Pimsleur Chinese (Mandarin) (affiliate link) is one of the most popular tools available for learning Mandarin Chinese. When I first began learning Chinese, I went through Pimsleur programs 1 to 3 and found it to be a great primer for learning the language. The features I liked about it included:

• It was audio based, which meant I could listen to it on my iPod or while on the go
• The lessons got harder as Chinese from earlier lessons was reused, which meant real progress
• It forced me to constantly review earlier material as this material was reused in later lessons

There were a few issues about it that I didn’t like though:

• The Chinese being used was very Beijing centric, which wasn’t how the locals where I was (Taiwan) spoke
• The program only had 3 levels (now 4), and I wanted more beyond that
• It was mainly an audio program, so I didn’t have any pinyin or character sheets to follow along with
• While there was a lot of learning done within the lesson, there wasn’t much I could do outside of the lessons to help review the material

CLO was actually created to address these issues. I tried to incorporate the features I liked about Pimsleur (audio based, progressive, constant review) while adding more to it, namely:

• Use speakers from Taiwan, whose accents I find are easier for beginners to follow (due to tones being emphasized more)
• Expand the course to 7 levels of difficulty
• Provide transcripts in pinyin or characters to follow along
• Provide review tools to let students review the vocabulary, grammar and characters taught in each lesson

The course has gotten great feedback over the years, but we are not done yet. Expect to see more tools added in coming months to improve your learning experience. Stay tuned!

All this experience in lining up though has paid off for them. The line ups for getting on the Taipei MRT transit system are some of the most orderly that I’ve found anywhere in the world. Lines are marked on the ground where people should stand. What a difference it makes during rush hour to have people be able to step off the train in an orderly fashion, while new passengers patiently wait their turn without blocking them. It results in a very efficient system of moving mass throngs of people from one train to another.

Despite all the places that I’m used to lining up at,  I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how many places use ticket systems to avoid line-ups. Banks, mall food courts, utility companies, hospitals etc. all provide seating while you wait for your number to be called. While you wait, you can kill time by watching headlines from the local news on a nearby television.

As I grew up in Canada, I got to know a lot of immigrants who moved from non English speaking countries. When they first arrived, they could barely say a word in English. However a year or two later, they could converse in English with no problem.

When I first arrived in Taiwan, I assumed the same thing would happen here. Sure, I couldn’t speak any Chinese when I got here, but give me a year or two and I’d be fluent! However, after a year or two, I came to the realization that I could still barely speak any Chinese. Why was that? Was I that bad at learning the language?

The truth was, I hadn’t put much effort into learning the language. Why would I need to? I live in Taiwan! I hear Chinese all around me, and see Chinese characters where I look. So what was the problem?

The problem, it turns out, came from the characters. When people learn English for the first time, they usually start with the alphabet, then work their way up from there. When learning Chinese though, many students (myself included) skip learning characters, as they are too complicated. Instead, we focus just on listening and speaking – using pinyin as our writing system. What’s wrong with that?

Back to how people learn English – a lot of the learning comes from reading. When we hear this, we assume they are learning from reading children’s storybooks, but this is only a part of the learning. A bigger part of learning comes from being out on the streets in an English environment.

Imagine that you’re just learning how to speak English and you see the picture to your left, in front of you.

You know it’s a bank, because of the ATM in front of it, and you see the word “bank” on top. You’ll start to recognize this word, as you’ll see it on every bank that you see. So eventually your brain will recognize this word as meaning bank, even though you may not have consciously taken note of it. If you’re really eager, since you’ve learned the alphabet, you might even try to pronounce “b-a-n-k” in your head, so that you can reproduce this word in the future, should you ever need it.

Now extend this type of experiential learning throughout your daily life in a new country and you can see how you can quickly learn the language just by reading the titles of all the objects and places you’re interacting with regularly.

Now compare this with trying to learn Chinese in a similar manner. You see a bank in front of you and recognize it as a bank (after all it’s the same Citibank you’re familiar with) and try to associate it with the equivalent word in Chinese, but this is what you see instead.

