How I study Chinese (part 1)

After quitting my job at the Embassy end of October last year, I have not been working. Naturally, this gives me a lot of time to study Chinese.

Over about 3 months, I estimate that I have spent 20-30 hours per week on Chinese. Taking an average of 25 hours per week, this adds up to about 300 hours, that's about 3% of the 10000 hours required to become an expert in a subject.


1. Reading
I read a lot right now. I still feel that my reading speed is rather low, but  over the last months, improvement has been rather encouraging.

Most of the time reading, I use texts produced by my reading tool (see last post). As I have a private tutor, I will rarely look up words. Instead, I will go through difficult parts of the texts together with my teacher. Especially when it comes to Chengyu (4-character proverbs), I feel that my level is rather low, and this is one  of the parts I have been concentrating on.

Last week, I spent some time before class to read the first two chapters of Yu Huas new book: China in ten words. I had it downloaded already, converted it with my reading tool, and started reading. The style of Yu Hua is easier than most other authors I have read lately, so I did not have to stop that much.

2. Listening and speaking
During my private lessons, I try to combine reading with listening and speaking. After finishing a text, we will go through the important words and passages. More importantly, we will also discuss major points of the text, starting from what happened in the story, and going further into the historical context and setting, moods etc.

My overall goal with this is to increase appreciation when reading. Another goal which is closely linked is to understand what constitutes a "good" text in Chinese. This includes aspects such as word choice, sentence structure and  flow.

Natually, I also want my spoken Chinese to sound natural, for example during interviews, but this is not so much of a problem. Chinese people have no problem understanding me, and it rarely happens that someone asks me again to repeat what I said. This seemed to happen more when I was speaking "Scandinavian" to Danish people in Denmark.

3. Presenting
I think this is part of the European scale on language acquisition as well. I would really like to improve my presentation skills, but I seem to be slightly too lazy to do any presenting.

So far, this goes into the listening and speaking part. Sometimes, in the first 15-30 minutes of a lesson, I will summarize something I have read, a topic I am interested in or some recent experience from China. I am not afraid of making mistakes when speaking Chinese (at least not anymore), even if I still make a lot of them. However, I am a believer of the school that uttering mostly correct sentences will improve language acquisition faster. So, usually I let me teacher correct me on a sentence level, so that it becomes something in between a presentation and a dialogue.

4. Writing (not by hand)
My goal when it comes to writing is to be able to write a coherent text, such as a blog post or a summary of a book/chapter or news article that I have read. Because the quality of my writing is not very good yet, I spend more time reading and hope that a larger vocabulary will improve my writing as well.

Lately, the only "longer" piece I have written in Chinese is a summary of Bi Feiyus Qingyi that I included in my last post.


This basically summararizes how I have been studyin lately. Next time, I'd like to go into a bit more detail on what I read.