How I learnt Mandarin Chinese grammar...
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 21 ก.ย. 2024
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In this video, I explain tips on how to learn mandarin grammar. Hope you guys find it useful!
Will, thank you so much for sharing your experience. I've been studying the language for two years as part of my uni degree in my home country, and was so disheartened when I discovered that I couldn't converse at all during my exchange semester. I quickly realized that the traditional teaching methods were failing me, and that I made surprising progress during my outings in China, miles faster than in the classroom. Initially, I thought it's a fluke, but you helped me understand why it helped and the underlying method. It's so daunting to have to start from scratch again and throw out most of the things that I relied on, but I'm glad that I'm not the only one who questions the sole reliance on grammar text booked based learning + single word vocabulary drilling, as seems to be the approach of many schools. I had so many doubts, and no one seemed to understand my growing scepticism, but now I see that I'm actually on a better track, that is more suited to me. Chinese is so pattern-based, and it relies extremely on context, it just makes more sense to encounter the context first and then learn the appropriate sentence pattern than the other way around. Otherwise, you just end up like me, having all the troubles you described in this video. The only thing that is extremely daunting is when you are naturally very introverted and/or might even suffer from social anxiety, then it's much harder to match your acquisition speed, but that is a different topic and a separate challenge. Of course, there is no need to learn it as fast!
Thanks so much for the comment! Really great to hear your story! It's great you've managed to find your own method and move away from more traditional methods.
Grammar is created from those already learned the language in attempt to help those who havent learned the language. So maybe it is best to not learn grammar systematically in full but as a need based. This way, we probably can use language in a more natural way.
Totally agree!
Hey Will :) I had a couple of questions and I’d be grateful if you could answer
1. When you were watching ‘Home with kids’ did you watch it with English subtitles at all? I notice the subtitles are all in mandarin (with English cc) but I don’t recognise many characters at the minute. Did you understand much when you started watching?
2. When you began speaking with conversation buddies (outside of your childhood friend) how well could you speak/ how long had you been learning? I’m struggling to keep the Chinese part of the conversation in Chinese as I can’t express myself that fluidly yet so every other sentence is me asking ‘how do you say…’ (it’s my second week but outside a of teacher I don’t have any bbc friends). Do you reckon it’s worth continuing on with language exchange business or do you think it’d be better to stick with teachers for the time being?
3. When you were * first* making anki flash cards (before you could read characters) did you use pinyin at all? Or English? I’ve started making closed caption cards but I put the characters at the top and pinyin at the bottom ( with the English showing up after I click just to make sure I remember). Please could you run through how you made them right at the start? I understand the closed caption with characters only method if you can read but for those of us who are on level breakthrough of the mandarin learners series what do we do? 🥹 thanks in advance!
I don't think you should watch home with kids if you can't really understand it as it's not going to be particularly helpful, anything you're watching try and watch without english subtitles. So maybe try some beginner content on youtube, there's lots of beginner comprehensible input around as you want to be understand the majority of what you're listening to in all honesty. I think stick with teachers until you're comfortable holding a conversation and then move more to language exchange partners when you're ready, or maybe you can even try a bit of both. I think in the beginning, adding the pinyin and a bit of english isn't a problem as there's not much getting around that unless you add some pictures for nouns etc instead of english. Just make sure your cards are designed so you actually recall the chinese and not just read it. Really hope that helps!
@@willhartmandarin that is really helpful, thanks so much Will! Also, when you were learning to read (I believe using the mandarin companion graded readers) how did you remember the characters at the very beginning? Was it a matter of simple seeing them repeatedly? Did you use anki flash cards to remember them? I bought the breakthrough level mandarin companion books so just trying to figure out the most efficient way of learning using them :)
@@sumayah8823 I personally just saw them loads until I recognized them, but it might be a good idea to add some of the characters you struggle to remember to anki like front: character -> back: pinyin.
@@willhartmandarin legend, thanks so much Will!
