1 Year of Mandarin
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Hi! I’m A Tian (or 啊天ъ), a native English speaker from the US learning Russian and Mandarin. I switched to immersion methods for Russian around July 2020, and I "officially" started Mandarin on March 12, 2022. I'm roughly following the plans and advice given at Refold, a guide and community for learning languages. If you're not familiar with me or Refold, you might be interested in my previous posts.
As usual, I've copied my summary of the Refold methodology below.
About a month into starting up Russian again during the pandemic, I kept seeing Matt vs. Japan in my YouTube recommendations while watching Russian With Max's videos. “Who’s this self-important weeb who thinks he knows so much about language learning?” was a frequent thought I had. After watching a few of his videos, I felt a lot of his points made sense, and I began to follow Refold, a guide to learning languages through consuming media which Matt co-created.
You can read more on the Refold website at https://refold.la, but two core assumptions of the methodology (based on the theories of the linguist Stephen Krashen) are:
Subconsciously acquiring a language is different from consciously learning it—you can't get good at swimming just by reading about how to swim.
Language is acquired through comprehensible input—listening or reading to language that is slightly above our level. Corollary: grammar study, speaking, and writing do not contribute directly to language acquisition.
The core methods of Refold are:
Stage 1. Learn the sounds, writing system, and basic vocabulary (500-1,500 words) of your target language (TL). Skim through some basic grammar. Start consuming content in your TL.
Stage 2. Fully immerse in the language—listen to and read as much content by native speakers of the TL as possible. Look up grammar and vocab when you feel like it. The easier the content is, the more comprehensible input there will be to learn from, but enjoyment should take priority.
- Optionally, use the flashcard software Anki to supplement immersion with sentence mining—when you find a sentence in your immersion with only one unknown word or grammar concept, make a card for it with the text or audio on the front and the definition of the unknown word on the back. This helps keep your memory of that word or concept alive long enough for you to acquire it in your immersion.
Stage 3. Once you have very high listening comprehension of a particular domain of content for native speakers (e.g. sitcoms, true crime podcasts, or travel vlogs), work on outputting (writing and speaking) by immersing in everyday conversational content, writing small amounts each week, and polishing your pronunciation as you ease yourself into speaking with natives.
Stage 4. Once you’re comfortable outputting, work on other domains and more specific skills.
Numbers
Passive listening is counted as 1/3 in the total hours number.
1,300 hours seems like a lot, but it doesn't compare with my best Russian-learning year, so I'm a little bit disappointed. For a few months this year I was learning Russian at the same time or almost entirely focused on Russian while visiting Russian-speaking friends. On top of that, I frequently have dips in motivation or discipline and end up working on other hobbies or watching useless content in English. I think this stems partly from not really having any Chinese friends and not living alone anymore, but also I had forgotten how hard it is to stay enthusiastic in the long term when you feel like you're struggling to understand anything interesting.
Events, Tools, Thoughts
Reading Phase
I started ramping up my Chinese study again at the tail end of my extended stay with my Russian-speaking friends, Alex (from Kazakhstan) and Maria (from Ukraine). At first I was still just reading manhua (Chinese comics), but I found I was able to start reading the translated light novel series I had been looking forward to much sooner than what I'd been led to believe by Chinese Text Analyzer, a tool which calculates how many words in a book you know, which had me at around 80% words known. Finding word boundaries algorithmically is a challenging problem in Chinese, so it's not surprising that its estimates were unreliable. There were also a lot of proper nouns I happily skipped over or words made up of familiar characters that I understood through context.
I went very hard on reading, especially in October, where I was hitting almost 4 hours of reading a day--an all-time high for me in any language. I also bumped up my Anki to 25-30 cards/day, resulting 45-60 min of reviews each day.
I totally burnt out on the series I was reading, and wasn't able to finish it by the end of the year as I had hoped. I've also been leeching tons of the Anki cards I mined in that period. I don't regret taking the approach I did at this time; I just eventually felt like I needed to change things up.
Streamer Mode
Towards the end of November, I started getting itchy for anything other than reading. In the initial burnout phase, I ended up spending most of my time watching streams on Bilibili (essentially Chinese Youtube/Twitch). A lot of the time I'd scroll to the bottom of the listings for streamers with very few views and just try and chat with the them until I couldn't understand them anymore (which often was after their first or second reply). Bilibili has a very strict per-message character limit, which forced me to use Chinese if I wanted to write anything substantial, even to the rare few streamers I came across that knew a decent amount of English. I also chatted a bit with Chinese on other platforms, including Kook (a Discord clone which now requires a Chinese phone number🥲) and HelloTalk (a mobile app for language exchange), and it was a lot of fun actually using what I had learned for a while.
