Hello, everyone! Today we're going to do something a little different. I'm going to talk about learning Chinese
How I learned Chinese; I'm going to show you a book that I used,
show an old video and do some other things and talk about how I learned this crazy language here in China. When I first moved to
China
in 2011, smartphones were just then kind of becoming the thing to have and a lot of people were starting to get smartphones,
but at the time there weren't all the apps that
People had to study like there are so many apps and so many tools that people can use now to study
But I didn't have those at the time. And also to cap that off,
I was at a university where there were no other foreign students.
I was the one and only foreign student so I didn't have a lot of people to
Bounce ideas off of or to swap notes with or things like that
It was just ME! My classes were one on one and I remember in particular my Chinese writing teacher
didn't really speak any English. Which was SUPER awkward and
It was a really interesting time. And when I first started studying, I was in this little classroom
With few seats it was just me and my teacher one-on-one and I had a few different classes
I had a comprehensive Chinese class, I had a listening class,
I had a culture class, and I had a writing class. So I had four Chinese classes all going on at the same time,
one-on-one... it was rough.
You know? Some of the textbooks were
Pretty foreigner friendly. They got them from like Beijing University Press and they were made for foreigners learning
Chinese at my level which was pretty much non-existent.
Like, I could read a few things like I could maybe recognize like a hundred characters and
read pinyin, but that's about it.
I couldn't really have conversations or any of that. Those classes were all good in one way or another. My listening class was great,
I learned how to focus on tones in my writing class. I learned kind of the structure of Chinese characters,
My comprehensive class was great for my speaking and well,
They're all good, but none of them were as good as my Chinese culture class
And I'll tell you why. It wasn't because I learned about Chinese culture.
I mean, that was all fine and everything,
But it was because that class kicked my ASS
With this book right here that I've still got, actually, it's
中国丈化面面观 (zhong guo zhang hua mianmianguan)
So "The Ins and Outs of Chinese Culture," and this book
This is a book for Chinese learners. Yes, it's not
It is a book for Chinese learners. Yes...
But the thing is it's not a book you give to someone who's just starting out. My Chinese culture teacher just said "Hey,
here's this book study it," you know
Okay, so I opened the book, and let me just show you... and it's just like this!
It's just it's all Chinese. It's all Chinese right there. There's no pinyin to help out
There's no tone marks or none of that!
None of that to help you out!
So imagine being a foreigner who'd just come to China, and your teacher gives you a book and says, okay study
This we'll do this on Monday. You know it's Friday,
So I've got about a couple days to to read over through this.
There are a few vocabulary words here, but you know if you've just starting off studying Chinese,
It's not helping much because you're not going to understand really any of that.
So like this one right here, this text is about
Ancient novels. Okay, it's about ancient novels >_<
okay, which obviously I'm not going to know any of that.
and some of the ones before it are
on
Topics that I really don't know much about now. This is about
Discussing ancient poetry, you know I can't even do that now. I don't know what you about ancient poetry now
And this is six, you know six years on, when I first started studying Chinese. My book was covered in
marks; it was covered in me trying to cheat the system. I wrote in Pinyin or I wrote in tone marks
or I wrote in English or something. Because, you know I had to do one of these chapters every
couple days
And I really had my work cut out for me. By nature of this I
Learned Chinese very, very, quickly. I learned Chinese so fast because of this I had to learn
About Chinese food. I had to learn about Chinese Maricopa customs. I learned about the Chinese minorities,
I learned about so many different aspects of Chinese culture which was great, but I also was able to learn
So many vocabulary words like that. I was probably learning
between 30 to 60 new words a day
Just with this book. Not to mention my other books. It was a super long and drawn-out process
Because I didn't have a smartphone
So I looked it up in a paper
dictionary. I looked it up by the radicals and by the number of strokes which people don't even know how to do anymore and
I looked every single word up in a physical dictionary and that took so long so just for this class
I studied six days a week probably
in total with all my study
I've studied at LEAST ten hours a day. At the very least I studied 10 hours a day because I was so
Over my head with everything, because you know, I was the first and only foreign student at the university. The university
Didn't really know how to deal with foreigners, so they just said
Here's some stuff and was ridiculous. It was a pretty hardcore semester at the same time. I'm trying to write my senior thesis, which
required me to go to the libraries and read books-- read history books in Chinese and
Translating all this other stuff had to go through interviews ugh. It was a lot. It was a lot of work
So all of that, I studied at least 10 hours a day
Probably more actually, I did that for about four months
That was all that I did, was study and then after about those four months
I wanted to have a social life and able to go out, and do stuff, and explore, and all that
Just nuts mad nuts. That's how I learned Chinese. I basically just
went crazy for a few months and
and
LEARNED. It's great now because I can actually look at this book
I can look at this book and go you know all these years later
I actually understand this. Like I could just pick it up and casually read it.
even the chapters that I never looked at
When I was in school. Like I can just pick this up and look at it. Okay,
(talking in Chinese) so this one is about calligraphy. I can just pick it up and I can read it
Which is wonderful. This one's about Beijing opera
It's fantastic
Crosstalk yeah, so it's fantastic. I can visibly see my progress
but,
You guys don't have to learn the way I learned
If you want to that's fine, no problem, but I'm going to be releasing a few videos over the next
Over this month talking about studying Chinese and talking about apps you can use and things like that
So be on the look out. I think that's about it.
So thank you all very much for watching. Feel free to like and subscribe and all that kind of stuff.
I'm trying to make a video EVERY day at this point! We'll see, we'll see
If you've got any advice for learning Chinese, please, please, leave a comment. Thanks a lot. See you all next time~