Hi everybody, it’s Chris again, and in this video I want to talk about some of the mental and psychological aspects of learning Chinese.
I’m worried that a lot of people get put off because people say that Chinese is the hardest language to learn in the world. A lot of Chinese people have also asked me: “How could you learn one of the hardest languages in the world?”
Everybody seems to believe that Chinese is disproportionately much more difficult than any other language in the world to learn, but in fact it’s probably other things that are holding you back.
When I tell people that Chinese isn’t as difficult as people say to learn and how it’s completely possible for any Westerner or anybody who really has the motivation and persistence to get to a good level in the language, they normally say to me: “I haven’t got enough time. I’ve got too many other things going on. How could I take up a language like Chinese?”
It’s not so much that you don’t have time, it’s that you need to decide whether it’s something that you can really dedicate yourself to doing. Obviously, it’s not going to happen overnight but you don’t have to study in really on long bursts of sitting down with a book and studying in order to to start and pick up the language.
If you can concentrate for a short period of time even for say 15 minutes or 20 minutes, and if you can be completely focused within that time, then actually you can learn a huge amount in a very short period.
Say you were going to study three times a week, even for just a small amount of time, that would get you a long way quite quickly, and that’s what people don’t really understand, I think. They think that it’s very very difficult and you need huge amounts of time, but it’s really not like that, or it doesn’t have to be like that.
I remember when I first started learning Chinese, I was really motivated by curiosity about the language and the culture and the challenge of learning something new. I really loved languages and I wanted to get into a culture and language as ‘different’ as Chinese. I had an intellectual curiosity as well as an interest in the culture and Chinese characters and other aspects.
It was really difficult the beginning..
I remember I went to visit different universities that offered courses in Chinese and I met a guy in his fourth year who had been studying for about three or four years. I asked him, “How good are you at Chinese? Can you have a conversation? Can you understand what people say? Can you read a newspaper?”
I remember he told me that he could understand the gist of what a newspaper was talking about but there were so many words that he didn’t know and he didn’t feel confident he could read well. I just thought: “You’ve been learning Chinese for 4 years, can it really be that difficult? Can it really be so difficult that you’ve been doing it all this time and still you can barely read a newspaper but luckily that wasn’t my experience. Luckily I didn’t believe that it was that difficult.
At the start I found Chinese characters really challenging, and I remember after I been learning Chinese for about a year, I went to Taiwan and I was able to have conversations, but I just remember being really put off just a couple of times when I was with friends and they could understand like a lot, but I was barely able to understand anything of what people were saying. It seemed really really difficult, but I just carried on my listening practice and persisted.
There were so many situations where I couldn’t really understand what people were saying. Every time I went to a new place it was difficult to understand the accent, and it and he just took a long time to get used to it.
I think it’s important to understand the importance of being really focussed. Even if you can only dedicate say 20 minutes of 30 minutes at a time to learning Chinese then that is still really valuable.
There are other people making videos online who say that they they can speak 4 or 5 or 6 languages. I do speak other languages a bit, but I don’t really go on about it and I don’t certainly make videos of me speaking other languages, because the truth is that I’m kind of average at them…
One of the reasons I think that I was able to carry on with Chinese and persist with that is because I had this focus on one particular language. I didn’t decide to learn 4 languages, and become average at all of them. I just decided to really focus on Chinese and become as good at Chinese as I possibly could.
I’ve been learning learning (or rather speaking Chinese) for about nine years now, and you can see videos me speaking. You can see I’m not perfect. There are things I don’t know, and people will point out mistakes and that’s good, because I can still see areas that I can improve and specific things I’ve done wrong.
I can communicate pretty fluently now, and I can understand almost everything I hear and read accurately, so what I want to say to you is:
It is definitely completely possible to learn to speak fluent Chinese as a Westerner, whatever language you speak, as long as you have persistence and motivation.
You don’t have to have a lot of time, as long as you keep doing it.
For me it was just a process of constant improvement over a long period of time. I started off speaking really slowly, focussing the tones and getting them accurate all the time. I looked up words constantly every time there was something I didn’t know.
I tried to have short conversations, without really knowing exactly how to say things. In the early days, I just blurted things out and thought of dialogues in my head. I had short conversations, just trying to express things, even when I barely knew how to say them.
I also kept listening to Chinese over a long period, to other people and native speakers and constantly analysed my own mistakes and improved. I carried on doing loads of flashcards and revising vocabulary and listening and that got me to where I am today.
I think one of the hardest things about learning Chinese or any other language is getting started in getting into a routine.
You can say that you really want to start learning Chinese and be really motivated for a week and you might put in a lot of effort, and then after that time you just find that you can’t continue and you think that you are going get round to it, but you never do.
It takes time to form a habit, just like going to the gym or losing weight. You can say that you are going to do it and then you do that exercise for 3 or 4 days and then after that it fades away, unless you really have the persistence and motivation to keep on doing it. That’s what is going to drive you forward.
If you can do something for more than a week, you’re already doing pretty well. If you get into the habit and you been able to keep it up for more than two weeks then you are already a lot of the way there, because it just feels automatic to you and you’re already in the process – and that’s what you need to do with learning a language as well..
The hardest thing is always getting started.
I strongly believe that it’s completely possible to learn Chinese, whether it’s just a little bit or you want to get to a high level.
I’m not just saying this just for the sake of saying it. I’m hoping you will see what I’ve done and look at my experience, and think that you can also learn Chinese yourself.
I just want you to take that first step and say “Yes. I think it is possible and yes I will start this and see how far I can go…”
I hope this video helped to motivate you a little bit and I hope it’s given you an idea of what it’s like. Thanks for watching!