Progress report: Thoughts on one month of learning Mandarin & some FAQs

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This is a historical mission update. References to tomorrow, Friday, this week and this month belong to the original publication.

It's been one month (and a couple of days) since I arrived in Taipei with the objective of speaking fluent Mandarin in 3 months. So it's about time I gave you a status report on my progress, before I share my next Mandarin video with you on Friday tomorrow! (This photo is a teaser for that fun video!)

Since uploading the first video, I've gotten some great feedback (as well as some not-so-great feedback). Taking that and my own awareness of my biggest issues into account, I have changed my strategy quite a bit. I am always working to improve my current level, so a typical day for me in my first week, my fifth week and my eleventh week will be completely different!

There isn't one single way or one strategy to learn a language. You have to adapt to your needs, environment and abilities.

A note from the Fluent in 3 Months team before we get started: You can chat away in Chinese for at least 15 minutes with the “Fluent in 3 Months” method. All it takes is 90 days. Tap this link to find out more.

Toning down on tones

As you can see from that video, I was putting a huge amount of effort into getting my tones as correct as I could, and this required serious mental power as I said each syllable. This was based on advice from many people that I should focus on tones as much as possible in the beginning. It's a bit of a double-edged sword because all that energy on tones meant that I had no flow at all in the language.

So my approach since then has been to learn words as best as I can, always attempting to get the tone right but speaking faster, even if a few syllables have the wrong tone.

It's an approach I would highly recommend to other learners: put lots of work into tones at first, since it would be much harder to fix bad tones after you are used to speaking the language. But when your tones are “pretty good”, focus much more on speaking full words and sentences.

A few days should be enough for this. The two weeks that I gave it were too much.

The main issue with my first video was that I had to think a lot about each syllable, and this led to far too many pauses within words. That can cause as many misunderstandings, or more, as speaking faster with some tones wrong.

All that work on tones meant that, for almost my entire first month, I wasn't able to get beyond brief interactions at all! That video was scripted and it still took me forever to say simple things. This isn't practical for real conversations.

If I had taken my usual approach of saying things quickly as soon as possible and not worrying about mistakes, I'd be saying and conversing much more right now. But then again, it might be much harder to fix my tone issues. It remains to be seen whether I made the right choice, but what's important is that right now I can converse and I am doing so with OK tones. For the moment, I think I made the right decision.

You'll see in the video on Friday that I still have lots of room for improvement, but it's way less awkward to listen to me speak, as well as being much easier to follow.

Getting over the plateau and finally conversing

This week I have reached a major milestone, just in time for my 1st month update: I can converse in Mandarin for long periods of time! The temporary restriction, while I improve my comfort level and flow, is that I can only talk about certain things and only with someone who knows to speak slowly.

I was stuck at a plateau for over a week, without feeling that I was making any important progress. My routine was similar to the frustrating day that I described, but my spoken practice still came in brief bursts, lasting only a few seconds each time. I was at the stage of being an “advanced tourist”, but far from being able to sit down and talk with anyone for any length of time, and I was in danger of being stuck there for perhaps several weeks.

Speaking for longer than a quick exchange was draining and a little stressful. The many new situations I was intentionally getting myself into deflated my ego every time, so I was keeping conversation at bay and studying a lot. After a very brief exchange, I'd retreat to the books for several hours before the next one.

My main problem was that I wasn't comfortable enough to speak. Whenever I tried, I'd freeze and wish I could look up the word, or realize how slowly I was speaking and make an excuse to abandon ship. Most people's solution to this problem would be “learn more words”, “improve your sentence structure” or something similar, but I had a much better idea:

Force myself to speak with someone for three entire hours every single day

If you are learning to swim, you can either ease yourself into the shallow end with a floating device, or you can ask someone to push you in so you have to swim. As frustrating as speaking at this stage was for me, I decided once again to run head-first into that frustration. Bursts weren't enough. I needed no choice but to fill long periods of time with conversation.

So this week I've set up language exchanges and new lessons with different teachers. The other person would be motivated or paid to listen to me struggle, and I'd have to say something. I met one teacher who didn't speak any English at all with me. After the class, I once again felt like my brain was melting, but I had survived without simply repeating myself over and over. I had successfully chatted about my time here and my work, asked her about herself, and discussed the particulars of our classes and future meet-ups, entirely in Mandarin.

I've kept this up all week and have spoken three hours of Mandarin every day, and my conversation skills are starting to appear! I feel like such an idiot whenever I'm speaking, but I'm ignoring that and doing it anyway. I can feel the progress every single day. I finally have the flow that I was lacking in my first weeks.

