“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.
Willow Tree Chinese 