Short tips on learning how to speak native-like Mandarin

Hello all,

some of my friends have been asking me to provide a more detailed explanation on how I learned Mandarin but at the time I didn’t feel competent enough to give any advice because I wasn’t fluent enough myself and I had to wait to find out what actually worked for me and what didn’t.

There is unfortunately no step-by-step manual on how to become fluent in Mandarin, but I will try to write down in brief what I think worked for me. Goes without saying that what worked for me might not work for the next person and this is really only my personal opinion based on my own experience and the experience of other students I know.

In this article I am often using the imperative mood “you should, you should not” and similar expressions but the purpose is not to sound commanding of course, it is just that it is much easier for me to write in English this way rather than adding “in my opinion” after every sentence.

Without any specific order of importance, these are the key points that helped me learn Mandarin to Advanced fluency (almost advanced to be really honest):

• Your learning process should follow this following pattern, whether it comes to your overall learning strategy or learning of new single words or expressions:

1. understand
2. speak
3. read /type
4. handwrite

• Move to a Chinese speaking country for at least one year
• Find a Chinese speaking girlfriend/boyfriend
• You should not learn how to hand write characters in the first one or two years of your studies, only learn how to hand write the 50 or so most basic ones to learn the writing basics. It is an incredible loss of time and energy in the beginning. If you love characters, learn as many as you like, but if your goal is to speak as fast and accurately as possible, learning how to hand write characters will cost you an incredible amount of energy whether it comes to learning how to write them, memorizing them or because of the interference they cause in your brain when you speak. 
• Listen to people who have voices similar to your own
• Imitate people with voices similar to your own
• Try to find sort of like a “soul mate”, someone who has similar life values and copy his Mandarin. His/her Mandarin speech will probably be something very similar to your speech in your native language. I had a Japanese friend who learned to speak almost native like Mandarin in one year without a pen and paper or going to classes only because he literally “became” the copy of his Taiwanese roommate. The problem was that he was no longer himself when he was speaking Mandarin and talking to him was almost like talking to his roommate. 
• Find a conversation partner who has a similar voice to your own. If you’re a girl, find a girl, if you’re a boy find a boy. Chinese pod for instance is great but has unfortunately very few male native speakers and thus could not help my pronunciation negatively influencing it a little, because as previously mentioned I was artificially trying to raise my voice to match the height of the host's tones.
• Talking to 2 people is better than talking to only one person, because you can see how these two people interact and learn a lot from that.
• When you talk to a person, try to look at his/her mouth a lot. I think you can consciously or subconsciously learn a lot about pronunciation this way. Maybe little babies do the same thing, because the mouth is the only thing that moves on a persons face and must be very interesting for a small child.
• Try recording yourself regularly as you talk to other people and analyze the recordings later. Compare your pronunciation to the person you were talking to. You should be able to notice a whole deal of things that you usually wouldn't.
• Text chatting on Skype or MSN is great exercise too. It can help you solidify your spoken Chinese and give it more structure.
• I was so tired and demotivated by constantly learning and forgetting new words and expressions  that I decided to stop writing down new vocabulary altogether and decided to see what would happen. I rarely remembered new words after hearing or repeating them only once or twice and this approach didn’t seem to work at first but it unexpectedly started showing results. When I heard a new word, say 尷尬 and asked what it meant, after people explained it to me, I probably forgot it in about 5 minutes, maybe later that day I asked how to say “embarrassing”, again people told me it was 尷尬, but I forgot it again. The next day I heard 尷尬 in a discussion and it sounded more familiar, however I still didn't remember what it meant, but this time, when told what it was the sound-meaning association somehow “clicked”. My explanation for this is that the brain makes records of everything you hear and selectively decides which sounds/expressions it will keep and which ones it won't. Since the word in question 尷尬 kept popping up and I was honestly interested in remembering it (since it sounded so familiar and was a bit annoying that I still didn't know what it meant), the association was made. After this moment I could recognize the word automatically in real time speech and since I associated the sound with its meaning directly and not through pinyin, the association was very direct and fast. Learning how to say the same word happened in pretty much the same manner. I was in a situation where I wanted to say “embarrassing” in Chinese, but couldn’t quite remember how to say it, someone helped me and I said.. damn why can’t I remember how to say this word when I know what it means is when I hear it? Believe it or not, this is actually a very important moment, because that is when the brain realizes that this word really is important. After 2-3 situations like this, the word became a part of my active vocabulary. On average one word or expression took me 5 days to get into my active vocabulary. It seems like a very long time, but when I was bulk learning vocabulary, when it really comes down to it, after a week of studies, I