Is learning Mandarin Chinese hard to you? Let’s check out the following suggestions. You will find how to learn Mandarin Chinese easily as a beginner.

Choice the right materials and select the right speed to listen

There are a lot of Mandarin Chinese learning material for beginners. You can easily find hundreds of videos in YouTube. What you need to do is to choose the one that fit your level (or a little higher), don’t try to push yourself too much. There is an old saying in Mandarin Chinese: More Haste, Less Speed (欲速則不達) which means don’t be rush.

Some You Tubers can speak really good Mandarin, but maybe bit fast to you. Don’t forget there is a bottom in YouTube can adjust video speed. When the speed slow down, everything will become easier.

One day five vocabulary and one sentence

How many days are there is a year? 365days! That is right. If you can remember one new vocabulary and one sentence per day, after one year, you already familiar with so many new words and sentence.

Don’t think there are nothing, they are very important foundation as a beginner. You can develop yourself on top of them, you will improve fast.

The most important thing is to keep what you learn in your brain. Lesser but really understood and remember what you learned. How much you learned is just a number, how much you can understand and remember is the key point.

Slow is not bad, but need to move forward everyday

Ignore speed. Build up your own tempo. Slow doesn’t means anything, fast neither. As long as you are improving and move toward to your goal, slow is not bad. Well prepared for next level.

Don’t stay in place. It is means everyday get something new, everyday try something harder than yesterday. Not too much, just let you feel comfortable (a little stress still be fine).

Read Mandarin Chinese and find what you know

Language is for communication. Unless I try to connect with the real word, what I have learned will be useless.

As a beginner, how can I build up the connection? One of the easier ways is to read something. Reading is less stress than speaking, because you don’t need to respond people immediately and quickly.

However written language is hard than verbal language. What I suggest here is to pick up the characters/vocabularies that you knew. Through this, you can increase the opportunities to repeat what you know in your brain. Also, when you see them, you can try to think about their pronunciation and meaning and so on.

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

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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.

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

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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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