When I first came to Taiwan, I assumed I would pick up Chinese without much effort. After all, I was constantly exposed to it everywhere I went, so even if I didn’t want to, I would automatically learn, right? A year later, feeling like I hadn’t learned much, I realized that things didn’t quite work this way. I actually had to put in effort to learn the language. To make things easier on myself, I decided to focus on listening and speaking only. Learning to read and write characters just seemed like too much for me.

Three years later, while I don’t consider myself fluent by any means, I have learned a lot about the learning process, especially through creating the CLO course and communicating with listeners. Through this process, I have tried to create the tools that would have helped me the most, were I to start learning again from the start. Like anything else you want to accomplish in life, it can be highly beneficial to set goals for yourself when you have a long, arduous task in front of you. When you begin, it may look like a long road ahead from the start to the day you consider yourself fluent. However, with some due diligence you can find that the goal isn’t as far off as you think.

Many people “want” to learn Chinese, but give up early when they realize how many characters they would have to learn to be literate. Constantly being bombarded with new vocabulary, while easily forgetting old words can also make it easy to give up. What I have found is that having a system of learning greatly reduces the complexity of this process. This system can be broken down into 4 steps.

1. Determine where you are
2. Determine where you want to be
3. Set a time frame to reach your goals
4. Allocate the time necessary to reach your goals

So for example, if your goal is to be able to write characters, set a goal of how many characters you want to know. Looking at our course, you need to know about 500 characters to get through level 1 and level 2. A moderate pace would take you a year to finish two levels (you can adjust this pace for yourself). This means you would need to learn 1.36 characters a day to achieve your goal. All of a sudden that doesn’t sound so hard, does it?

Learning to write characters usually involves writing it over and over again. You can practice using the worksheets we’ve created for you here along with our new character introductions. For me personally, I have a habit of writing 50 characters (half the worksheet) each day. This is a combination of new characters and reviewing old characters.

It is important to note that this process is MUCH harder up front. Of those 500 characters, over a hundred are introduced in the first ten lessons. This means a lot of time will be spent up front where it seems like you aren’t making progress. However, once you’ve made it past those ten lessons, all of a sudden things become much easier. New characters will be easier to learn since they will mostly be based on characters or elements you already know. Plus you will find yourself spending less time on stroke order since it will now be more natural to you. A similar process can be used for learning new words with the new memorization mode on our flashcard program. Choose a range of lessons and learn the vocabulary associated with them by logging in once a day.

By dividing up the chore of learning into daily, manageable steps, you will find the process much easier, as you will actually be learning something new each day. The above steps add about 30 minutes to my daily routine, but the results have been much better than the haphazard, plan-less program I was using previously. The way I look at it, another year will pass whether I put in daily effort or not. This way though, I know exactly where I will be a year from now, rather than just hoping I have improved.

Most learners of Chinese try to take shortcuts and I was no exception. Learning to read and write Chinese seemed impossible for me to do in a short time, so at first I didn’t bother. When I eventually did decide to tackle this area, I decided to focus on reading rather than writing. It was one thing for me to be able to recognize a complex character at a glance, but it was another thing for me to actually be able to reproduce it on paper with all its minute nuances. I later found that when learning to read Chinese, there are other shortcuts that I could take to make the learning process seem much quicker than it actually was.

In English, it is possible for learners to read a paragraph of text out aloud without having any clue as to what they are reading. For new words, whose pronunciation isn’t known, it is still possible to try and come up with an approximation of what the word should sound like by phonetically sounding it out, which is usually enough for a native English to understand. In Chinese, this process is of course a lot trickier, since you frequently come across characters that are completely unrecognizable, with no phonetic clues to help you out. Whenever I was at this point, I was usually stumped. No amount of prodding or encouragement from a teacher was going to help me since there were no clues at all on how to proceed.

Well the truth is, there were clues, but they were just in different places. Most words in Chinese are formed from two or more characters, so usually when reading, knowing what one of the characters is, is enough to give you a clue as to what the word is or might be. For example, when looking at a menu, I would look for key characters. 肉 was a good one since by studying the characters around it, I was able to figure out what kind of meat was in the dish. I’d recognize 羊肉 as lamb since the 羊 resembled the horns on a sheep. Beef also featured similar characters. I found that by setting the context this way, I was much further ahead than having to sheepishly stare (pun intended) at the menu with no clue as to where to look. Similarly, I was able to spot 茶, so I knew I was dealing with tea. I also knew that 红 meant “red.” So with that, I knew that I was dealing with a type of red tea. At the end of the day, it was much easier to ask the waiter “what kind of red tea is this?” than to simply ask “what’s on this menu?”

Once you get your brain used to looking for clues in this way, you will find your brain automatically scanning texts for characters you know and figuring out the rest from context. I found myself being able to write tests in Chinese despite not being able to recognize many of the characters on the test paper. Here was a typical scenario:

I would see the following sentence: 冬天很冷，可是夏天很热。 At first glance, the only characters I could pick out were …tiān hěn …, kěshì … tiān hěn … My typical thought process was as follows:

“Hmm, I see two 天s there so we might be talking about days. Jīntian? Míngtiān? Zuótiān? No, I know those ones so it can’t be days, so it must be seasons! There are two seasons there - “one is very… but the other is very…” The 冬 character there looks similar to 多. Duōtiān? That sounds similar to dōngtiān - winter?!? If that’s winter, then perhaps 夏天 is summer. So perhaps we are talking about winter and summer. So winter is very… but summer is very… hot and cold?? I remember the character for hot looks a little like boiling water so that must be 热 which would make 冷 cold. I choose answer B: Winter is cold, but summer is hot. As long as the teacher wasn’t deliberately trying to trick you, it was usually possible to determine the right answer this way.

This technique actually works quite well in Chinese because many vocabulary items tend to be grouped neatly. For example all the seasons end in 天, all transportation on land ends in 车, all meat ends in 肉 and so on. You don’t even have to be perfect with it. For example if you looked at the characters for 年，车 and 牛 individually, it would be very easy to confuse them. But that usually isn’t a problem since the characters are usually shown within some context. I would know that 牛肉 was beef since I was unlikely to see the 牛 mixed up with cars or dates.

Obviously the more characters you are able to recognize, the more accurate this technique becomes. Depending on how you look at it, the result of this and some of the listening techniques I’ve talked about previously is that you can either seem a lot smarter than you really are, or that you can learn a lot quicker than you originally thought.