Learning Chinese for free

Learning Chinese for free isn’t likely to be easy, and is not something I would particularly recommend. But everyone’s circumstances are different, and I am sure many people start learning Mandarin with the expectation of failure hanging over them – because it really is a hard language. So keeping costs down to begin with is perfectly valid and here are some tips to try and help you. How well you succeed is likely to be down to your own hard work, not to mention a bit of luck with your circumstances.

Get a language exchange partner

Short of paying for one on one tuition (expensive!), finding a good language exchange partner is probably one of the best things you can do to improve your Chinese, and best of all, it is free! Not everyone is going to be a natural teacher, so don’t be afraid to try a few partners before settling on one if you can. How much luck you have with this is likely to be out of your control, if you’re an English native living in a large city with good universities, you will likely have many options. As a native English speaker living in London I was lucky enough to find some great language exchange partners, one was even studying to be a Chinese teacher at the time which was fantastic.

If you’re not an English speaker who is lucky enough to live in a city with a large Chinese population, never fear, you are still likely to be able to find someone to practice with. Rumour has it that Chinese people live all over the world, and have interests in learning all sorts of languages, not just English, so just try your luck.

The great part about having a language exchange partner is that you can practice all the key skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking. Other free resources for studying the various skills that make up learning Chinese are below.

Reading

Obviously there is a lot of Chinese content online that you can read for free, the problem though is that text written for native speakers is not likely to be accessible for beginner learners. As a beginner, the set of reading material you can realistically expect to understand is limited. There are however websites aimed at solving this problem by providing reading materials for students of Chinese which have been graded based on how easy or hard they will be to read. Examples include the Chinese Voices project. And this site.

Understanding Chinese as you read online is also made a lot easier with a dictionary plugged into your browser. Get Firefox, and then the Perapera pop up dictionary.

Writing

Writing is probably the hardest part of learning Chinese. A lot of people just skip it entirely, relying on pinyin and digital input methods. If you are determined to write Chinese (and you should be, it is a wonderful experience), tools like Skritter exist to help you learn the stroke orders, however Skritter is expensive. At its simplest, learning to write needs just a pen and paper to practice. (Pro tip: use the narrowest tip pen you can find). However, even with pen in hand, you literally are not going to know where to start – which part of the character to write first? There are rules for this which you can search out online (generally, top left to bottom right, outside to in, but fill in the middle before closing off the outside). Luckily there are more online tools to help, A good start is the yellow bridge animated dictionary which will show you the stroke order for many characters. If you are just starting out, check 来, 国 and 过 to get a feel for the stroke order rules. Use online resources such as this to learn the stroke order, then pick up your pen and practice away.

If you have a modern smartphone and someone to communicate with, another good way to learn the stroke orders is to force yourself to use the handwriting input method built into your phone when writing text messages or emails. You can also install Wechat and find people nearby to practice communicating with.

Listening

As with reading, there is much material available online for listening to Mandarin Chinese, including mainland TV and radio stations. However for a beginner it is again better to stick with material aimed at the appropriate level. For this websites such as ChinesePod (they have a few free lessons) and cslpod are very useful and have a wealth of material available. cslpod also has a very useful pronunciation tool which lets you listen to any Chinese syllable based on the pinyin. Many of the texts in the Chinese Voices project mentioned under reading above also come with MP3s that you can listen to.

If you have a language exchange partner, I recommend you practice listening with them carefully to nail down the tones. When covering new vocabulary, get your language exchange partner to speak the word, and make yourself try to guess what the correct tone is. At first it may seem impossible, but with time it will get easier. And do consider listening to Chinese radio online occasionally too. As I wrote under “Confucius says learn Chinese every day“, a bit of passive learning even if you do not fully understand can still help your brain absorb the language.

Speaking

Practicing speaking is easy enough if you have a language exchange partner, but if not, it will be hard to know whether anyone would understand you. However, there are a few options. First is the Pimsleur system, which I would definitely recommend for someone who wants to learn how to speak Mandarin. Again, the Pimsleur system is not free, however you may get lucky and be able to borrow it from your local library (and look for some text books while you are there). Even if you cannot get hold of the Pimsleur system, I can tell you the methodology of it is to repeatedly listen and vocalise out loud what you hear, many times over. Armed with this knowledge, you can mimic the Pimsleur system to an extent by pausing and repeating the what you hear in the content available for listening mentioned above.

If you do have a language exchange partner, make the most of it and try to focus on your pronunciation. Not just tones, the importance of which is probably overrated, but the other consonants and vowel sounds which make up the language. For example, the difference between zhi, chi and shi; zi, si and ci; lu and lü, etc. From my own experience of being unable to understand people who have just started learning the language, the biggest obstacle is not so often the tones but a general inability to sound out a number of the initial consonants correctly. If you can nail these but have dodgy tones, people will often still understand you. Without these, no one will.

Flashcards

Spaced repetition of flashcards is all the rage in language learning, not just for Mandarin. Having written my own flashcards for years by hand (yes I was that crazy, but I also wanted to learn writing), I can attest that the system is a good one. I even developed my own rudimentary “spaced repetition” system before I ever learned that that was a thing. So it definitely works. As I said, I wrote my own flashcards, which is a pretty cheap way to go (just use some blank unprinted business cards). Otherwise you can find applications like Anki which are generalised flashcard learning tools not just aimed at Chinese.