Some users on the Refold Discord server highly recommend transcribing (writing what you hear as accurately as you can) as a listening exercise, so for a few weeks I incorporated it into my routine--first learner podcasts, then mostly clips of vtubers I liked. The main benefit I found was that it actually forced me to pay attention--while normally I would be getting distracted by my phone or letting my mind wander. However, I also felt like I was wasting way too much time rewinding easy parts to get the exact wording, often running into sections I couldn't figure out no matter how hard I tried, or spending a lot of time checking my answers against the existing subs/transcripts, and it eventually stopped being fun, so I decided to drop it for now.
Around this time I finally gave ASBPlayer a shot, and it's become one of my favorite learning tools. It's a free browser video player and Chrome extension that lets you make Anki cards with audio and screenshots from subtitles from many streaming services or from local files, and using it in with combination with the Zhongzhong dictionary Chrome extension totally replaced Migaku (a paid service) for me. Migaku does keep track of known words and underlines unknowns in the content you're watching, but in every other respect I prefer ASBPlayer + Zhongzhong (or Yomichan).
I also started playing around with using Whisper, an AI model for transcribing audio, using this guide from a Refold Discord user. It creates surprisingly accurate subtitles for Chinese--not perfect, but definitely enough for me to use it for making Anki cards at my level since I could figure out most errors myself or compare them with hard subs. Often it even gave better results than the OCR tools I tried on hard subs. It made mining donghua much more convenient and also allowed me to mine let's plays and recordings of streams, which helped boost my gamer/conversational vocab a fair bit.
While searching for webnovels to read, I ended up taking my frustration out on a programming project, which I've called 乾坤袋 [Qian Kun Dai]. It consists of data I scraped on 30,000 webnovels/novels from several sources, including some difficulty metrics I calculated and tags that I harmonized. At the moment the results are just in a spreadsheet, and I have plans to expand on the project, but I hope somebody finds it useful in its current form.
#Rufest2023
I planned on visiting Alex and Maria again in February, so I prepared by cutting down my Chinese to just Anki reviews and a few minutes of reading and passive listening and catching up on all the Russian audiobooks, YouTube, and anime dubs I'd been missing out on for a week or so. I'd been mulling over the idea that I've been focusing too much on reading and growing my vocabulary throughout my language process and not enough on just listening, so I decided not to do any reading whatsoever.
For the last 5 months I had only been doing about 10 minutes of Russian each day, so I was surprised to find that my listening ability had not noticeably deteriorated. At some point in that period I gave up on doing Anki in Russian, and when I went through my backlog for fun, I did find that I had forgotten many uncommon words. I don't see this as a huge loss.
I came down with COVID halfway to Alex's house, so I ended up driving home and binging a ton of anime in Chinese for a couple weeks while I recovered before setting out again.
I often have thoughts bubble up in a mixture of Russian and Chinese, and I continued immersing in Chinese for the whole week I was at Alex's (although I did listen to the Russian Trash Taste Podcast dub on the way up), so I was worried I would feel a lot of interference while speaking. To my great relief this wasn't really the case, though--I felt like after a few seconds of hearing someone else speak Russian my brain switched over entirely.
牛角挂书，约法三章
After visiting Alex, I went to NYC to visit my office in person for the first time since going remote at the start of the pandemic. I didn't really look out for any language other than Russian in the Before Times, and I was absolutely astounded just how much Mandarin I heard at my workplace in the halls and cafeteria--I counted 17 speakers, 5 of which had desks within 30 feet of mine! It was also the only language other than English I heard while I was there. I brought up that I was learning with one coworker from China and had a good time chatting about Chines content we liked, his hometown, and Chinese-speaking places to visit.
I decided to extend my stay an extra week and move closer to Flushing, NY, site of one of the world's biggest Chinatowns. I had a blast just exploring the area--it was both jarring and magical when something I've only been experiencing through screens and headphones for 1,300 hours suddenly dominated my surroundings. I hit up a couple bookstores (highly recommend China Books!), went with a coworker to a hotpot restaurant for the first time, and walked around until my feet were screaming.