passively memorized maybe 300-400 expressions, but getting them into my active vocabulary was very difficult and often very unsuccessful. All I had to do was take a week off and I forgot two thirds of the expressions I have previously learned, not to mention the characters. If you learn 5 solid expressions per day and get them into your active vocabulary, you will literally “own” them, you will have a much better “new vocab per week” ratio in the end, sounding like a native (or close). Mandarin takes a long time to learn any way I look at it, so the way I see things is, that you will have to be spending a lot of time on your studies and you unfortunately will progress slowly. You can choose to spend this long time anyway you like, but in my opinion, since there is no bulk-learning shortcut to Mandarin, slowly but steadily learning 5 expressions per day will get you much further in the long run. You should also try to talk to as many different people as you can, as much as you can and use your “safe” expressions in many situations to solidify your active vocabulary learning slowly but steadily as you go.
• Whenever I didn’t know how to express something, I asked how it should be said and didn’t try to improvise, because I found out that as much as I tried in my improvisations, they never matched the Chinese set-phrase that should be used in this or that particular situation.
• After becoming conversationally fluent I started to read comic books in Chinese. They consist of 80% direct speech which is virtually the same as spoken Mandarin and will help you enhance your speaking abilities. The descriptive parts however are mostly different from spoken Mandarin, will not enhance your speaking abilities and are the reason why regular books are much harder to read.
• After being able to read comic books, I started to read regular books. For me, reading proved and proves to be the best way to broaden my vocabulary and helps make my expressions become more standard and educated. When I read, I don’t translate every word I don’t know, only the key ones that I cannot move on without. I circle in the word I don’t know with a pen, pull a line to the side of the page and write the translation there. After 10 pages or so I review. I circle in the words because they are easy to find when I review the pages and I write the translation far from the words in text at the side of the page, because if the translation is written right next to the unknown word, reviewing vocab is impossible. 
• After being able to read comic books fluently, I got back to characters and finally learned how to hand write them in detail.
• When it comes to tones, I tried to use my Sound-only method as much as possible. (For more information please see Mandarin Chinese tones - Sound only approach)
• When it comes to tones, it helped me a lot that I always learned syllable pairs and not single syllables. It is much easier to learn a syllable pair (basically most of Mandarin words 說話, 看書 and so on) rather than to learn isolated syllables like 我, 他, 去 and so on. Learning words this way, you have a relation of two sounds that are either in contrast or are the same and it is much easier to remember them rather than trying to remember the sound of a single syllable. Subsequently it is also much easier to isolate a syllable from a syllable pair and then use it in a different word remembering its sound (for instance you learn the sound of 說話, then isolate the 話 and use it in 普通話).
• While learning a syllable pair – if I have a problem reproducing it, I only try to listen out for which  one of the two syllables is higher and whether the tone of the syllable is flat or I have to “get up to it” in pitch in order to match it.
• The neutral tone is very important. I realized that a lot of my expressions sounded off because of a wrong neutral tone. For instance I always thought that I just could not correctly pronounce the Mandarin “a”, most notably in expressions like 真的嗎? Turned out it wasn’t the “a” sound that was the problem, but the pitch of the neutral tone in 嗎. A lot of foreigners, even though they are very fluent, still don’t get this one right.
• The best teacher is not a native speaker but a native like speaking foreigner. He will understand your problems much better and will point them out to you in a much clearer way. For instance I was trying to pronounce the word 茄子 in Taiwanese but couldn’t get it right for a very long time. I was asking my Taiwanese friends to tell me what I was doing wrong and they were always trying to correct my pitch and tones. It turned out that it was not the tones at all but it was the initial consonant that was off and a foreigner had to tell me that.
• When it comes to the pronunciation of difficult initials and finals in syllables, be very critical of yourself and never believe a Chinese person when he or she says your pronunciation is great. The native like speaking foreigner is the key again. If you can’t get the sounds down by purely imitating them, try hundreds of different positions of your tongue until you find something that you are satisfied with. Then memorize the position of the tongue, force it into that position the first couple of days until it becomes natural.
• There is also sort of a basic “starting mouth position” for Mandarin. It is the position of the tongue, lips and other speech organs before you even start speaking. If you find that position, keep your month that way, expand and get back to this starting position as you speak. It will be much easier for you to pronounce Mandarin sounds correctly, but it takes time to find this position. In Taiwanese Mandarin, in the starting position the tongue is slightly pulled back in your mouth (my explanation is that Chinese have naturally shorter tongues so you have to make your tongue shorter by pulling it back a little), the tip of the tongue is slightly  touching the hard palate right behind your upper teeth and lips are very relaxed. The mouth almost seems as if it were a bit opened, the back of your tongue is a bit higher, approaching the soft palate. It is very difficult to explain it this way, so you just have to experiment a little and try and try and try.
