I should say up front that no technique I’m using is a magic bullet. I think pouring time into learning Mandarin is the most important factor. As Mike Munie told me, “If I had to pick one thing that helped me learn Mandarin, it would be the five years I spent studying it.”
1. Dianhua Dictionary
My favorite program. This online dictionary also allows you to search for words and quickly bookmark them for study later. Every week, I create a new folder of words and add new words as I learn them into the folder. It syncs between my phone and the website. For example, I take my computer into lessons with my Chinese tutor so when I learn new words, I can enter them directly into the Dianhua website. Later I study these words on my phone whenever I have a minute.
2. Google Translate
An obvious important tool. Any Chinese I don’t understand can be thrown in here, especially with the iPhone app. Sometimes I get a text message and I wonder, “is this from a pretty girl?”
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| The answer: No |
3. Google Pinyin
Google Pinyin is how everyone in China types. If you’re not familiar with Mandarin, Pinyin Romanization perfectly describes Chinese sounds, but that doesn’t mean you know what character to write. A sound can be related to a variety of characters.
Instead of selecting each character individually, Google Pinyin predicts which character you want to type based on context. Most people in my company setup their companies so they can switch between English and Chinese by hitting a rarely used hotkey like alt-shift. When they are in Chinese mode, they use Google Pinyin.
Google Pinyin is how everyone in China types. If you’re not familiar with Mandarin, Pinyin Romanization perfectly describes Chinese sounds, but that doesn’t mean you know what character to write. A sound can be related to a variety of characters.
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| Disclaimer: I'm not a linguist |
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| It kind of looks like this |
This program automatically translates highlighted Chinese characters. I use the CEDICT dictionary since it doesn’t need to access the internet to get its results (so it’s fast). I’ve only discovered how to use this program to translate individual words or phrases, not entire sentences. As a result, it's worse than Google Translate, but a lot easier to use since you just have to select some text. At the low level I know Chinese characters, translating word-by-word is still pretty useful for me.
And a final note
It’s now been over a year since I’ve been in Beijing. I’ve learned a lot of Mandarin, but I am definitely not fluent. My mood varies from being proud of the concentrated effort I’ve put into the language to extreme frustration. Sometimes, I’ll have a real conversation with words I just learned and tell some jokes, and it feels great. Other times, I ask someone what they did for the weekend, and they respond with something I haven’t learned yet and I feel right back to where I started.
I also realized that almost no matter what someone says about my Chinese level there’s a chance I’ll be frustrated. It sucks to be berated for not knowing Chinese better when I might have spent the day before studying after a long day at work. But it can be as frustrating when people compliment me over knowing extremely basic Chinese (like how to say hello), which I feel just cheapens any effort I’ve put in. Maybe I shouldn't let this bother me. But even though I know chocolate isn’t good for me, I eat it anyway since I’m human.
As much as I complain, though, learning Mandarin has been a fun challenge. I try to ruthlessly track down only the the most critical words I need to know (much to my tutor's dismay), and to find out why words are they way they are so I can better remember them ("aha! the word for "Train" is made up of "Fire" and "Car"). Mandarin is a language some say takes 4x the time for an English speaker to learn compared to more similar languages like French. I guess I couldn't have expected it to come easy.