I also went with a friend to a language meetup where--although unfortunately no Russian speakers showed up and I didn't feel confident enough in my Chinese to use it--I spent a long time chatting with a Taiwanese guy about places to visit there and differences between Taiwan and Mainland China.
Although I used to consider myself a reader before all else, all this interaction with Chinese people added on to already growing motivation to focus on improving my listening ability and getting conversational. I've been hypothesizing that since understanding a language through listening relies on both top-down processes (such as knowing which words and phrases are most likely to come next) and bottom-up processes (such as identifying sounds), letting my top-down abilities dominate would give my brain less negative feedback to work with to improve my bottom-up abilities. In other words, if I already know what's being said due to context, my brain doesn't have to care as much about tones or nuances of pronunciation to recognize the words it's hearing, so it may develop its abilities to recognize those things more slowly. I also felt like I was accumulating a lot of vocab (read: Anki leeches) while reading that wasn't helping me understand conversational speech, and I very often fail to recognize a word in speech that I know in writing. Lastly, although it eventually went away, I often had the feeling while learning Russian that I had to mentally transcribe speech and read it in my head in order to understand it, which seemed slow and very unnatural, and to this day I still can't distinguish some sounds in Russian reliably even though I can produce them. I'm hoping if Chinese doesn't go better it at least won't go worse.
I really don't think having strong top-down abilities (which I mostly associate with people who read a lot) is a bad thing or that improvement in bottom-up abilities in their presence is completely impossible, and I'm not committed to the idea enough to go listening-only until fluency, but I'd like to see if I can give my tone recognition a boost and disassociate my knowledge of words from their written form a bit by dropping reading for at least a few hundred hours. I've recently been accumulating a bunch of novels, web novels, and visual novels I'm eager to read, so I definitely won't be able to hold back for long.
I had already mostly quit pure reading and making new Anki cards a couple months ago, and I recently dropped all subtitles too. I've made an effort to incorporate a lot more easy listening into my routine now, and I've seen a lot of people from the Refold community recommend crosstalk--conversations where each person speaks in their own native language.
I've always been extremely nervous during any one-on-one conversation, especially with tutors, and double especially in foreign languages, so I decided to just schedule 2 crosstalk sessions with tutors on iTalki (an online language tutoring platform) a day until that feeling backs away a bit. And so far they've gone great! I can't understand everything, but both me and the tutors have been pleasantly surprised by how much I understand at 1 year of study. It feels pretty powerful for learning, too, since the teacher can always adjust to my level, and I can always ask for explanations.
One thing another learner on the Refold server tried was watching shows and videos with a tutor, pausing for clarification or context and letting the tutor expand on that. When I've found tutors I'm comfortable with and I've formed more of a relationship with them that's something I'd like to give a shot, too, but for right now I think just the idea of crosstalk is already quite novel to most people--one of my sessions was mostly spent just arguing with the tutor about the validity of crosstalk over regular conversation practice.
Plans & Goals
- Get 300 more hours of pure listening before adding back in reading
- Crosstalk for 50 hours
- Make plans to visit Taiwan or China
Mandarin Content
Grammar & Pronunciation
I've been referring back to the Standard Chinese phonology article on Wikipedia a lot, but I haven't done much grammar. I skimmed through all the grammar points through B1 on the Chinese Grammar Wiki, and didn't find it that useful, although I kinda wish I had saved all the points that seemed hard to remember for later reference while outputting. I had plans to read all the B2 points, but it's very rare that I don't understand something in Chinese due to lack of grammar knowledge, so it just doesn't seem that helpful.
I do want to start working with a tutor on pronunciation and start chorusing in the next couple months, as I think I'm more eager to speak Chinese in real life than I was with Russian, which I was learning during the height of COVID.
Reading
Manhua
After being done with graded readers but before getting into books, I read a fair amount of manhua. The only series I finished was 今天的她也是如此可爱 [Jin Tian De Ta Ye Shi Ru Ci Ke Ai - She is Still Cute Today], a highschool GL romcom series. Despite putting the cast through very wide range of scenarios, I felt like the language used in it was pretty simple, and I can wholeheartedly recommend it. While the romance aspects or other emotional parts sometimes fell flat for me, many of the more comedic chapters had me in tears laughing.
Light Novels, Visual Novels, Web Novels, Novels
Most of my reading time was dominated by translations of a Japanese light novel series, and although I've started a ton I haven't actually managed to finish any original Chinese books. I've dropped probably 20 web novels (serialized amateur stories) in the first 5 chapters at this point, but I still have a couple I liked enough to want to finish when I get back to reading.
