While going through some old posts I came across the post I wrote almost two years ago in which I declared my intent to improve my Mandarin Chinese. That post, published on December 9th, 2018, stated that I would try to achieve the level of HSK 4 or 5 within a year and was inspired by a conversation I had with a colleague who said, if I simply focused on it, I could probably do it.
You can read that post here.
I almost cringe while reading through it, mainly because it’s sometimes awkward re-reading something you wrote so long ago, but also because this post and declaration to study actually happened AFTER I wrote a post saying I was simply going to start reading Chinese and learn the language that way.
Suffice it to say, that didn’t happen. And those books have barely been touched. Even worse, I’ve bought more books since then and they seem to be stacking up with little progress going through them.
How are things going so far?
I have detailed my journey learning Mandarin Chinese quite a bit, blogging about moving from HSK 2 to 3, taking the HSK 3 test (I got 82%), moving on to HSK 4 books and finishing them during the COVID lockdown, and, more recently, finally stepping up to the HSK 5 books. All of this progress only to be told that the Hanban Institute, the people who run the HSK test, have decided to re-do the scoring levels and move from a five-band approach to a nine-band approach.
Does this affect me at all?
Not really. I’m continuing on with this “old” style of band levels and will continue to do so until I finish the HSK 6 books, which I hope will be at the end of 2021. To be clear, the Hanban Institute hasn’t released the changes just yet but have only said that they will be reformulating the different levels to better reflect progress in the Chinese language. So, unless they substantially change what’s in the books I’m using (which are the standard course books used to teach Mandarin Chinese), I won’t deviate from this path of study.
Is my Chinese getting any better?
People say so, but it’s difficult to gauge. A lot of them are being nice though I do notice myself using a wider vocabulary than before, even if I get the pronunciation wrong. I also seem to make several “rookie” mistakes in confusing some words, notably 蛋白质 (dan bai zhi, protein), and 百分之 (bai fen zhi, percentage). You can go ahead and laugh at what seems like such a simple mistake, but then you try to speak those syllables and things get tough. Yes, ESL students, I know your pain.
One area of improvement I’ve noticed is my ability to read. I can’t translate very well on the fly but I can read through something and usually get the sounds right. Given time I could translate the passage but rarely feel the need to.
I’ve been told my writing is very neat, which is true, but it also takes me forever to write a character. One colleague said that his fiancee prefers to write in English rather than Chinese because it’s so much easier to write. I can’t say I disagree. So one of the goals I have is to increase my speed of writing.
I have written before of my plan to use dictation exercises in an effort to increase my awareness of the sounds of the language, but in listening to my course materials I’d have to slow down the audio file so much that it would just take forever. Instead, I’ve taken to copying out passages from my textbooks, magazines, newspapers and books that I have in my collection. My goal here is to familiarize myself with writing the language as properly formed sentences and chunks of thought, not just on a character-by-character basis.
The other thing I have noticed improve is that words seem to stick better. Whereas before I’d have to look at a word and its pinyin several times before remembering it, the number of times it takes me to see a word, remember the character, its pronunciation, and how to use it, has decreased significantly. Although progress has been slow, it still is a bit of success.
Further, in writing, instead of having to study each character for its different components, I’ve found I’m able to write quite a few of them simply after glancing at them. Since I’ve spent so much time writing the characters, I feel I have a better understanding of how the characters are made up, including their stroke order, radicals and other characters that make up the different words. Again, it’s a small bit of success, but it’s taken six years to get here.
What would you say to someone who wants to learn Mandarin Chinese?
If you’re new to learning Chinese or are thinking of learning the language and are scared by what I just wrote, understand that my approach and goals of learning Mandarin Chinese are a little bit different from most people who study the language. A lot of the people I have met who know the language typically know how to speak well but don’t know how to read or write very well. Some people also had taken the HSK test a few years ago when the tests were far easier than they are now.
There is one point I should make clear about learning the Chinese language: when you are learning a language like Chinese you will be learning three or four languages at once. The first is the spoken language with all its tonal challenges (Mandarin has four, Cantonese has nine); second, you will learn how to read using pinyin which uses the English alphabet to write down the sounds of the Chinese characters; third, you will learn the Chinese characters themselves, of which there are several thousand. The fourth, if you so choose, is to write the characters which requires another skillset in that many of the characters have a certain stroke order and some are so “full” that they require close scrutiny to make sure you get all of the elements correct.
Of those four steps, speaking is easiest followed by reading in pinyin. Those two steps will suit most people and that’s where a lot of people stop. The problem with only relying on reading pinyin, however, is that some words are spelled the same way but have completely different characters, so it helps to learn at least a few of the common characters.
Why has my desire to study the language changed so much since first arriving in China?
To be perfectly clear, I never wanted to learn Chinese and I had no illusions about my life in China when I arrived back in 2014. I had little desire yet another language and dreaded the idea of starting it only to leave the country soon after.
However, as things progressed I found myself becoming rather anxious that I was in China and I had the perfect opportunity to learn and use a living language that it just seemed silly to let it go. So that was the push to actually learn the language.
So what changed?
As far as I can tell, the language has gotten far easier to deal with. I no longer track my progress in spreadsheets because it’s not worth the time trying to remember how much of each language skill I worked on each day. Instead, I am now able to sit down and read a newspaper and get something from it either in terms of information or something language-related. Likewise, with writing. Writing the characters isn’t a struggle but formulating grammatically-correct sentences is still something I have to work on. These may seem like obvious statements, but when you’re aiming for full proficiency in a language, you become all too aware of how much it takes to actually learn a language.
Can I write out a 1400-word essay in Chinese that is mostly free of mistakes? Ha! Hardly! My Chinese is so English-grammified that I feel sorry for my Chinese teacher whenever she asks me a question. And my pronunciation? Nails on a chalkboard, even to me. But those are things I can change and I will work on as I become more comfortable with a larger vocabulary. That might even be what I focus on while I’m working through the HSK 6 books next year, if all goes well.
What’s my ultimate goal?
The goal I have in mind is to be able to translate from Mandarin Chinese into English. Why this goal? I don’t really know, but it seems like a sufficiently high enough goal and isn’t something that a lot of people can do, at least among the people who weren’t born into a Chinese-speaking household.
So, we’ll see how things turn out over the next year as I’m about to sign another contract (we only ever get one-year contracts) and it’s within that time that I plan to complete not only the HSK 5 books, but also take the HSK 4 and 5 tests. The year 2021 will be spent going through the HSK 6 books and working on my translation abilities.
And with that, let’s 加油！