~2,000 Hours/~1.5 Years of Mandarin
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Welcome to A Tian's Language Blog, a place where I can procrastinate my language learning by writing about it, and you can procrastinate yours by reading about it!
I’m A Tian (or 啊天ъ), a native English speaker from the US learning Russian and Mandarin Chinese. 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
Here are my immersion and study totals, split by type of activity. Mixed is watching shows with Chinese subtitles. Listening is watching without subtitles. Passive listening is listening while walking, driving, and cleaning, and is counted as 1/3 in the total hours number.
Here's a fun little plot I forgot to include in my last post: my reading speed as it increased last year after starting my first books, a series of light novels translated from Japanese to Chinese. Each point is the average characters per minute read for a volume from the same series. Each volume had similar length and difficulty.
Events and Thoughts
好久不見，давно не виделись! [long time no see!] I had originally planned to post after visiting Taiwan or after hitting Refold stage 3, but I chickened out of the former, I feel like I'm pretty close to the latter, and I'm starting to forget everything I've been doing, so it's time for an update.
Listening Focus
I avoided reading as much as possible for the rest of April 2023 to focus on my listening. I did feel like I slowly and steadily improved, but it was a pretty brutal grind for me, especially since I was trying to focus on comprehensible content like Peppa Pig or learner podcasts. I continued crosstalking with tutors up to 17 hours total. Even though the sessions went very well and felt productive, the anxiety leading up to each one never felt like it lessened, and I decided I just didn't want to deal with the stress of constantly thinking about the next call looming ahead anymore.
In May I kept focusing on listening, but I ended up doing a fair amount of watching with subtitles. This was mostly because I was regularly watching shows with a friend, and I wanted to actually keep up with the plot. I also got back into sentence mining for this period, as before using ASBPlayer with Whisper-generated subtitles on donghua or streams, or from handmade subs on YouTube channels like 王局拍案 (independent news) and Leya蕾雅 (video game essays).
Return to Reading and The Big Slump
I went into June armed with a ton of webnovels and visual novels I was eager to read, and for a few couple weeks I went very hard at it. Unfortunately, due to health and other reasons, my discipline wavered and my motivation dipped to its lowest since I started, and for most of August, most of my immersion was just passively listening to Taiwanese vtuber streams for a couple hours each day. My Anki usage has been and remains sporadic--clearing my backlog once every several days, not learning many new cards. I did manage to do something every single day though, and I found my footing again in mid-September. I got excited about what I was reading again, and I also finally found the damn Mandarin dub of Spice & Wolf!
I started using Azure text-to-speech audio generated using this python script and audiobooks on Ximlaya while reading, and for slice-of-life content I found I was able to keep up with the pace of the audio most of the time. In particularly difficult passages, I could choose to pause and reread slowly or just let them go if I wasn't that interested.
It took a lot of the stress out of reading since I could just listen for tones instead of checking them in the dictionary constantly, it led me to do fewer unknown vocab lookups since pausing is annoying (which I see as a positive, as I tend to obsessively look up words no matter how rare or irrelevant to the story they are, which reduces my overall exposure to the language), and it allowed me to occasionally take my eyes off the page to rest them while letting the story continue to play.
Crossing the Strait
I finished my first ever Chinese-original book, a ~700k character web novel (WNs are novels that are serially published on internet platforms, usually by amateur authors, usually with very little editing and at a rapid pace), and it was around this time I decided to switch to focusing on Taiwanese Mandarin.
I had originally planned this switch anyway in order to prepare to visit Taiwan, but I couldn't get myself to do it until I suddenly came upon a huge burst a motivation: during my big slump I couldn't really bring myself to open Bilibili, so I stuck to YouTube, where a huge percentage of the content is by Taiwanese creators--understandable, since YouTube is blocked in China. I felt like in general the average video on YouTube was much more entertaining, or that at least YouTube's recommendation algorithm is better. I also found that there are a ton of Taiwanese vtubers relative to Taiwan's population on YouTube and Twitch, and they seemed more interesting on average than the mainlanders on Bilibili.
