Contents

• Introduction
• Beginner Level
• Intermediate Level
• Advanced Level
• Conclusion

Introduction

If you’re doing business in China, then getting a proper grasp of Chinese will be a game changer.

I learned Chinese for 20 years, and these days use it all the time for things like understanding contracts. These are my top tips!

Beginner Level

Things to do in this stage: Master tones, learn characters, and work through lots of dialogues to get vocab and grammar.

Pleco – The Chinese dictionary app everyone uses.

Pinyin Chart – Click to hear each sound

Chinese Radical Poster – Shows all the parts of Chinese characters on one page. This is like the alphabet of Chinese characters. Print it and put it up on your wall.

Chinese Grammar Wiki – The best Chinese grammar resource, explained in simple language with lots of examples.

ChinesePod – I’d say this is the most influential Chinese learning resource over the past 15 years. Huge library of audio/video lessons. You need to pay, but if you’re a serious learner, it’s worth it, since you’d get far more out of this content than a paid university course, in my opinion (the materials are far more natural and practical than the textbooks). The guy who started the “Chinese Grammar Wiki” (above) and co-founded “Mandarin Companion” (below) – John Pasden – was a host on ChinesePod for a number of years.

Intermediate Level

Things to do in this stage: Widen your vocabulary, get better at using words and forming sentences.

ChinesePod – “Qingwen” Series – Good for Intermediate level. Answers common questions about Chinese. I think you need a paid ChinesePod subscription to hear all these.

Mandarin Companion – High Quality Graded Readers. Long, simple novels written with a limited set of characters. E.g for Level 1, if you know 300 characters, you can read the whole book. Big confidence builder for intermediate learners. Can get kindle versions. Paid, but worth it.

Learn Synonyms: “1700对近义词语用法对比” Book – A very thick, comprehensive printed book that covers one very particular topic extremely well – synonyms (近义词) – or more practically speaking – what is the difference between two similar words. e.g 开心 and 高兴. As an intermediate learner, finding this book was like striking gold. It answers a lot of the questions you will have at this stage.

Learn Collocations – Pairs of words that often appear together. Collocations are called 搭配 in Chinese. E.g 满足你的要求 – 满足 and 要求 are collocations. From memory, the Hanban HSK 5 Textbooks* have lists of collocations – very handy to have that information in one place. You’ll pick these up over time through general reading / listening to the language too.

Note these books come in two parts for level 5: 上 and 下. Also note: I think the HSK level system is changing soon, so you might want to look into that before buying one of these books).

Sentence Flashcards – Make flashcards of natural & useful ways to express things in Chinese (whole sentences or phrases) that you come across in books, tv, talking to Chinese friends etc. I used this kind of paper flashcard with a ring through it (see Taobao link below). They are easy to carry around so you can note down, review, and discuss sentences you found with Chinese friends and fellow Chinese learners.

两生花 Chinese soap TV series – Intermediate level is a great time to watch a tv series and learn all the words with flashcards. A good way to learn maybe 3000 words in the context of a story, with lots of repetition. This was the series I watched, and it worked well for learning Chinese. But any series you find interesting would work.

Read Your First Proper Chinese Book – Maybe a novel or non-fiction book. The first time I read a real Chinese book (not designed for learners) it took forever – maybe 30 minutes or one hour to read each page, looking up words as I went.

Find a Library and Use It – A challenge I set for myself when I was studying Chinese fulltime: Visit a library and read real Chinese books for an hour every day. You must have a good base of a few thousand Chinese characters before you try this.

