In French, there is a phrase — “C’est du chinois” which literally means “It’s Chinese”. This phrase is similar to the English idiom “It’s Greek to me”; all indicate that something is impossible to comprehend. In Chinese, we have a phrase 像天书一样 xiang4 tian1 shu1 yi2 yang4 (the same as heavenly script), means something is so unfathomable. Is learning Chinese this hard for non-native Chinese speakers? I asked my students and my friends who are learning Chinese, and they told me: “Chinese is not that hard to learn; we just need time to practice it.” So, yes, practice makes perfect, including learning Chinese. But, how to practice? It is a big question. Chinese is a living language which means it has at least four aspects (not to mention those 5000 years’ history and wisdom behind it now) that you should learn — listening, speaking, reading and writing. What things or what work you need to do to better your Chinese learning? The following tips can help you a great deal if you can spend some time and actually do them. Action speaks louder than words, so if you want to improve your Chinese, do something; more important, do something right!
1.Master the tones
Tones are so hard to learn if your native language is not a tonal language. For the beginners, I would encourage them to exaggerate the tones as best as they can. When I introduce the vocab for the new lesson, I like to do tone awareness movement to use the arms or the whole body to remind the students the tones’ differences, and the students were having fun doing and learning the tones in a fun way.
For the tonal movement that you can practice, you can check the BBC site for the tone practice:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/chinese/games/tones.shtml
Make it a habit to recognize each new word’s tone and character’s meaning. Exaggerate and practice your tones, but don’t just concentrate on that single aspect. The sentence fluency is equally important. Your sentences need to flow with ups and downs of tonal melody.
2. Practice whenever you can
Wherever you are, just try to speak Chinese. When you are in a Chinese restaurant, try to order food in Chinese. When you are with your fellow classmates, try to chat with him or her in Chinese or talk to whomever you know that can speak or understand Chinese. When you are at Youtube site, pick up some Chinese lessons to learn. Label the objects in your house or your room with Chinese characters and pinyin. When you want to say a sentence, ask yourself, what this sentence will be in Chinese?
Immerse yourself in Chinese in thinking, in speaking, and create the learning time as much as you can.
3. Listen to the dialogue of your textbooks
If you are learning Chinese based on a textbook. Then you need to keep a good habit to listen to the dialogue at least three times a day. The purpose that I recorded those Integrated Chinese textbook dialogue is to help my students develop their listening comprehension. For the first time, you can do pure listening to focus on the recording, and for the second or third times, you can read aloud and follow along with the recording. If you want to practice more, read it to your family or even pets, see what reaction you will get from them.
4.Decode Chinese characters – useful tips for recognizing characters longer and effectively – painting images in your mind or making a story for the character you wish to remember
Try to recognize Chinese Characters by rote is time consuming and the memory won’t last long. Seeing each Chinese character as a painting or continuous strips of story will aid essential visualization to your storage of Characters, make your recognition clearly and more interesting, and help you to build a lasting memory.
Most of Chinese characters are made of a few radicals or units. It is a good idea to study the parts first, then assemble the parts back to the whole meaning with these two ways. In order to do this approach, I suggest you to study at least 40 common radicals (部首 bu4 shou3）. See my post about radicals to get more information about common radicals.
A Painting images on your mind
For example, the character 秋 qiu1 (autumn) is made of two basic radicals — 禾 he2 (crops) and 火 huo3 (fire). The time when you see the green leaves change to flaming red and orange and the farmers harvesting their abundant crops is the season of autumn. So, paint two images on your mind, both images vividly express the meaning of autumn.
So, next time when you see this 秋 qiu1 you will remember it right away that it is fall ／ autumn.
The character 早 zao3 means early. It consists of two radicals — 日 ri4 and 木 mu4. Ri4 日 is the sun and the mu4 木 means wood or trees. So, when you see the sun climbs up to the tree top, it is morning time. Morning is earlier than the noon or the night, thus, it has the meaning of early. Also, 早上 zao3 shang4 means morning, 早安 zao3 an1 means good morning.
The character 好 hao3 means good. It consists of two radicals 女 nv3 and 子 zi3. Imagine you are the man of the house, when you arrived home and saw your child and wife after a long day of working, you must have some **good** feeling? The ancient Chinese people thought that a man would be good and content as long as he has a wife and child – a wife to tend to his need and a child to carry his gene to next generation. So, paint a happy ＊＊good＊＊ family image for this character.