Since you haven’t learned any characters, it takes a lot more effort to recognize that 銀行 refers to the word “bank” in Chinese. Even if you could recognize those characters, it would be a lot harder to reproduce this later on, since you won’t know how it’s pronounced. As a result, in most cases, the brain just ignores what it can’t understand.

This results in a lot of wasted learning opportunities with all the signs in Chinese we see in front of us on a daily basis. Imagine how fast your Chinese would improve if you could read each sign and figure out what it was referring to. That’s the edge most people are missing.

So what’s the solution? Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as just learning the Chinese alphabet first, since there isn’t one. Instead you have to go through the process of learning each character, one at a time, and hopefully maintain your character recognition skills with the vocabulary you’re learning.

The current CLO course has an emphasis on listening, leaving you to learn the character portion on your own, using the available transcripts. For those interested in emphasizing characters more though, I’ve recently begun work on a new course, that is based around the same CLO course material, but with an emphasis on reading and typing Chinese. Create a free account and try it out today!

Watching TV or movies in Chinese is a great way to improve your Chinese, as it teaches you skills you may not normally pick up from traditional books and CDs. If original Chinese shows and movies are too difficult for you, you can start off with Western shows / movies that are dubbed into Chinese, and work your way up from there. DVDs are a great choice for this activity, since they give you the option to control what subtitles you see.

Most Chinese TV / movies are shown with Chinese subtitles. This is obviously a great way to practice your reading since you can try and follow along with the speakers as the subtitles roll by. Don’t worry if you can’t pick out every character – you’ll get better with practice. Your brain will also learn to speed up over time, and you’ll be surprised with what you can read in the future, if you do this regularly.

Once you get really good, you’ll find yourself reading the subtitles faster than the speaker, than using the speaker to check if you got it right. Another option would be to watch the movie with a pause button – giving you time to read as much of the subtitles first, before unpausing it to see if you got it right.

For a different challenge, you can try watching Chinese content with English subtitles. This way your focus can be on the translation of what the speaker is saying. Don’t worry if the content goes by faster than you can process it. You can always repeat it later, to enhance your comprehension.

The trick is to find material that is slightly ahead of what your brain can normally comprehend. If it’s too complicated, your brain will tune out completely, whereas if it’s too easy then there’s no learning involved.

Apart from reading and listening comprehension, there are other benefits that also come from watching this type of content:

1. Learning interjection particles and when to use them – basically the Chinese versions of “Ooh, wow, huh, ugh” etc. Watch enough content and you’ll find yourself subconsciously spouting out the same particles. That’s when you’ll know that you’ve crossed to the next level!
2. Learning about Chinese culture – the shows and movies will showcase a variety of contexts such as parties, weddings, funerals and festivities where you’ll get to see how people participate and what types of things go on.
3. Learning emotions – how do Chinese people react when they are angry, sad, excited, confused etc. What kinds of words and phrases do they use in these contexts?

The beauty of learning from this format is that many of the above points will be taught to you passively, so you can focus on enjoying the content, even though you’re learning so much on the side!

One way to tell if you are mastering fluency in a language is how well you know the various exclamation particles used in the language, and more importantly whether you can reproduce them when the context is right.

The CLO podcast uses a lot of the particles you’ll see below in the various dialogues throughout the course. Here is a list of the more common ones – some sound and behave very similarly to their English counterparts. Others have similar behavior but with a different sound. Take a look below.

哈哈 / hāhā – Haha

哇 / wā – Wow

啊 / ā – Ah

嘿 / hēi – Hey

哦 / ó – Oh?

嗯 / ēn – Mmn (indicating acknowledgement).

唉 / āi – Indicates surprise

咦 / yí – Also indicates surprise

Since a lot of communication these days takes place on forums and social networking sites like Facebook, it’s common to see these characters sprinkled throughout. You can identify them by the 口 radical they all share.