Think about: why do I learn a new language? The answer should be very easy: I want to communicate with the others. Check out the following five effective ways to practice Mandarin Chinese speaking skills.
Open your mouth
Unless you would like to open your mouth, you won’t have chance to improve your Mandarin Chines speaking skills. Here what I say “open your mouth” has two meanings.
First, really open your mouth and try to talk to somebody. Nowadays internet is a very popular and simple way to find someone all over the world.
Second, you can try to talk to yourself, but not in your brain, need to say it “loudly”, as least can hear your voice.
Repeat people’s sentence
If you are not confident about what you say, you can try to start from “repeating”. Even I will not say you are really “communicating” with the others, but at least you are “speaking”.
By repeating the others, you are also practicing how to speak. Think about how a child learn a language? They have no idea about grammar, they don’t really understand what people said. They just listen and repeat.
Read more Mandarin Chinese materials
Before we can say something, we need to have something in mind. It means, if we don’t know what to say, no matter how good I am in a language, there is no way that I can speak well.
Read more Mandarin Chinese materials bring us few benefits. Fist, we can improve our reading skills. Second, we will be more familiar with Mandarin Chinese speaking people’s logic.
Even though reading Mandarin directly seems harder than reading your mother language, but it worth you to do in this way.
Don’t ignore tones
Mandarin Chinese is a language with tones. It is very important to pronounce it properly if you don’t want others to misunderstand you.
There 5 tones in Mandarin, and lot of word have same pronunciation but with different tones. Anyone who doesn’t care about tones will have problem sooner or later.
I don’t mean that everyone needs to pronounce perfectly, even myself sometime may pronounce some words wrongly. What I want to say is don’t ignore it.
Use it more often
it is very simple, but we always forget. If we want to see the improvement, we have to do it day by day, year by year. There is nothing we can learn it well without practicing.
The last secret I am going the share is “use it”! The more you use it, the better ability you will have. There is no shortcut way. We all understand that if we learned something but not using it, that ability will disappear in the end.