The fact that I can only do this with teachers or a language exchange is a temporary (and expensive) setback. I am improving quickly enough that I will soon be ready to talk to someone who speaks a little faster and covers a wider range of topics. For the moment, it's a useful stepping stone.

Rather than wait until I'm “ready”, I'm attempting to socialise in Mandarin in a non-one-on-one situation every few days, and I will be attending a party this Saturday with mostly locals. I've already tried this and failed miserably, returning home feeling like my Mandarin is worthless because I'm trying something far beyond my current level. But persistence will yield useful results. This week I am much more likely to be successful, and if not, then next week I'll be even more likely.

A refusal to give up is the key to success.

Way more restricted character learning

Another problem with my first weeks, which I do regret, is that I was learning too many characters. Rather than applying the triage system I've discussed in many posts, I was learning essential words in both spoken and written form. This may sound like an excellent strategy for the long term, but it wasn't useful for my short-term speaking goal.

I do indeed need to say verbs and other everyday words, but I do not need to read these words with the same urgency.

What I need to read must focus on vocabulary from signs and menus. In this sense, a word like “to live” (in a place) is essential for me to say, as I am very likely to use and hear it frequently in conversations, but I won't be reading it on a typical menu or sign. So, for the moment, I have cut my character studies down to reviewing some Anki (for iPhone, for Android, and for everyone else) decks related to food. Even within those, I am discarding many cards because they don't fit my personal requirements.

I've also tossed aside Heisig's book, which so many people recommended to me, because it is too focused on the long term for this mission. You systematically go through the book, and after you know it well, then you'll be able to understand the meaning of the most useful characters as a whole. Even that is still unhelpful for my current goal because it doesn't cover words. It's another “long-term investment” in which knowing individual characters will help you figure out what a word means, sometimes. At most, I'll use the book as a reference next month when I return to learning characters with more focus.

I'll discuss in a later post why too much of a “long-term investment” approach can be impractical for language learning.

There is a debate in learning Chinese, with many people recommending that you focus on characters as much as possible, as soon as possible. Unlike the tone issue above, I am quite confident that I can learn characters for non-essential words later. For my current goal, it's much more efficient to focus on what is essential right now. When I return to the other characters, I'll be learning them for words that already have full context in my mind because I'll be comfortable saying them.

This also resembles how children who grow up speaking Chinese usually learn characters: they know and have incorporated the sound, and then learn how it looks some time later.

Someday, I would like to read a newspaper comfortably in Chinese (for this mission, I just want to get the gist of one if possible), but right now I need to read menus and signs. After that, I would like to read short, simple sentences and focus on their key vocabulary, then expand each time to something a little more complicated.

This advice will annoy perfectionist learners, but I highly recommend that you streamline your character learning rather than learning as many as you can as you come across them. It's inefficient to try to learn everything if you plan to use the language in the real world any time soon.

Anyway, I'm certainly not avoiding character learning, as I see the same ones when using my Pleco app or my books. I'm getting used to seeing them all the time, and they are no longer foreign to me. Many of the characters I'm most used to now seem like the best way to describe a sound or even a word! But since speaking opens up many more doors and opportunities than reading does, I am much more focused on that.

Frequently Asked Questions

I asked those who had liked my Facebook page, as well as those on Instagram, to leave questions for me to answer in this post. Here are a few of the most interesting ones relevant to my Chinese mission:

• How did you improve your ability to differentiate/recognize tones when hearing multisyllable words?

In my opinion, focusing too much on learning individual characters (i.e. syllables) is a mistake. Words should always be learned as containing all their syllables in quick succession, as we do in every other language.

When doing this, you learn the tones in sequence rather than individually. So, for me, “problem” is not wèn, 問, a falling tone and the core word sometimes meaning “ask”, followed by tí, 題, a rising tone and the core word sometimes meaning “topic” or “subject”. That requires so much damn thinking. Instead, I learn wèntí (falling-rising) as one unit without worrying about the component parts, unless I encounter one of them another time as an individual word. I'll discuss the techniques I'm using to remember multi-syllabic words with their tones another time.

Learning them individually will leave you speaking like I did in my first video, or needing a native speaker to slow down far too much. Just for the moment, I need a native speaker to slow down at the word level, not at the syllable level.

• Compared to all the other languages you've studied, how does Mandarin compare in difficulty?