• Give each syllable its proper length. Some syllables are actually much longer and elaborated than I thought. The 先, 片 – ian final cluster actually almost seems like two syllables “-i+an” and not a monosyllabic “yan”.
• I didn’t want to talk about tones as a matter of my own policy, but as I said, height is very important, so concentrate on the fact that there are three high tones (as in the words 天, 明, 去 – deliberately not mentioning the number of the tone) and one low tone (as in the word 起). It is a good rule of thumb to set the天, 明, 去 group higher than the 起 group if you are a girl and set the 起 lower than the 天, 明, 去 group if you’re a boy. If you are a boy and start speaking too high you will sound funny (a lot of boys/men learn Mandarin from girls/women and they unfortunately end up speaking like them - that is with an unnaturally high pitch of their voice and a speech full of female expressions, which not only sounds strange but is also very tiring, since you have to artificially elevate your pitch every time you try to say something), that’s why it is better to go lower with the 起 and staying in place with 天, 明, 去. Also, even if the 去 group tones start high, they end very low and almost sound like a low tone so in order to get them right, the key is not to accent the syllable as much as you can as in 去!! , but rather start naturally and completely relax your vocal chords at the end of the syllable to achieve that low bass purring sound. But this is all very individual. The thing to do, as I said before is to concentrate on hearing and producing the sound only and forget about tonal changes. If you repeat what you hear it will sound much more natural and will be much easier to reproduce than having to consciously concentrate on how to adjust your vocal chords. This 天, 明, 去 Vs. 起 distinction is only here to help you if you think you are mispronouncing a word that has tones from both groups and you don’t know why. The reason probably is that you are not separating the two groups enough, so as I said just keep in mind that 起 tones should be low and 天, 明, 去  tones should be high.
• What helped me a lot was, that I only learned how to recognize characters for words that I already knew how to say. I saved a lot of time and could concentrate on other things instead. Learning how to read something you know how to say is much easier and faster. I remember that a long time ago I used to bulk learn characters and expressions and when I look back at my studies, I think that was one of the biggest mistakes I made. I thought I had a good memory and would sort of 'pre-learn' hundreds of expressions that I could later use in real life situations. It was very time consuming and very inefficient. Almost none of those expressions 'sticked', the ones that did I had to re-learn based on their sounds through my new method, because characters and not the sound of these expressions kept flashing in my brain whenever I was speaking which was very very tiring. Also, when I heard a sound and tried to recognize what it was, I had first the character pop up in my mind based on which I could remember its meaning. It all happened in fractions of seconds, but was very very time and energy consuming because of the number of occurrences in even the simplest of discussions. 
• Later I stopped learning new characters altogether, concentrated only on speaking and understanding, waited until I was fluent and then started to learn how to read and write.
• I stopped consciously concentrating on tones and started to concentrate on the sound and sound reproduction only. I was trying to imitate people as good as I could.
• I was learning whole expressions instead of just words
• I stopped bulk-learning characters.
• I stopped bulk-learning new vocabulary that I didn’t know how to use.
• I was learning vocabulary on the go without writing it down, only remembering it by the sound.
• I was/am trying to speak slowly.
• I was not using Anki or any other SRS programs.
• I was doing a lot of listening, preferably to a large variety of different types of voices that were as close to my voice as possible.
• I was listening to good music in Mandarin.
• I was watching a lot of TV shows in Mandarin.
• When I suddenly didn’t know how to say something, rather than asking for a direct translation of what I wanted to say, I asked for the expression that a Taiwanese person would use in that situation. The two were often very different.
• I tried to be able to understand as much of the Chinese pod intermediate podcasts as possible before coming to Taiwan. I pause-rewinded them looking up every unknown word by trying to guess it's pronunciation in a dictionary over and over again and listened to them over and over again until I could understand them at natural speed word by word.
• I was chatting a lot in Chinese on skype. This is very good practice actually. Sometimes even much better than talking to someone in person. On skype, you constantly have to talk, constantly have to describe concrete or abstract situations in detail. You have to talk in bigger chunks and describe everything with your words instead of just pointing to something. In person, sometimes you only drop a few sentences, use your body language to describe things, or just point at the thing you have in mind, on skype you often have to talk for minutes on your own, describing every situation or object without having your body language or environment helping you, structuring your speech and so on.
• I didn’t write down any vocabulary that I learned during the day, but it was a pretty helpful to wait until the end of that day and try to write down off the top of my head the words that I’ve learned during that day. Chances were that the words that I remembered at the end of that particular day were important and were already at least in my passive vocabulary.