雖然我不是在學中文 但這影片對我幫助一樣很大
無論如何解釋，結論是一樣的。學霸就是學霸。任何一個能上醫科大學的人通常具有與眾不同的頭腦。而這種頭腦是來自天賦，並非來自個人的努力。所以大家不要指望能在短期內達到像他那種水平。
I was once fascinated by one of your vids in which you spoke a bunch of Chinese. Your Chinese is by far better than any expatriates I came upon during the last 25 years. No matter how long their stay and which nationality. I showed it to one of my local friends and no one believed the fact that you'd never been or stayed for some period here before. As for me, I'm Korean.
Thanks so much for the encouragement!
Great video 😊
Thanks! 😊
This was really interesting Will, keep it up! I wanted to ask, how did you specifically go about improving your accent and making your pronunciation more standard when learning Chinese? Also, who would you imitate/shadow when you wanted to improve your accent?
I would recommend imitating someone with a similar voice to yourself. I think the main methods that will help are echoing, shadowing and chorusing.
Hi Will! I'm a Mandarin native speaker and a fellow medical professional (veterinarian, so depending on who you ask...) I wanted to learn French during vet school just to keep my sanity but I got so busy, and my mental health crashed so I did not do anything about my French until after clinics. Kudos to you doing both at the same time! I wish I had the self discipline.
Do you think that sentence mining will work in learning European languages? I've been trying to apply the techniques in my French learning (echoing, etc.) and I hate learning grammars, so I hope to learn the grammars as I encounter them. Also wondering how you find time to learn? After 10 years of being in school I thought finally I would have free time...not if you work clinically :)
Great to hear from you! I think sentence mining will definitely work for european languages, I gave it a go in Spanish and it was better than I expected. As for finding the time to learn, for me using 碎片时间 and having some good habits is what works. For example, I listen to chinese podcasts when walking to the hospital for placement etc. Let me know how you get on!
@@willhartmandarin Thank you! I will give it a try and let you know😄
شكرا 🥰🥰🥰
Hey Will your videos are incredible as usual!
What do you think about learning Chinese and eyesight problems?
Does it make it worse?
How about your eyesight?
Thank you!
Interesting question, I wouldn't imagine chinese would negatively affect eyesight tbh
@@willhartmandarin so is your eyesight good? Even after long reading session of Chinese characters? I just noticed that in terms of reading Chinese I need to read closer to the source so I kind of have an eye strain in the evening, idk if it’s related to Chinese characters or any reading would do it to my eyes ahah, but I’ve never noticed smth like this before
Will, will you please recommend some tv shows, or some videos you watch to improve your Chinese? Thanks in advance?
I recommend starting with 家有儿女, then you could watch something like 三十而已 and 乔家的儿女. Hope that helps!
谢谢@@willhartmandarin
I’ve been studying Chinese for 2months even if I don’t know many hanzi besides I’m at level 3 but my speaking is so low so how can you guide me to improve my speaking skills????
What about listening? Do you think watching with target language subtitles improve listening?
I think it will, but it would also be useful to practice listening without subtitles e.g. with a podcast
Hi how do i collect sentences i've been using google translate to form sentences aswell as obtaining words from MDBG dictionary. Is there any other methods you could reccomend.
I would recommend obtaining sentences from native content i.e. TV shows, podcasts, books etc. Hope that helps!
Hello, Will. I am a native Spanish speaker and the truth is that creating sentences is very difficult for me. Do you think it would be a good idea to watch Chinese dramas to be able to imitate and learn grammar? I've wasted a lot of time learning just the characters, I know a lot but when I try to write a sentence I become a disaster!
Hey, yes I think TV dramas will definitely help! I think TV dramas + sentence mining is the best combination personally !
It always pains me so much when people say Chinese grammar is easy. I actually find it quite counter intuitive to the way my brain works (native English speaker) which makes it so hard and it is really difficult to explain that to people. I often feel Chinese grammar is also taught it such isolated, disparate chunks too (like you mention 虽然。。但是). However, I find this method and the nature of Chinese grammar just doesn't seem to build up cohesively for me to constructed longer sentences. Learning other languages I have found myself learning a few grammar structures and then this allows me to build a path way to construct some really long and complex sentences quite quickly. Mandarin just seems to take so much more effort to gain those structures and then link them all together.
Totally agree, sentence structure in chinese is very different to english, you have to think in a completely different way.
Chinese is the hardest grammar. Look at 了, it has 20 different use cases