These were the “rules” I set for myself:

1. Go to the library every day. I used the Chinese library at my University.
2. The library/section of the library should be 100% Chinese books with many genres to browse.
3. Pick one Chinese book.
4. It cannot be a book for designed for people learning Chinese. It must be a real, normal Chinese book for native speakers.
5. It must be a book where you are genuinely interested in the actual topic of the book, you can’t pick one that you think you “should” read because it will be helpful for your Chinese.
6. Choose the one chapter that looks most interesting to you.
7. Sit down and try to read the chapter.
8. You must stay sitting there trying to read it for one hour, even if you fall asleep on the book.
9. You’re not allowed to use a dictionary, even once. That changes it from a reading session to a study session, and you lose your momentum.
10. If you find a character that you are really curious about, memorise what it looks like, and look it up on the Pleco app after you finish the reading session. Maybe just do this for one or two characters at the most each day, so you can keep the flow of reading going.
11. You probably won’t finish the chapter, but that’s ok. Just finish up and put the book away.
12. You’re not allowed to keep reading for more than one hour, no matter how interesting the book is. This keeps the habit achievable, to guarantee that you can always consistently do your one hour each day. It also balances your reading habit with everything else in your life, and makes sure you get the rest that you need to guarantee that you can successfully complete tomorrow’s one hour.
13. You’re not allowed to read the same book twice – tomorrow you are only allowed to choose a new book, to keep it fresh and fun, and avoid a sense of duty or failure that can come from slowly working through the same book piece by piece.
14. Explore lots of different genres. So for me, I explored art, design, politics, psychology, economics, geography, history, local history books – because I was interested in those things.

This is like a workout for your Chinese. If you keep doing it, you’ll start to feel the benefits. After doing this for one semester, I felt confident to pick up any Chinese book and read it, and I got 96% in the reading section of HSK 5.

…More Ideas…

Lots of Conversations with Chinese Speakers – Enjoy conversations with Chinese speakers in lots of different real-life situations. Going to the dentist, the zoo, getting your bike repaired, or going on holiday.. all these different situations bring out different conversations and vocabulary.

(Single Word) Flashcards for Categories of Things – Countries, Cities, Provinces of China, Illnesses, Medications, Treatments, Fruits, Vegetables, Animals, Herbs, Chemical Elements, etc etc. Pleco has a good Flashcards feature (paid). Me and my friend were challenging each other to learn animal names in Chinese and learned maybe 200 or more. Countries seem hard to learn when you’re just starting, but after you have learned hundreds and hundreds of other words, learning 200 more words seems easy enough. And if you want to have normal in-depth conversations with people – things like names of countries definitely do come up sometimes.

Try Out Different Sentence Structures on Baidu – Type your guesses for how to write a sentence into Baidu, surrounded with quote marks so you search for that exact phrase/sentence. See how many results there are. If there are 20 million examples online of someone using that exact phrase or sentence, but only 5 examples of someone using another way of expressing it, then you know which is the most natural and common way to say it.

Give a Presentation or Write an Essay in Chinese – This will push you to get better at forming sentences and choosing just the right word to express something. One very helpful exercise I did in a university Chinese language class is watch a cartoon and then try to describe everything I see in the cartoon in writing. Then the teacher would check it and suggest improvements.

Look up Every New Character You See – Signs on shops, menus, etc. Handwrite them in the Pleco app to look them up.

Learn Local Things – Things like the names of metro stations in your city, famous landmarks in your city, the names of local food, or vegetables that aren’t available in your home country.

Learn Things Specific to You as an Individual – Things that might not have come up in textbooks, like your specific job title, or particular kinds of foods famous in your home country, or words to describe things from your home culture.

Podcasts About Learning Chinese – This kind of podcast is about the process of learning Chinese, rather than actual learning content. That kind of thing can help you feel a part of the Chinese learning community – which can be motivating. You can get tips & inspiration too. This podcast is one good one.

Advanced Level

Things to do in this stage: Time to get in to real native content. At this point, textbooks will feel awkward and boring compared to the other real native content you’ve started exploring. It’s time to stop learning Chinese and start using it. The possibilities are endless here, because you can explore any of the books, movies, podcasts, and blogs that Chinese people do.

喜马拉雅 APP – Podcasts on every topic for native Chinese speakers. My favourite was a podcast where a Chinese guy describes what it is like as a Chinese person moving to my home country – cultural differences etc. Fascinating.

Live Life and Keep Learning – Note down interesting new words or ways of expressing things you come across. I keep a list of interesting new words on my phone. For example, the other day while playing cards with Chinese friends, I learned how to say “hearts, clubs, spades & diamonds” for suits of playing cards – so I wrote those down on my list.

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