B Make a story for the character
Sometimes, it is hard to make images easily. When you feel some difficulty of creating the images, you need to have some creativity — try to make a story to it, no matter how silly, funny or ridiculous the story might be. so, learning Chinese can make you a creative person:)
Today, in my class, we were learning the character 重 zhong4 (heavy). I told the students to make a story for this character. Daniel said that the middle like the big face and the top and bottom like big hands and big legs for that person is very heavy.
I told him, “Yes, that is a fine story for you to recognize and memorize the word.” I said, besides that story, we can also think the middle is a big fat belly and the top part like the hands got squeezed up and hanging there, and the bottom part like the belly is so heavy and the legs got collapsed. The students laughed, and I bet they won’t forget this word easily 🙂
We also did another word lou2 楼 （multi- storied building). I told them, in ancient China, most houses were built by wood, so that is the radical we saw on the left side mu3 (wood). The bottom on the right side is the radical for 女 nv3 girl, and the upper one is 米 mi3 word (rice). I said, how about I remember this character by this story – Once upon a time, in a wood building, there was a starved girl. She always ate her bowl of rice while she was climbing up the stairs. The students felt the story was pretty ridiculous, but, as long as it can offer some mnemonic aid, it would still be useful.
A lot of people told me recognizing and memorizing Chinese characters are hard and boring. It can be yes or no, depend what approach you use. Remember when you first learned English, you teachers told you one of the most important strategies of reading is to chunk the word into little units, then blend them together and sound them out. Learning Chinese characters are the same – Chop the big pieces into little units and then assemble them to form the meaning — it can be etymological way, silly way or ridiculous way. However, as long as it works for you, it would be the best way:)
5. Write a few characters a day
Pinyin is the Romanization of Chinese characters. Learning characters might overwhelm you, but you can not learn Chinese by solely relying on pinyin. You should try to learn at least a few characters a day and actually write it with pen and paper. Writing Chinese characters is like doing an art project. Each character is a tiny bit of project. The first thing you need to know is to know the common radicals (see common radicals under my categories). The Chinese radicals tells you the meaning of the words. Knowing the radicals can help you learn the Character better in a meaningful way and also help you remember the character for a long long time. The second thing you need to know is to follow the stroke order, from left to right, from top to the bottom. Yellowbridge is a good website for learning the meaning and the stroke order of Chinese characters — http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/character-stroke-order.php?searchChinese=1&zi=%E5%9C%8B
Writing Chinese characters is a good way to practice your patience and to better your temperament. There is a term called 书法 shu1 fa3 — the art of writing — Chinese calligraphy. See the Chinese calligraphy category to know more about it, and it is another amazing field of learning and appreciation too.
Also, here is the link for the beautiful calligraphy from those famous masters. http://www.chinapage.com/callig1.html#cx
6. Chinese flashcards
I ask my students to make flashcards to practice on a daily basis just to refresh their memory. There are so many characters to learn, but, human’s memory is limited. The only way that you can keep the words in your brain for a long time and not forget about them is to make best use of flashcards. Write the Character on one side, and the pinyin and the definition on the other side. Each time when you practice, ask yourself, what character this is? It is great if you know the answer right away, but, if you don’t, just spend a few minutes to memorize it, and then question yourself on it again. It is a lot of work I know, but, no pains no gains, especially when we are talking about learning language, especially the most difficult language in the world?
7. Sing Chinese songs
If you ask me what is the most powerful way to learn Chinese well, I would say it is to learn to sing Chinese songs.
I believe that singing songs is one of the best ways to immerse the learners in a target language. By learning to sing songs, the learner needs to listen to the songs over and over again, which is good for improving listening comprehension; he or she also needs to sing the songs repeatedly, and doing so, is an excellent way to practice speaking the language. Beside listening and speaking, they also need to read the lyrics and it helps the developing of reading fluency. Besides all of these benefits, they can learn the cultural aspect and wisdom behind the songs; however, the most important fact is singing itself is enjoyable, and the memory will last for a long, long time.
So, I hope you will enjoy those wonderful songs at my website, some of them are the hottest ones and some of them are classic ones. Each song is a little story or a little journey of someone else. We said ” Reading will take you to a different world to explore” so does singing a song.
Yes, I know that you can not do everything at same time or in one day, it is totally fine. Just do some of them one step of a time. If you keep doing it over and over again, eventually, you will be a master at learning Chinese. Enjoy your learning and have a great time every time. Now, you know what I have in mind to conclude today’s post? Mmmm a song. What song it might be?
Yes, one step at a time!
Shu