It doesn’t matter how long you’ve learned Mandarin Chinese, as long as you wish to speak Mandarin Chinese fluently, you need to know the following 5 tips.

When speak Mandarin Chinese, don’t ignore tones and pronunciation

There are very few languages have tones, Mandarin Chinese is one of them. If you wish you can speak Mandarin Chinese fluently, then you have to pay more attention to tones. The same as pronunciation.

I am not saying you have to pronounce like a native Mandarin Chinese speaker. What you need to do is to focus on this, don’t ignore it.

Start from your first day of learning Mandarin Chinese, listen to it very carefully. If you are not used to “tones” and Mandarin Chinese, it is hard to get their sound and different. But as long as you keep focusing on them, you will find your improvement.

Know what Mandarin Chinese you are saying

This is very important. Sometimes, when my students say something wrong, I ask them to repeat what they say and try to clarified what the mistake is. However, about half of them couldn’t tell me what they just said. The answer from them normally is: I have no idea what did I pronounce, I just pick up anything “sounds like”. That is the problem.

As the other 50%, they know what they were saying. What they say is exactly what in their mind. However, sadly to say that the information they remember was wrong. That is the reason they couldn’t let people understand them.

Pay more attention to what you say and what you try to remember. When speak Mandarin Chinese, you need to know what you are saying.

Clear is always better than fast

Don’t try to speak Mandarin Chinese fast. Of course, when we speak your mother language, we can speak very fast, but not to a newly learned language.

Language is for communication. The purpose is to let people understand us. Speed is not for speaking training, it should be for listening.

Say everything clearly. Not only your pronunciation, but also the meaning. Present yourself clearly. Focus on accuracy, in stead of “sounds like a native speaker’s speed”. I didn’t say you need to use a very slow speed when speaking Mandarin Chinese. What I want to express is: speed should not be your goal in the beginning, natural is good enough.

Simple but correct can increase your fluency when speaking Mandarin Chinese

Sometimes, when I asked beginner students to do presentation, one of the common problems comes form here: they wish they can express very complicated idea through certain advanced vocabularies.

Frankly to say, this kind of presentation is terrible. Not only me, their teacher, but also their audiences, no one really understand what they want to show to us.

As a beginner, build up your skills step by step. One day you will have the ability to explain a very complicated concept through a lot of advanced vocabularies. Just be patient.

Accuracy should be put in the first place when you are trying to build up the foundation.

Repeat what you hear is very useful if you want to speak Mandarin Chinese fluently

It sounds very simple, but very useful. When study Mandarin Chinese, listen to your test book or videos is a good way to practice. However, repeat what you hear is a batter way to improve your speaking skills.

First, when repeating it, you must know what you are saying. Second, you can check your pronunciation immediately with what your teacher said. In your mind, you still keep both, yours and your teacher’s.

That make the differences become very clear. Also, it will easier to “copy” the correct sentences within just 2 seconds later.

What you need to do is to follow up what you hear. It won’t take you much time, but really good to you. Or, you can follow up everything in Mandarin Chinese you hear. Only to be careful about the speakers, if he or she can offer you good content or not.

Those five tips can helps you to improve you Mandarin Chinese speaking skills, really worth you to try.

Here you can read about How to practice Mandarin Chinese when you are not surrounded by it

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After a Mandarin Chinese class, what we can do to remain or keep the content we’ve learned in our “brain”? Here comes some suggestions.

Repeat everything you learned in your Mandarin Chinese class every day.

Learning, especially a language, learners need to practice what they learned in the class. Maybe repeat the sentences in the teaching material, maybe listen to the content. Anything will be good.

Do it everyday! Let your “brain” to absorb them. Make everything become nature. Don’t do it like a” serious study”. It is not a home-work, you are doing something you are interesting. So, be happy and relaxing.

Use Google/YouTube “keywords” function to find those new vocabularies you learned in the class.

Try to search what you learned in your Mandarin Chinese class from internet. You might not be able to understand everything that you found in Google or YouTube, but definitely can increase the chance you hear or see them.

Choice those which meet your current level. Too hard or too easy won’t help. The purpose is to know how Mandarin Chinese speaking people use those words in the real life.

Use them together with what you have learned before.

When learning anything, no chapter can be separated with other chapters. Please use the newly-learned knowledge together with those you learned before. Develop new skills based on what you can do now.

In the other side, I would like to say, don’t let the new knowledge squeeze away the old one. Anyone who wants to improve their Mandarin Chinese skills need to combine every information they learned or learning from their Mandarin Chinese class.

Build up the connection with your daily life

The purpose of learning a language is to use it. But, knowledge in a book will only be knowledge unless we can build up the connection between bool and the real word.

If you are a Mandarin Chinese speaking place, just walk out and talk with them. If you are not in a Mandarin Chinese speaking place, still there are ways can do it. Like when walking on the street, think about any Mandarin Chinese you learned from the environment you are.