One visual novel (basically games that are 98% just reading) I made it pretty far into is WILL：美好世界 [WILL: A Wonderful World]. It's a collection of interrelated short stories where you need to swap the order of events in each story or swap the events between stories to progress. It gets very dark very often (otherwise why would you need to fix the stories?), so I can't recommend it to everyone, but it's been a fantastic experience so far for me. It's not super easy, but it works (sorta) with Textractor, a program for taking text out of games so that you can look up words and make Anki cards. I think overall visual novels are what I'm most excited about, as it's a medium I haven't spent much time with in English or Russian.
There are tons of regular published novels I'm excited about too, but they seem like the final boss in terms of their difficulty to entertainment ratio. Right now I'm about 1/4 of the way through 活着 [Huo Zhe - To Live] AKA every Chinese learner's first novel, and of course I've got the three real paper books I bought in NY staring at me from across the room now.
Listening
Learner Materials
I'm pretty happy to be free of graded readers, but I've kept coming back to TeaTime Chinese Podcast, Chinese Podcast With Shenglan, and Peppa Pig. All of them manage to be both comprehensible and at least relatively entertaining. There are a lot more episodes of Peppa on Bilibili than I've found on YouTube, and I'm currently planning to finish working through all of them without subtitles, then go through all episodes of Bluey, another children's show.
YouTube & Bilibili
For several weeks almost every day I watched 王志安 [Wang Zhi An], a former CCTV (China Central Television) journalist living in exile in Tokyo, usually sentence mining a bunch of words from his videos in ASBPlayer. He covers a ton of really interesting stories mostly concerning China and overseas Chinese, but was also one of the first Chinese journalists to visit Ukraine after Russia's invasion. It took a lot of effort to understand his videos, and a lot of the vocab I was mining was not very useful in other contexts, so I've put his channel on pause for now.
Most of what I've watched on Bilibili has of course been let's plays. I kinda exhausted my interest in travel videos while learning Russian, and videos on tabletop roleplaying games, coding, history, etc. still seem way too out of reach, so I don't know really what else to watch. Currently making it my mission to watch every Zelda game ever released.
Donghua, Anime, Shows
I watched tons of anime dubs, several donghua, and a couple dramas.
It seems like all the Studio Ghibli anime films got decent mainland dubs, so I've been going through the ones I hadn't seen before. Castle in the Sky was a standout hit for me--it's easily my favorite Ghibli movie now. Of the anime shows I watched, I especially enjoyed Girls' Last Tour--the dull, bleak post-apocalyptic setting is balanced by the protagonists' carefree and curious attitudes toward it, and it brought me an unexpected feeling of peace.
I still haven't gotten around to watching a lot of the really popular, highly-rated donghua--I still feel like if I watch them without 110% attention and tons of lookups I'll be wasting them--so at times I kinda felt like I was wading around in garbage. After sitting through a particularly bad show I caved and watched 风铃玉秀 [Feng Ling Yu Xiu - Soulmate Adventure], and as I expected it jumped straight to the top of my favorite donghua. For the first four episodes it was just an indie passion project with one episode coming out each year, and while the animation sags in some parts, much of the action looked incredible and very creative and fluid, the character designs are cool, the story is both straightforward and interesting, and of course the protagonists are adorable together--eagerly awaiting season 2!
Some other donghua that stood out to me were:
汉化日记 [Han Hua Ri Ji - God Troubles Me], a gut-busting slice-of-life comedy about a young office worker and her cat and smartphone which turn into gods. As much as I like the show, after 3 seasons I feel like they're starting to run out of ideas with the current cast and setup, so I'm hoping season 4 will shake things up a bit.
凸变英雄 LEAF [Tu Bian Ying Xiong LEAF - To Be Heroine], which had a lot of interesting genre-mixing concepts that it didn't quite manage to tie together, a super catchy ED, and a combination of some of the worst and best animation I've ever seen. Some fights were incredible, but some entire episodes were on par with the laziest 2000s Newgrounds Flash animations. This seems to happen in a lot of donghua, but this was easily the worst example of it for me.
无限少女48 [Wu Xian Shao Nv 48 - Infinite], an idol/CGDCT-ish (cute girls doing cute things) show featuring four girls from different worlds. It wasn't mindblowing, but it stood out as being one of the very few Chinese examples of those genres.
