Hi everyone! For the past two years I’ve been studying mandarin intensively pretty much every day (544 day Anki streak at least). I’ve reached the point where I can talk about most topics without much issue (that includes more advanced topics like AI or general geopolitics), and I can also consume news and social media.
I followed the Refold method, since it’s by far the most fool-proof and efficient way to learn a language in my opinion.
I started out immersing in gaming content, since it’s very visual and you don’t really have to understand what’s being said in order to follow along. Some popular gaming channels on Bilibili include: 中国BOY, 徐大虾, and 老番茄. It is during these beginning stages where I would say learning Chinese is the hardest, because you will have a very hard time hearing the tones and you will also likely have a hard time hearing the difference between for example ‘xiang’ and ‘shang’, or ‘chi’ and ‘zhi’. In order to be able to hear these sounds, your only option is just to bash your head against the content until your brain magically figures it out at some point or another. As long as you keep immersing and don’t get too upset at yourself for not hearing the difference, your brain will kind of magically sort it out eventually.
The same thing is true for the speed at which you can comprehend words. At first you will have to seriously make an effort to decode all of the sounds and convert them to meaning, and so you will feel that they are talking way too fast for you to comprehend. Eventually however, your brain will start to do this conversion from sound to meaning automatically and consuming content will feel more effortless. This is why it’s important in the first couple of months to just have some 自律 and push through the immersion and trust the process.
Once I started to feel quite comfortable with gaming content, I started moving towards consuming dating shows like 新相亲大会 and 非诚勿扰 (these can be found on youtube). These shows are seriously great sources of immersion for three reasons:
- The shows are very predictable so it’s easy to follow what’s going on even if you’ve missed multiple sentences.
- There are hours upon hours of content for you to consume, and I would even recommend you to rewatch episodes.
- The shows are seriously fun to watch! There are some really great moments from these shows and you usually don’t need very advanced vocabulary to follow along. I would say that 新相亲大会 was *the *show which improved my Chinese the most. Watching through all the seasons let me get a natural sense of Chinese grammar, it propelled me to conversational fluency, and I finally felt comfortable with all of the sounds of the Chinese language.
The next step of my immersion journey involved watching the news as well as consuming political and educational content on Bilibili. I’m still at this stage today and so I’m just slowly widening my vocabulary and building more of a cultural understanding of things.
To give some more general tips on language learning, I’ll start by saying that the most important thing to do is to build a language learning habit. You should worry less about progress or if you’re doing it “right”, because if you do immersion for long enough coupled with some speaking practice later down the line you are guaranteed to reach the level of fluency you want to be at. In order to build a habit, you need to do what is fun for you and worry less about if it’s the right level of difficulty or if your study method is correct. I’m also sorry to say that if you can’t build the habit of immersion, then you aren’t going to reach fluency as there are no shortcuts to this process. You simply have to put in thousands of hours if you want to reach fluency, and for most of those hours you are going to be seriously doubting yourself if it’s even possible to reach fluency in the first place.
I would also recommend everyone to learn more about the science of language learning. There are tonnes of great Youtube channels which talk about the science of immersion learning, but a classic is of course Matt vs Japan and also the Refold Youtube channel. Also, it can’t hurt to watch some Xiaoma for inspiration. I kind of cringe watching his videos nowadays but back in the day Xiaoma was really the person who got me on the path to learn Chinese in the first place, so I’m still very thankful that his channel exists.