How can you learn the Chinese language?

Answer 1

Many people will travel to China or Taiwan for anywhere from a month to a few years to learn Chinese. The advantage of this is constant exposure to the language, assuming one does not isolate one's social interactions into a region where expats of your own nationality and language collect in a city (think of British expats in Spain who congregate in groups of villas and speak no Spanish, or Chinese immigrants to the West who live in Chinatown and speak no English). The disadvantage is that it may be prohibitively expensive to even travel there; longer stays would involve a major consideration with regards to employment, one's social life changes etc

Classes are a traditional approach, and allow the student a convenient access to a native speaker and some learning material. However, with a class of more than a few students, much time is spent not actively engaging in the language, and very little will be spent engaging directly with the teacher and he/she with you. Instead you will likely be given exercises to perform with your fellow students, and in this you have the issue of conversing in poor Chinese. You will also find that listening to lots of rank beginners making no effort with tones in Chinese rubs off on you - you don't want to be that person. You may also find that even at a university level, some teachers are rather incompetent at understanding student's questions - it is certainly the case for some institutions in the United Kingdom which shall not be named...

Many self-taught language learners use internet resources to learn a language. It seems to be a consensus that interesting, authentic material is more useful than textbooks, software or even podcasts, all three of which are lmited in scope, may become dated over time, and can be boring while giving the user little in the way of total vocabulary - Pimsleur for example may give the user a vocabulary of 500 words, which is really only about 10% of the vocabulary an individual would need to be truly competent as an adult in that language. Those wishing only to talk about very basic subjects in a foreign language could get away with somewhat less, but this of course depends on your aims. The other disadvantage with a product like Pimsleur is that it engages you in speaking far sooner than is productive.

For Chinese, learning the characters is going to be a huge determinant of your progress. Reading a LOT of material is impossible unless you can learn the characters. A very effective though not well-known method is that created by Dr James Heisig, which uses mnemonics for the repeated components found in characters. Using the method he demonstrates, 50 characters a day could reasonably be learned, which is orders of magnitude more efficient than rote learning.

Whichever medium you decide to use, the critical factor is that you rack up thousands of hours of exposure to the language by listening and reading. Speaking practise is useful to get over any fear of conversing with a speaker, but if enough time is spent with active exposure to the language, speaking ability will develop quite naturally and without a lot of stressful conscious effort.