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When learning Mandarin Chinese, do you feel confusing what the differences between near-synonyms? This article will show you some tips and examples for learning these kinds of words.

Find the different usage and scenario

Some near-synonyms with very similar meaning. It is very hard to identify them through meaning. For these kinds of vocabularies, learners better understand through their usage and scenario.

Example： 開心  快樂  高興

The above three Mandarin Chinese vocabularies all means “Happy” in English, but their usage and scenario are different. Let’s see the explanations as below：

快樂：it is a long turn situation, kind of personality. Also, when I want to bless someone or celebrate a something, I will choice 快樂, such as 生日快樂(Happy birthday)、新年快樂(Happy New Year).

高興：it is a short turn situation. Or I can say it is because of something make me feel “happy”. If I got an excellent test result, I will say “我很高興(I am very happy).

開心：except bless someone or celebrate a something, users can choice either “快樂”or “開心”. The same as “高興”, user can use either of them. The only different is “開心”is bit closer to spoken word.

Catch the differences from the meaning

Some confusing words look similar but actually different, so, you can try to use your first language to help you. Don’t be confused by the characters. let’s see the example as發現/發明/發生.

For the above three vocabularies, they all have “發”, but their meanings are different. 發現means discover, 發明means invent(invention), 發生means happen.

It is very easy to know their different through meaning. The only thing you need to do is to remember them.

The part of speech

Some confusing pair-words are really “confusing”. They have same meaning, with the same scenario, so, how can I identify them? Under this kind of situation, I will suggest you use their part of speech. Here is an example：

迷人and 魅力 all means charming, I will use either of them when I want to tell someone he or she is very attractive. So, what is the different? The biggest different is their part of speech.

迷人is adjective, but 魅力is noun. Since their part of speech are different, their grammatical functions are definitely different. Here come the sentences：

他的魅力誰都比不上 (subject 的  noun)

誰都喜歡他迷人的笑容 (adjective + noun)

These are 3 top hacks when you are learning Mandarin Chinese near-synonyms. Hope this article is useful to you.

Here you can read about Five things you need to know before learning Mandarin Chinese

When learning a language, the environment surrounded is very important. Now, I am going to show you how to practice your Mandarin Chines when you are not in a Mandarin Chinese speaking environment.

Create a Mandarin Chinese environment by yourself

You can create a Mandarin Chinese environment by yourself！Try to make small cards with Chinese Characters, then stick on your wall. Or you can put the object’s name in Chinese so that you can see it every day.

You can also write short sentence or phrase, such as “早安”、”你喜歡吃餃子嗎？”and ”今天天氣很熱. Depends on your level and interest. If you could make “Question” and “Answer” together will be good.

Talk to yourself

Try to imitate you are talking with a Mandarin Chinese speaking person. What will you ask? What you want to say? Or try to pretend that you are making a speech! Just give yourself a situation.

You can talk to mirror, or just in your brain. No need to be very formal and long. Maybe in the morning, after washing your face; maybe at night, after enjoying your dinner.

One more thing, try to use it directly, don’t translate it first.

Shadowing

However, it is a little bit hard to talk with oneself specially when you are not familiar with that language. Shadowing is another option. You can try to shadow your test book、songs、films or a person, as long as they speak nice Mandarin Chinese.

By shadowing them, you just copy everything naturally, including sentence (grammar)、pronunciation、vocabulary and so on. But do make sure you choose the right sources.

Make a habit of using Mandarin Chinese

If a learner only “learn it”, instead of “use it”, the subject will not become part of he or she. No matter what level you are, please make a habit of using Mandarin Chinese.

Don’t be afraid of mistakes. Do it first. Try to find someone to do language exchange. Internet make communication become very easy. Why not take advantage from here? The more you use, the more you will gain. Mistakes bring us the opportunities to improve. It need time to see the improvement.

Here you can read about 5 Tips for improving your Mandarin Chinese

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If you know the following 5 things, learning Mandarin Chinese will become easier. Mandarin Chinese is a very logical but free language.

See Mandarin Chinese as a totally new language, don’t always try to compare with your own language.

If a learner always tries to make comparation between Mandarin Chinese and his/her own language, he/she will face to a bottleneck very soon. I am not saying you can’t compare them, but don’t ask: Why I can say so in my language, but can’t say it in Mandarin Chinese.

No, you can’t, just can’t. Mandarin Chinese is not your mother language. Any two languages with differences. If you stick on asking this kind of question, it will stop you becoming better.

Learning a new language needs time! There is no short cut way to master it.

There was a student in my class, he looks very confident. But he messes up every test during the coming few days. Before the end of the second week, he disappeared.

I heard that he gave up and leave our center. After talking with some of his classmate, I realized that he thinks he can speak as good as a Mandarin native speaker within 6 months.