黑白无双 [Hei Bai Wu Shuang - The Unparalleled Black and White], a fantasy/action-ish show with some cool characters and worldbuilding based on Chinese mythology that I loved for the first several episodes, but the second and third seasons just felt like an extended trainwreck, and I totally lost track of the story threads. Lushu and Zhongkui were cool as heck though; they should have been the main characters.
It's been hard to find dramas that aren't historical or criminal (which I find too difficult) but still seem interesting to me, however 开端 [Kai Duan - Reset] was a wild but relatively comprehensible ride, and every Chinese person I've asked about it has heard of it. It's a timeloop mystery on a bus, and I don't want to spoil any more than that. A less popular show I enjoyed was 今天不是最后一天 [Jin Tian Bu Shi Zui Hou Yi Tian - Definitely Not Today], a dark comedy romance. It treats some dark stuff pretty lightly, so check the tags on MyDramaList before you watch if you think that might bother you.
VTubers
I of course watched quite a lot of Chinese vtubers (streamers/video makers that use a virtual avatar) over this period and wanted to mention some of my favorites so far:
Shourei小N [Shourei Xiao N]
Popular voice actor (over 1.5 million followers on Bilibili!) by day and vtuber by night, 小N is the voice of several Genshin Impact characters, Sombra in the Chinese version of Overwatch, and Anya in the mainland dub of Spy x Family. She's very bad at Valorant in a way I find fun to watch, and I quite like her huhhuhhuhhuh laugh and find her easier to understand than a lot of other streamers I've tried.
Most of her stream VODs aren't on her Bilibili page, but you can find them if you look around a bit on Bilibili or YouTube.
爱哥 [Ai Ge]
A separate Chinese vtuber who branched off popular Japanese vtuber Kizuna AI. Her voice was kinda grating to me at first, but she has mountains of hard-subbed videos with very diverse content, and it seems like her team is always on top of recent Chinese trends and memes. My favorite videos involve her being carted around on a tablet TV/screen due to the awkward contrast between peppy, ridiculous cartoon character and bemused real-life humans.
中单光一 [Zhongdan Guangyi]
Note: VirtuaReal members use Japanese names a lot of the time, but I've noticed that they tend to use the Mandarin readings when talking to each other, so that's what I'm using.
Guangyi is a member of Nijisanji's Chinese branch, VirtuaReal. I was super into Dota 2 for a long time, and Dota 2 streams, tournament watchalongs, and replay analysis make up like 75% of his content. He also occasionally streams videos or just chatting or shows up on other VirtuaReal members' channels. I quite like his voice and what style of humor I can detect with my limited Chinese.
惑姬Waku [Huoji Waku]
VirtuaReal member who occasionally streams games or sings, but mostly makes just chatting content, and I absolutely love her voice! She's done some book/essay readings on stream and like 4 episodes of a podcast that I've sentence mined the hell out of and listened to a dozen times by this point.
七海Nana7mi [Qihai Nana7mi]
VirtuaReal member and one of the most popular Chinese vtubers. Her voice is cute, there's memes about her I see throughout much of Bilibili, and she plays a lot of video games.
Qihai and XiaoN are both very active on Weibo (Chinese Twitter) and tend to post a lot of stuff from their daily lives that's easy to understand, so they've become my go-to immersion content while standing in line or waiting for my name to come up in meetings.
Russian Content
Outside of preparing to visit Alex, basically I just read the news whenever I felt like it, occasionally checked in on streamers I liked for a few minutes, and read and sometimes wrote comments on social media. During the couple weeks before my trip I mostly just caught up on anime I wanted to watch (Bocchi the Rock, Lycoris Recoil, and the Yuru Camp movie were all great) that didn't have a Chinese dub and YouTube channels I've mentioned on my blog before like Ирина Якутенко, Орк Подкастер, etc.
I did also read Мы [We] with the Refold Russian Discord, and while I always enjoy participating in book clubs and sharing an experience with other users, I didn't end up enjoying the book itself that much. The language was abstract and sometimes confusing, the world and much of the characters it described were deliberately dull, and I felt like other dystopian novels had better messages.
Thanks
Огромное спасибо and 多谢 [huge thanks] to my friends and the Refold Discord server communities for chatting with me, enduring my complaints, humoring my questions, and correcting my mistakes!
If you have any questions feel free to hit me up on the Refold Discord or in the comments on Reddit.