I first started learning Mandarin in 6th grade (15 years ago). I studied every year of school, and earned a B.A. in Chinese Language and Literature from Boston University.
For grad school, I went to Tianjin Juilliard, which is an American music school in China. All the instruction was in English, but still, I was in China for two years for that.
My fiancée, Sia is also from China, and I met her in 2018. She has been an important component to learning Mandarin as well. Since I do speak Mandarin with her sometimes, there’s never been a period in my life since I started learning where Mandarin has been fully out of my life.
However, there have been times where I study very actively and other times where I don’t study at all.
With Chinese, my reading is strongest, then listening, speaking, and writing follow in that order.
My understanding is that in order to improve speaking and writing, it requires massive about of reading and listening. In other words, more input leads to better output. Practicing output directly is important too, but it is ultimately input that expands vocabulary.
I’ve always found it difficult to find input in Chinese that hits the sweet spot in terms of being just the right difficulty level and being interesting.
The past few days, I’ve been using Zhihu (知乎) and just finding interesting articles on there. I read them out loud next to Sia whenever I can, or on the subway to myself, or just whenever I can.
In the past, I’ve experimented with writing down every new word I come across, but they just tend to pile up, and I don’t end up doing anything with them. Instead, I’m aiming to increase my reading volume significantly, and make note of new words that appear often across articles. So if I’m reading an idiom for the fifth time in a week, I know that it’s probably something worth writing down somewhere.
For listening, I may get into watching some type of video, movie, or TV show. I don’t know, though. I’ve always found these to be either too difficult or just not interesting in Chinese. I think I’ll focus on reading for a while.
For speaking, I will rely on conversations with Sia for now.
For writing, what I’ve been doing is any time I journal in English, I also write in Chinese for a bit.
I think my focus will be more reading for a while, plus making an effort to have more of a variety of conversations in Chinese with Sia, rather than defaulting to English whenever it gets difficult.
I’ll follow up on this in a week or two and see if reading articles on Zhihu seems to be helping at all.
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