Anyone who ever learn a real NEW language should know this is MISSION IMPOSSIVEABLE to master it within a short period. Give yourself enough and reason time to learn it.

You need to pay more attention to Tones

When we are singing, we need melody. When we speak Mandarin Chinese, we need tones.

Tones is an important element in Chinese. If you don’t care about it, then you will have problem in using it. People may probably misunderstand you. Here is an example：

「買mǎi」pronounce 3rd tone, which means to buy;

「賣mài」pronounce 4th tone, which means to sell

There is no tense, genders in Mandarin Chinese, but do have measure words(classifier) .

Mandarin Chinese use doesn’t have clear tense in sentences. Except this, the object, like newspaper and chair, in Mandarin Chinese doesn’t have genders. However, Mandarin Chinese do have genders for man and woman, bull and cow.

As measure words(classifier), is a quite important and necessary part in Mandarin Chinese. The basic pattern is:

Nu. (amount) + Measure word + Noun.(singular form)

Ex. 3 pens → 三枝筆 sānzhī bǐ

Chinese character is not based on alphabet, it based on logogram.

Most of the languages in the world are based on alphabet, but Mandarin Chinese is not. Chinese characters including 3 parts: meaning, shape and pronunciation. We won’t know which character people are saying unless we saw it (not in a sentence). The shape (radical and parts) normally can help beginners to understand and memories its meaning.

Here you can read about 5 tips for improving your Mandarin (Chinese) Skills

Here you can read about When learning Mandarin Chinese, character is a must or not?

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First of all, When learning Mandarin/ Chinese, ask yourself the following 2 questions before you decided to learn Chinese characters or not：

Question 1: What your purpose is?

This is a very important question. If you only need to go to a Mandarin/ Chinese speaking country for few days or weeks. Learning Mandarin/Chinese is because you wish your trip there will be more convenient and easier, after that you won’t use it any more. Then, use Pin-yin system to help yourself get used to Mandarin/ Chinese will be a great idea.

But, if you want to master it, at least can use it properly in the future, then why not learn characters from the very beginning? Writing and reading are also part of any language.

Another thing you need to consider is Chinese is not a spelling language, Chinese has a lot characters with same pronunciation but represent different meanings.

For example, “Shì”, there are at least 5 different characters, all with different meaning, such as “is”、”try”、”watch”、”things” and “room”(是、試、視、事、室).

Question 2: Why you don’t want to learn Chinese characters?

This is an interesting question. If you say no to something, should be a reason with it. Are they too hard to remember? Do you fear to learn it? Do you think learning them spend you too much time? Do you think learning Characters are wasting your time?

No matter what your reason is, you are saying no to it. Try to think why? Will you learn Italian but refuse to learn how to write and read them?

Sometime I may hear learners compliant about how difficult to write Chinese characters or why they need to learn it. To me, I am more interested in why you don’t want to do it instead of why you need to do it.

Secondary, as a professional teacher, I would like to share my experiences about this as below:

Learning how to write and read Chinese characters is a must, but not necessary to be as fast as your listening and speaking skills.

We can learn how to write and read form some simple characters. Those characters are more like pictures or with very few strokes. Most of those characters may become the radical or parts of some complicated characters.

As a learner, if this is your first time to hear Mandarin/ Chinese, you can focus on listening and speaking more than writing and reading. Sooner or later, as long as you are keeping learning, you’ll see your improvement.

Don’t push yourself too much. There is an old saying in Chinese：More haste, less speed(欲速則不達).

Use a smart way to learn Chinese characters.

Practicing is necessary, even to a native Mandarin/ Chinese speaker. Apart from that, we need to find a smart way to learn Chinese characters.

First, as I mentioned in point one, most of Chinese characters can be separated into 2 or more parts. Some of them be called as Radical, some of them be called as part. No matter what they be called, they may be seen repeated.

Here are some examples：

「好」、「她」、「媽」：these 3 characters are all with 「女」

「吃」、「喝」、「唱」：these 3 characters are all with 「口」

Here come a harder one：

「星」、「產」、「醒」：these 3 characters are all with 「生」

Really knowing them doesn’t means “identify” them, also need get the connection between characters and characters.

Find the fun part of it.

Writing is boring if you only write it. We can make it more fun by watching video to know how Chinese characters been created, use quizlet, finding similar parts from a group of Chinese characters and so on.

If you like singing, try some Chinese songs, or some short youtube videos(not the teaching one), games in Chinese. Anything except watching your textbook only.

Try to use it.

If you don’t want to use it, then you won’t have the motivation to learn it. Also, if you don’t use a skill or knowledge, you will forget easily. So no matter how much characters you learned already, try to use them.

Here you can read about 5 tips for improving your Mandarin (Chinese) skills

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