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Overall there is a wealth of free resources available online to help you learn Chinese, but that doesn’t mean that learning Chinese for free will be easy. After all, there is no substitute for a native speaker to help you. If you really cannot find a language exchange partner, then paying for lessons, especially one on one lessons if you can afford it, is a great option. Alternatively, see how much progress you can make for free with the resources available, and whichever skill you find hardest to learn, or you are weakest at, consider spending some money on improving in that one area.

And if you’re an accomplished student of Mandarin, what free resources would you recommend to prospective students?

Confucius says study Mandarin every day

“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop”.

For students wanting to learn how to speak Mandarin (or read, or listen or write), there is some truth in the Confucius quote above. One of the most important pieces of advice I could give you is not to stop, ever. Not even for a single day! It might not seem practical, but hear me out. Chinese is too hard to master if you are not at least trying to improve daily and I honestly believe you should study every day, even if just for a few minutes.

Of course, you won’t get far learning Chinese for only a few minutes a day if that is all you ever do. There have to be some days where you knuckle down, concentrate and focus on studying hard. But setting yourself the goal of studying something every day makes it harder to procrastinate, harder to put things off until tomorrow and harder to slip and give up. I think it doesn’t matter much how little or easy or how passive your study may be on some days, anything is better than nothing, and with Chinese being a pretty damn hard language to learn, your brain will appreciate all the help you can give it.

So the first suggestion I would make is that you can switch on the internet and listen to Chinese radio broadcasts online. If you are an absolute beginner, there is no way you’ll understand much of anything, almost certainly the best you can hope for in terms of active learning is to recognise a few words here and there. But your brain can benefit from passive learning too. Just from being exposed to the sound and rhythm of Chinese being spoken by a native with the correct intonation, slowly but surely you will become more used to hearing and understanding the language. Of course, once you reach greater levels of understanding in Chinese, hearing natives speaking on the radio becomes ever more useful for practicing your listening skills. Finally, if you plan to visit China in the future, you can even use local radio stations to get a feel for the sort of accent people speak with in your intended destination. Because while people in Xi’an and Shanghai may both speak Mandarin, they will definitely sound quite different.

Tuning in online may be useful, but it is not likely to be part of your daily routine, and the act of listening to Chinese radio regularly is not likely to become a habit for everyone. Another suggestion to make it easier to study something every day is to force Chinese into your daily routine. So, who doesn’t check email every day? If like most people you do, then sign up for any one of a number of email lists and get a blast of Chinese into your inbox daily. I have been receiving an advanced sentence from chinese-course.com every day for the last few years, and it has been great to keep my Chinese on the boil even when I have taken a few months off from formal study. Even if you just spend a minute or two reviewing a sentence, thinking about the grammar structures making it up or glancing at some new vocabulary, every little helps – and repeated every day over weeks and months will surely add up.

There are many other things you can do to keep your Chinese gradually improving every day. If you find it hard to get motivated and focused on studying, then anything that is quite easy or passive is more likely to work for you, simply because it is more likely that you will actually do it. With the best will in the world, everyone will burn out trying to learn 50 characters a day with spaced repetition and a whole bunch of example sentences. So stick to something simple. Go back a few (or more) chapters in your text-book and review a short passage, trying to soak back up some of the vocabulary which may have been new then but is more familiar and now easier for you to recall a few weeks or months later. Try making example sentences in your head and speaking or consciously thinking about the pronunciation.

No matter how simple it is, if you study a little bit every day, the benefits will add up, and you’ll have made a much bigger improvement after six months or a year than if you had done nothing on those days where you did a little bit.

Talking about characters – or which “shi” do you mean?

One of the hardest things about Chinese is that it is full of homophones – words and characters that sound either identical, or nearly so. For example Pleco has more than ten entries for shī, and more than sixty for all five tonal variants (including neutral) of shi. In a correctly pronounced and intoned sentence, context will usually be enough for Chinese speakers to figure out which of many possible homophones is actually being spoken at any given time, but that is not always the case. Particularly for foreigners who cannot always hear or speak the tones correctly, but also sometimes for native Chinese， there can definitely be confusion or ambiguity around which character exactly was said. Luckily the Chinese have a method for resolving this confusion which I am going to teach you, to help you clarify not only what you have said, but what you have heard as well.

Like I said, this is a technique that Chinese people use themselves, particularly when describing their names, the reason being that names are effectively contextless and even native speakers therefore have no way of knowing exactly which of possibly many homophones was spoken. The way it works is to verbally identify the character in some way separate from its pronunciation. Usually this is done by reference to a distinctive word which contains the character, or less often either by describing psychically the structure of the radicals making it up, or by describing the meaning of the word with reference to a synonym. So for example, my name is 德伟 [déwěi]. Many foreigners take 大伟 [dàwěi] as their Chinese name, so I often have to explain that I mean 德伟 not 大伟, but because there are quite a few characters which sound like dé, I often have to explain which one is actually my name. There are a few ways to do this. 德国 [dégúo] means Germany, so I can say “德国的德” [dégúo de dé] which literally means “the 德 from 德国” which everyone understands. However, I am not German, and this can lead to confusion too, so I prefer to explain that a friend borrowed this character for my name from a famous chain of roast duck restaurants called “全聚德”. So I say, “我叫德伟， 全聚德， 那个德”. Which usually works.

