Glossika Founder's Takeaways from Learning Chinese
We're sharing insights from an interview Glossika's founder Michael Campbell gave on the Im Learning Mandarin Podcast. Michael has dedicated a significant portion of his life to understanding and mastering languages, and he's lived in Taiwan for most of his life and become proficient in many Chinese languages and dialects along the way.
Listen to the podcast below or read our main takeaways from Michael's story.
I moved to Taiwan at a fairly young age and started with a little bit of a challenge. I wanted to learn Chinese within a certain period of time and see if I could get anywhere with it. My first year in Taiwan was dedicated to learning Chinese. I couldn't afford any formal courses or schools, so I studied on my own. This was happening decades ago, so I didn't have access to the internet. It was just paper and books, and my attemts to communicate with people on the street.
But having an immersion environment for a whole year really took me a long way. I ended up staying in Taiwan, studying Chinese and various dialects of it, working as an interpreter and teaching students.
And here's what I've learned from my decades of experience with Chinese.
Conquer Chinese Tones
Tones are not really a huge obstacle that people make it out to be, because we actually use tones quite extensively in English. You need to shift your mindset about tones, and think of it as of something you're already familiar with. There are some languages that are very much less tonal than English, like French or Spanish, they have their pitch accent on a very specific syllable in a word. In English, we tend to have a lot of ups and downs throughout the sentence. If you step back and listen to your own speech patterns in English, you can actually start to hear a lot of tone contours that you're using naturally. It's part of the syntax of English.
To master the Chinese tones you need to:
- Pick a tone you're working on.
- Repeat it out loud until it starts to sound natural.
- Combine the tones you're comfortable with into two syllable words.
- Practice relaxing while speaking to sound more natural.
- Get as much immersion as you can.
Adopt a specific accent
If you're just starting out with Mandarin, you don't really need to worry about which one you're learning at the moment. However, once you get to the point where you're really refining your pronunciation, you'll need to choose a place you want to identify with. Are you going to speak like a Taiwanese person, or a person from Shanghai or Beijing?
Once you get into that root rut, you start speaking a certain way, and it defines the accent that you're going to use. I once met a Taiwanese person who spoke English with a half-Texan, half-British accent, and it was very confusing. I think she had teachers from various places. It was kind of hard to follow what she was saying. So I think it's really good to have a consistent accent and choose a place you want to identify with.
Forget vocabulary lists
The mistake that many learners make is to kind of cram vocabulary lists in isolation with the direct translation from English. Then they try to put the words together artificially relying on the English sentence structure and logic.
One of my friends who teaches Thai says that when you learn a language so different from your own, you need to "download" the operating system for the new language. I found that to be quite applicable to how I went through the initial stages of learning Chinese, along with the tones and everything else. You try to think in a Chinese context. You have to put everything you say into the Chinese frame of mind. You have to rearrange your thoughts starting with the major things and then go more and more into the details of the sentence. You start with the big and you go small. The same thing applies to anything you add into a sentence in Chinese.
Focus on sentences over words
Sentence learning is an excellent way to learn any language, because without context it's really hard to know how words are actually used. You could memorize a thousand individual words in Chinese, but that doesn't mean you'll get anywhere speaking the language.
I've probably met thousands of Taiwanese people over the years. They've memorized the whole English dictionary, and they can't hold a single conversation. If you don't have the sentence training, then it's really hard to say anything. I know thousands of words in Slavic or other European languages, but I wouldn't be able to speak them at all. The speaking part of a language is always going to be the hardest because you have to pull it out of your head fast enough and your tongue has to be used to making those dance movements and spitting it out fast enough for a native speaker to have the patience to actually wait for you to finish saying what you want to say.
Nothing Beats Immersion
I don't think anything actually beats immersion. It's pretty hard to replicate immersion because that experience gives you so many visual and audio clues around you, the environment that you can learn from.
I can start some basic conversations with people that are always centered around just having a handful of verbs that I could use and some modal verbs like I can go, I can do, I want to get, I want to buy, I want to look at. So when I go back to Europe, I'll kind of use the same kind of conversational hiccups and just start using the local language, even if it's super basic. I don't know if I actually make a lot of progress while I'm there, but it's just fun to be able to get to use it.