I'm actually at exactly the point I was hoping to be at after one month. I was much slower to get into conversations than in any other language I've tackled, but I find the sentence structure so much more logical that I am expressing myself as coherently as I would be after this amount of time learning another language from a different family. The European languages I've learned require much more thinking about complex grammar and conjugations, and I have almost none of that to slow me down here.

It took only a matter of days to go from forcing myself to speak for longer periods to being reasonably comfortable in conversation. In this evening's session, I would even go as far as to say that I was comfortable speaking, within the limited topics I can discuss, without feeling like my brain was melting the entire time. While this is quite fast, keep in mind that 9 hours of pure speaking, with a native speaker constantly there for feedback, is a lot of time!

So it's harder to get into, but when you do, it's much easier to make faster progress. This balancing act means that I still have no reason to think Mandarin is “harder”.

Vocabulary is an issue since I have almost no cognates I can rely on, as I would in European languages. But then again, learning new vocabulary is much easier because the words are so short! There are many homophones (words that sound the same), and this can be confusing. But it can also help you to learn because there are a limited number of ways that words can be pronounced, and you can use one word to help you learn another if you have an effective mnemonic.

In this way, for every “disadvantage”, I've found something that balances it out. I plan to write a detailed post about this much later. In the meantime, if you're interested in difficulty levels in general, I'd highly suggest you read this post.

• How did you pull off an hour-long conversation without hitting stumbling blocks like not knowing the right word or not knowing words that your conversation partner was using?

If the other person is speaking, I use extrapolation. I take the words I do know and try my best to work out what they are likely saying. Context fills in so many of the holes that the conversation can continue.

If I'm speaking and don't know a particular word, then I use a simpler word. Basic verbs like “to do” get overused, but with enough context it's usually clear what I'm talking about. Since I'm mostly talking to my teachers, they are experienced in doing this with learners. Once again, this is just a stepping stone. I'm doing lots of work on vocabulary and will be using workarounds less and less, so the other person has less need to adjust for me.

It's important to realise that you don't always need “the right word”. A “good enough word” is what you really need if you are trying to get by.

• Do you have a Chinese nickname?

Not yet. Some people reading the blog have offered to give me one, but I'd rather get one from a friend I make naturally here. I did this with ASL and am very pleased with my sign name because it has a personal history.

• Given the fact that your other known languages do not belong to the same linguistic family, do they still help you learning Mandarin and if so, how?

Oddly enough, my basic American Sign Language has been helping me because it has a similar word order!

Otherwise, other familiar features crop up. Many “yes/no” questions can be answered by repeating the verb rather than using one universal word for yes or no, much as in Irish, and these questions can use a question particle as in Esperanto. There are also general advantages to having learned other languages that give me a head start, like being absolutely sure that the world won't end if I go up to someone and speak the language. It takes some time to realize this!

• What's the most challenging thing for you when learning Chinese?

The greatest challenge I am having by far has nothing to do with the language itself. When I learned languages in Latin America, or when I was learning Turkish or Tagalog, I often found that people were quick to approach me and start conversations. My experience in Taipei has been different: most people let me be. In an entire month, nobody has come up to me and tried to start a conversation. I imagine people may have assumed from my appearance, and perhaps from their interactions with other Westerners, that I was unlikely to speak Mandarin.

When I speak first, though, people are always quick to encourage conversation, so using my appearance as an excuse is quite weak. Nobody has switched to English when I start in Mandarin, since I do some simple things to make sure it doesn't happen.

The problem is that this puts much more pressure on me to do all the approaching and hopefully make friends. Socialising in the target language is important for me to improve quickly.

I'd say Portuguese was one of the easier languages for me to practise, not because of its grammar (which is more different from Spanish than most people think), but because I found people in Brazil so friendly. Strangers approached me every single day there, and conversations flowed from that. People in Taiwan have been friendly when I start the conversation, but less likely to approach me first. Then again, this may just be an issue in Taipei city, with people in the countryside perhaps quicker to approach strangers, but I'm comparing it with my experience in cities in general.

This is not actually a major problem. It just means extra work that I don't usually have, and I'm already working very hard.

This month I'll get into socialising much more, and figuring out how to do that in such a way that I can start using the language more naturally is going to require me to put on my thinking cap. But discovering how to get around social and cultural differences is all part of the fun!

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That's it! There were lots of other questions, but I've either answered them elsewhere or they weren't as relevant to this post.

Hopefully this long post gives you an idea of where I am at. So far, so good 😀 On Friday you'll see my one-month-level video, which I wanted to separate from this post.