Apart from describing words that a character appears in, you can also describe the character itself, but you need to be quite familiar not just with characters but also with the radicals, or sub components, too. If you are reasonably familiar with written Chinese, then you’re good to go. For example while there are over sixty characters which sound like shi, only one has the water radical 氵, which can be described as “三点水” or “three dots of water”. And while there are 14 characters specifically matching shī, only one has the mouth radical 口 at the left and can be identified with the phrase “左边有口” [zuǒbiān yǒu kǒu] – literally “the left hand side has a mouth”.

Knowing exactly what is the most appropriate way to verbally identify a character can be hit and miss, but descriptions based on common radicals are likely to be understood even if they do not seem the most natural for native speakers. If you have a Chinese name, and native speakers do not always understand which characters you actually use to write it, think about preparing a description of those characters in advance, which you can use next time you need to get the message across. People will definitely be impressed if you know this trick.

Simple and useful way to answer questions in Chinese

If you’re not a complete beginner at Chinese, you can probably express a certain limited (maybe very limited) amount of ideas when you speak. Perhaps you know a few sentence structures and a few bits of grammar, which you can plug your vocabulary into and start making yourself understood! Great, because that is how most people start out. Build up the grammar rules, build up the sentence structures and build up your vocabulary and your ability to express yourself will grow exponentially.

This works as long as you are in control, as long as you get to pick the sentence, and as long as you can build it up from the components you know. But sometimes that is not possible – for example if someone asks you an unexpected question. You understand the question, and know – in your mother tongue – what the answer should be. But you don’t know how to put that answer into Chinese. Fear not, there is a really simple trick to turn most questions in Chinese into a grammatically valid answer.

This trick is one of the most useful things I ever learned, and will probably never stop coming in handy. You just need to identify the “question word” in the sentence, and replace that with the answer! Questions words are things like who, what, where, when, how much etc. So for example:

他的女朋友是谁?
[tā de nǚ péng you shì shéi]
[his girlfriend is who]

他的女朋友是小红
[tā de nǚ péng you shì xiǎo hóng]
[his girlfriend is Xiao Hong]

This sentence means “who is his girlfriend?”, or word for word, “his girlfriend is who?”. Obviously the question word is “who” [谁|shéi], and we replace the question word with the answer, the name of his girlfriend, 小红! Simple.

As with everything, there are exceptions. If I ask “who is your girlfriend, you cannot reply “your girlfriend is Helen”. If you want to answer the question, you need to reply “my girlfriend is Helen”. So when using this rule, always replace 你 with 我. Finally, there is one obvious exception to this rule, but it doesn’t matter much as you probably already know it.

你多大?
我二是五岁

That’s right, if the question is how old are you, “你多大”, then the question word is 多, and the answer should replace 大 with 岁. That is pretty much it. Let’s see some more examples, the question words and their replacement answers are in bold.

你想去哪儿?
[nǐ xiǎng qù nǎr?]
我想去北京
[wǒ xiǎng qù běijīng]

你什么时候想去?
[nǐ shénme shíhou xiǎng qù]
我后天想去。
[wǒ hòutiān xiǎng qù]

你想买几张火车票?
[nǐ xiǎng mǎi jǐ zhāng huǒchē piào]
我想买三张火车票
[wǒ xiǎng mǎi sānzhāng huǒchē piào]

三张票要多少钱？
[sān zhāng piào yào duōshao qián]
三张票要九百块钱
[sān zhāng piào yào jiǔ bǎi kuài qián]

Seems simple right? Next time someone asks you a question in Chinese, see if you can use this trick to answer it.

Why the willow tree?

Do you know that Chinese people use the leaves of the Willow tree as a gift to indicate they wish someone would not leave, that they would be missed? That is because the name of the Willow tree in Chinese is 杨柳 [yáng liǔ], and 柳[liǔ] sounds a bit like 留[liú], which means to stay. Giving someone a gift of a leaf from the Willow tree means, “don’t leave, don’t go”. You’ll be missed.

The Willow tree in this blog represents two things. Firstly, after over five years of learning Chinese, and reaching a pretty decent level of fluency, the best advice I can give someone wanting to learn Mandarin, is to stay with it. Have dedication, and persevere. Don’t give up or you will miss all the wonderful and interesting details, stories and insights into a foreign world and culture that this language has to offer.

Secondly, I hope this blog will give readers something more than just dry grammar rules, endless character lists and exultations to use spaced repetition systems. I hope to brighten up the language learning experience by sharing stories like that of the Willow tree to help make Chinese learning more interesting and to share a bit of the colour, culture and character behind the language.

Hopefully I can “stay with it” myself, and keep the blog interesting 🙂