Essay:A Statesian Marxists' Guide to Learning Mandarin

PART I: OPENING Q&A AND GENERAL MYTH-BUSTING

“Learning Mandarin is really hard. It's a category 5 language for English speakers. It's impossible!”

Learning Mandarin is not hard at all. All those various difficulty discussions are really saying is that Mandarin takes a while to learn. Per the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), an easier language like Spanish takes ≈23-24 weeks (or 575-600 hours) for basic fluency whereas Mandarin takes ≈88 weeks (or 2200 hours) for basic fluency. So about 4x longer to learn Mandarin than Spanish or say, Afrikaans. Whatever language you choose, learning a language is like eating a large elephant one bite at a time. If the Mandarin elephant is 4 times bigger, you just have to take significant, but livable bites out of the the Mandarin elephant for that many more days.

“I don't live in China. How can I possibly learn Mandarin?”

You are exactly who this guide was written for. If you are concerned about finding a speaking partner, just keep in mind that there are 1.1 billion fluent Mandarin speakers. So you will have little or no trouble finding an enthusiastic Mandarin speaker who wants to talk with you. This is the digital age. There are dozens of apps, websites and other tools to connect with native Chinese speakers.

“Are 'Chinese language' and 'Mandarin language' the same thing?”

No. Mandarin is the official language used by the government and by most speakers. There are other Chinese dialects besides Mandarin such as Wu and Cantonese. The particulars of these is beyond the scope of this guide. Thinking using dialectics, China is the nation where the Chinese economic base and superstructure meet. 'China the country' or nation-state, comes from Chinese culture and from the political-economy of the land. The best way to think of Mandarin, then, is that it is the lingua franca, or bridge language shared by the various regions and subcultures of the Chinese people. Due to China's education reforms, only elderly folks 60+ years old (this guide was started in 2022) in certain parts of China will have trouble understanding Mandarin. This guide will use the two terms Mandarin and Chinese interchangeably.

PART II: MINDSET

There can be many mental and emotional barriers to learning Mandarin. Some are fairly extreme and beyond the scope of this guide, such as dyslexia or dysgraphia. However, the ones that get most people in trouble are very simple, and are generally not that hard to overcome once they are recognized.

The most important aspect is not the specifics of which resources you use or the details of a learning plan (though those are obviously important), but how you look at the situation. I don't mean in the sense that your mind is more powerful than rote practice, although you'll need to have some self-discipline and commitment for obvious reasons. The main problem is that most people look at language learning in a warped, incorrect way. That's why they flunk, not because it has to be so hard in and of itself. What I mean is that you can't look at learning languages as a short-term ordeal that ends at some point when you are sufficiently fluent and accurate. They must be seen as long-term lifestyle changes. That sounds kind of scary, but is actually not a big deal when you think about it, and once you start seeing results you will be motivated to continue.

Consider this: when people start studying, they are often extremists about it. They try to learn 3 hours a day, 7 days a week, or go thru some crazy program where they torture themselves to become fluent in 3 weeks. They burn themselves out or get sick or just hate life generally, and they fail. Then they get discouraged and settle back into only using the language they are already familiar with.

Was that a failure of willpower? Sort of, but the main problem is that the whole approach is wrong. You don't learn by killing yourself. You learn, and more importantly keep learning, by accumulating significant, but livable, improvements to your lifestyle over time, and building on that. Not by going through some horrible ordeal requiring Olympian willpower.

Learning Mandarin just has to become something you do everyday. Language practice has to become a habitual thing you do every day or two, like mowing the lawn or taking out the trash. If you do just a little better all the time, but really stick to it, you can accumulate big gains very fast, and improve upon them over the long term. Once you start seeing improvements without having to kill yourself, it becomes very easy to keep on improving. You don’t have to stick to the following 100% of the time; but every little bit you slip up detracts from your overall results. The amount of time and effort you put into developing and maintaining your language is directly proportional to what you will get out of it and the magnitude of the results you will see. If you follow this advice only some of the time, you will only get some of the results. In the end, the wrong thing done consistently often times nets more results than the right thing done sparingly.

