July 2011 at 8:45am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Thanks, Vlad, there's a lot of helpful stuff here.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6484 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 6 of 19 11 July 2011 at 1:37am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
It worked for Mandarin, so I'm sure it will work for Japanese. Of course, you will have to duplicate the degree of immersion you used for Mandarin, and you will probably need to do a lot more grammar work. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| galindo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5141 days ago 142 posts - 248 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Portuguese | Message 7 of 19 11 July 2011 at 5:50am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Thanks a lot for your post! It sounds like exactly the sort of method that would work for me if I ever decide to try learning Mandarin, since it's similar to the way I learned Japanese.
Yeah, I think it would work great with Japanese, especially since Japanese is much more phonetically simple, and the words are longer so you have bigger chunks that are easier to remember than individual syllables or syllable pairs. I think there's less of a gap between being able to understand a word when you hear it and being able to use it yourself, since there aren't tones or difficult initials/finals that you have to work hard at reproducing correctly.
I think this is less of a problem in Japanese, since the grammar is more formulaic.
I really agree with this. When I first started trying to read comic books, there were a lot of phrases that I hadn't heard spoken before, so that slowed me down a lot. When I focused more on listening comprehension, reading came much more naturally. If I'm reading and come across an unknown word and look it up, I'll remember it very easily if it's one I've heard frequently (kind of like, "duh, of course that's how it's written!"). If it's one I have never heard before, I have to look it up lots of times before it sticks.
I feel the same way. I've always been an avid reader, so it makes sense to me that reading is what works best for expanding my vocabulary. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6518 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 8 of 19 11 July 2011 at 6:24am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Eric:
Thank you for the comment. Did you manage to get that Death note comic book going? Leosmith: I would really like to try Japanese because of my big interest in the language and culture. I sometimes feel like all the good things in Taiwan come from Japan. I was asking my friends that have been learning Japanese for quite a while and reached reasonable proficiency in it to give me some pointers and what I mostly heard was that the sounds of Japanese are relatively easy to grasp, but that the grammar is very complex. I mostly heard, that Japanese is relatively easy to start, but difficult to move to the next level. I'm thinking about finding a Japanese language exchange partner here in Taiwan and see how things go. Galindo: It's really quite a setback in the whole language learning process, that reading books as an aid to speaking fluent Mandarin is something that can only be done once you are already reasonably fluent in the language. I remember trying to read books in Italian almost from day one and it helped me tremendously. Speaking of comic books, would you guys happen to be able to recommend a good 青年漫画? I like urban style grown up stuff. No big eyes or cute humor :) 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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