Introduction For various reasons I have had interest in learning mandarin for quite some time. After slowly making my way through the first three Pimsleur language tapes I finally had made a plan to go to a mandarin speaking country and begin to learn mandarin in earnest. For the past four months I have been in Taiwan learning mandarin and have arrived at around the B1 level in the CEFR framework by my and my teachers estimation. This means that I am quite confident having conversations about simple daily topics but I will frequently have grammar mistakes and when discussing something like politics I frequently find myself missing words. However, for travelling and having short conversations I find this is more than enough. As I continue to learn mandarin I hope that this will help to provide a strong foundation on which I can learn more and more. The following summary is a condensation of information that I have found on the web that has proven to be invaluable to me on my path of learning mandarin. It is my hope that the following suggestions will help people efficiently learn mandarin and amalgamate various sources of information that I have spent a significant amount of time to search for.

How quickly can I become “fluent”? Answer About a year and a half if you are willing to work hard, or about 8 months if you are willing to work hard and you have an easier definition of fluent.

Unfortunately everyone’s definition of ~fluent~ is different but getting confident speaking to people about basic topics and understanding the gist of what people are saying can happen much much faster than many people might expect.

What does fluent mean? Thankfully this is a problem that has already been solved but not surprisingly many non language learners have not heard of. The CEFR standards stand in europe as a broad standard that many use to measure fluency. The standard goes from A1-A2, B1-B2 to finally C1-C2. In Germany in order to attend a German speaking university it is necessary to obtain at least a C1 certification of “functional fluency” or of C2 or “non native-fluency.”

What strategies should I use to learn at maximum speed The CEFR has many parts to their assesments but it is of my opinion that although grammar is important words are often a main limiting factor, especially for understanding text. Therefore most of my mandarin learning techniques focus on learning as much vocabulary as quickly as possible.

I used three different strategies to maximize the time that I had in Taiwan. Primarily I used spaced repetition software to learn both words and characters. Next I stayed in a homestay and tried to maximize the amount of time that I spent speaking with my homestay family. Finally I went to a mandarin school for about 3.4 hours a day 5 days a week. 3.4 hours a day when averaging out days I showed up late or the few days I didn’t come.

One caveat is that I was lucky enough to attend a school where they could teach me almost all of the grammar that I needed, however this would also be possible with self study although it would be more difficult. However I firmly believe that for understanding someone and making your point clear it is often vocabulary that is the deciding factor in particular Nouns and Adjectives.

Because learning vocab is an integral part of learning mandarin it is important to talk about how words are organized in Mandarin Chinese. Chinese is broken into both words and characters but unlike English the line in mandarin is often a little bit fuzzier between the two. Chinese people may consider each character which is one syllable as a “word” for historical and cultural reasons making every multiple character word a compound word. However in english multisyllabic words can often not be broken apart because their roots might come from different languages like the word “Shampoo” for example.

Staying motivated after the first “slump”

There are multiple different opinions on how much vocabulary is needed for what level of mandarin on this site. However almost everyone agrees that it should follow zipfs law. This means that for every level of mandarin you need to double the number of words you know for every level that you want to increase. This is interesting because the rate at which humans can feasibly learn words is at most quadratic, probably linear, and potentially even slower depending on the person.

This means that no matter how fast your learning rate is at a certain point you will need to begin the “grind” phase. This is where you still may understand very little of what people are saying however, in order to understand noticeably more you will need to spend twice as much time as you already have. This is where the grind begins in earnest and it is vitally important to have faith in the methods and tools that you are using and to stay the course. This also means that in order to get a high level of mastery a large amount of time is needed regardless of the speed that is needed. Although human variation might make one student as much as twice as fast as another student if they study for the same amount of time this might only mean that the “fast” student is “only” one level ahead of the “slow” student.

Which Character set should I learn You should learn both if you go to Taiwan but start with traditional, or you should stick to simplified if you are in mainland China There are multiple opinions on this but the only real reason to learn the traditional set is if you are interested in the history of the characters, reading older literature or living in Taiwan. Currently almost all traditional books will have simplified translations but the opposite is not true. It is also true that a majority of the characters are the same or look very similar so going from traditional to simplified is not that bad. However, this again is the subject of huge debate.

Nitty gritty studying Strategies **Anki I personally find that using the card spaced repetition software anki to be one of the most efficient and speedy ways to memorize mandarin voabulary. Not only does the software keep track of words that you are about to forget but it also takes a huge mental load off of what you need to review. Allowing yourself just 30 precisely targeted minutes is enough to touch base on everything, and for me personally even move forward.

**Maximizing anki speed There is a certain maximum that everyone has when it comes to words that are in their “sort of know” bucket. The problem is that at first this is the only bucket that you are filling. For me personally this “sorf of know” bucket is around 800 words. This means that this is the maximum number of words that I can have to be reviewed within a single month. After I add more words it becomes harder and harder to remember other parts of the “sort of know” bucket and I begin to forget everything that hasn’t been learned really well. For me this means slowing down to about 20 words per day, as once I get to around 800 words I am filing about 20 cards away for long term reminders in anki, so I can add about 20 cards a day for new usage. This does mean that you need to make sure not to over study once you reach the saturation point.

**Finding a good Anki deck There are plenty of good decks out there, but if you can find a deck that has an audio clip and uses the word in a sentence I find that this will often enhance your learning of the words. There is one website in particular that has lists of various sentences at different levels of difficulty.

**Learning radicals If you want to learn the characters it is also imperative that you learn the radicals. For a number of reasons this will decrease the mental load that it takes to remember and recall the characters when you use them in daily life. Without the radicals your brain will often have to do to much work and it will be trying to memorize every single line. This is absoutely no good as you should be able to break down every character into just a few radicals for easier memorization. Memorizing all of the radicals is also not that bad because therea are only about 180, and many of these radicals are also characters in and of themselves. So merely by paying attention to a few of the characters you are learning it will become much easier to learn all the other characters as a whole.

**How much writing to learn Unfortunately writing will help you recognize characters and is more useful than I originally thought. This is unfortunate because writing by far takes some of the most time and gives you the least amount of benefit in your everyday life. However if you are interested in reading some difficult signs as well as in reading others handwriting, writing will help you in these contexts. If you are interested in learning to write I would take the time to memorize the top 80 radicals first and learn how to write those. After the radicals I would focus on learning no more than around the 500 most common characters. Going further to maybe 1500. Some huge percentage of everything that you will read can be read with only 1500 characters, but if you learn the 80 to 100 most common radicals you should have no problem whatsoever breaking down almost any character.

What the hell is Anki?? Anki is a [flashcard][anki_website] progam

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