You can easily learn about 10-50 words per week. That's at least 520 words a year and, if you have great internal/external dialectics, basic fluency in a year. In a year you’ll be able to go to China and have little trouble with all basic listening, speaking, reading, and in three you’ll be pretty exceptional, even being able to read/speak about Marxist topics at a university level, assuming you are consistent and motivated. We know how the the mind learns, we know what can be done, and we know how long it takes. Do not look for the easy-out, the miracle, or the learning secret someone wants to sell you. You want results, not false promises - stick to a routine and have fun and see it through. In otherwords, be persistent and be patient.

Another thing to consider is that many people find it hard to get into Mandarin because they have bad habits, especially when it comes to learning. Some of these are obvious, but many of them are not. Education in a bourgeois society is very spotty, and the media (and especially the internet) often report nonsense that just adds to the confusion. Part of the purpose of this guide is to educate you enough to be able to teach yourself any skill, not just Mandarin, but pedagogy or 'learning how to learn'. Habits are hard to start, but the rewards for good habits are immense and long-lasting. After a short while, you won't feel any stress from studying. You'll start to feel anxious if you miss a day of Mandarin. You'll think "How did I live like this? Why did I spend those years putting off learning this language? This is so easy!" It is. Just read on.

PART III: RESOURCES

The backbone of this entire program, How to Remember Anything Forever-ish. Read it. Then read it again. This Leitner schedule will guide you through the rest. Much of this guide is just using different spaced repetition tools to learn the language.

Sequence of reading

https://4chanint.fandom.com/wiki/The_Official_/int/_How_to_Learn_A_Foreign_Language_Guide_Wiki

https://4chanint.fandom.com/wiki/General_Resources

https://4chanint.fandom.com/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese

https://teachyourselfmandarin.wordpress.com/

Optional reading

https://www.hackingchinese.com/the-building-blocks-of-chinese-part-1-chinese-characters-and-words-in-a-nutshell/

Tools

• Discord Servers
  • /r/ChineseLanguage
  • 中英交流 Chinese-English Language Exchange
• Speaking Apps
  • Hellotalk
  • Tandem
• Reading Apps
  • Readera

PART IV: LEARNING MANDARIN

Normally its OK to jump around a guide as your whims take you. DO NOT DO THAT HERE UNTIL YOU LEARN PINYIN. Do not bother with strokes and so on until you know your pinyin fairly well.

To get the most out of this guide, practice Mandarin everyday. Even if you only have 15 minutes of spare time. Doing 15 minutes of practice everyday will give better results than a half-hour every other day. We have spaced repetition research derived from Hermann Ebbinghaus's work to thank for that fact.

Pinyin

Pinyin was invented by a group of Chinese linguists in the 1950s under Mao. Pinyin is an anglicized version of Chinese that uses the Roman alphabet to represent Chinese characters. It is the first and foundational step in learning Mandarin and is the first thing Chinese children learn in school when learning to read and write. By learning Pinyin, you will understand how to pronounce the Chinese language sounds as well as produce the 4 tones of the language.

Using aforementioned spaced repetition system, take the phone/computer app Anki, or AnkiDroid as your flashcard system and pair it with the Yoyo Chinese YouTube Channel to fill out your spaced repetition cards.

Yoyo Chinese Pinyin Playlist

For Mobile: Yoyo Chinese Pinyin playlist

Once you have basic competence with Pinyin you are ready to move on to learning strokes, radicals and characters. With serious effort this should take about 1 month. A more casual pace usually takes 2-4 months.

Radicals

Mandarin has 214 radicals. By and large Chinese is a compound language. That means most words are at least a pair of smaller words, similar to English words like nonetheless, firetruck, lifesaver, superhuman and so on. Indeed, most words in mandarin are two-word compounds. Radicals are these smaller component pieces. A good starting goal with radicals is the 100 most common radicals.

Use the Skritter App

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inkren.skritter.chinese&hl=en&gl=US to get started learning radicals.

Skritter has a number of different practice decks covering different parts of the language. A good place to start is with the deck "Chinese Stroke Order" to learn the principle rules (there are 8) of how a character is written. Top to down, left to write, left-sloping before right-sloping and so on. The "100 Common Radicals" deck covers the above-mentioned most common ones.

PART VI: MORE QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

“What is the reading speed of a native speaker?”

About 255 ± 29 characters per minute.

PART VII: THANKS

Thanks to Nicky Case for her invaluable research into pedagogy. And to 4chan for being the best proof there is that people as groups are just the best and that individualism is cancer.