From my exposure to Taiwanese content over the past few months, Taiwanese culture feels a little more in touch with my own (English-speaking, American), which has positives and negatives. I can definitely say I find it slightly more comfortable. The person who originally got me interested in learning Chinese was Taiwanese-American, so I also feel like I'm coming full circle.
The difference between China's Standard Chinese and Taiwan's is not as big as I had worried--definitely smaller than between General American English and Received Pronunciation (standard British). I regularly notice small differences in consonants, vowels, tones, vocab, and grammar, but when I first started watching Taiwanese anime dubs or streamers I didn't feel like my comprehension was much worse than with mainland content. There are definitely heavier accents I really struggle to understand, but that's true of many people in China too.
Chinese languages are generally written with two sets of characters: traditional (e.g. in Taiwan or Hong Kong) or simplified (e.g. in China or Singapore). A majority of the characters between the sets are the same, and there are some regular correspondences in the differences between them, but there are still some that are completely different (compare 龙 vs. 龍).
I'd been told learning traditional after knowing simplified would be fairly easy, and while this is true, it wasn't quite as easy as I expected. I already had a little bit of exposure to trad from anime subtitles, and in this period I swapped all the content I could to traditional characters. It took free-flowing a few novels with audio, but I feel like I'm 90% as comfortable with traditional now as I am with simplified.
I still rely very heavily on context, audio, and just the general shapes of words rather than really knowing the details of each character, but this is true of my ability with simplified characters as well. It's frustrating at times because in unfamiliar contexts (new words, stuff from classical Chinese, abbreviated signage) I sometimes won't recognize a character I should know, but I know from other learners that things will continue to get better just by reading, and learning to write is also an option if it's still bothering me in the future.
My First Conversation!
Learning Russian, I was extremely reluctant to output, and I never really got to the point where I wasn't a nervous wreck every time I had to speak. I don't want to get "stuck" like that again, and living somewhat close to a large Chinatown I encounter Chinese so frequently IRL that I'd actually like to feel comfortable using it. I'm also interested in the idea floating around in some relatively recent linguistics papers that suggests output could improve the speed of acquisition, although I don't think the research has totally shaken out on that yet.
Up until now, the most I'd done was say a couple words to a Taiwanese guy I met, give the names of Chinese media to my crosstalk tutors, about 10 hours of writing, and about 5 hours of chorusing. Starting with my first couple hundred hours of Chinese, I have often had thoughts or just random words in Chinese bubble up and occasionally said them out loud to myself, but not really regularly or deliberately.
And finally a couple weeks ago, I had my first conversation in Chinese! Several months of nervous procrastination after I had planned to start speaking, I got over my anxiety and booked a 30-minute lesson with a tutor on iTalki, and it went really well! I definitely wasn't speaking perfectly, but we were able to conduct the whole lesson in Mandarin easily, and my teacher said many encouraging things about my grammar and tones.
Tones are critical in Chinese, and there are a lot of horror stories in the community about learners that failed to learn them and having to go back and relearn all their vocab and do drills and such, so I have almost always checked the reading of every word I have the slightest doubt about while reading books, while listening I try to pay attention to which tones I think should be used and what I'm actually hearing, and in Anki I fail cards if I remember the tones incorrectly.
I'm definitely nowhere near perfect--I distinctly remember saying 注音 [Taiwan's phonetic system] as zhu1yin1 and cringing to death when it was soon repeated back to me as zhu4yin1, and in my second lesson saying 沒事 mei1shi4 [there's nothing wrong] instead of 美食 mei3shi2 [fine food]--but I'm having much less trouble than I thought I would.
Each lesson so far I've done okay for the first 10-15 minutes but just absolutely crashed in the second half, struggling to remember words, feeling extremely tired, and coasting as much as I could on 對對對 [right] and 好 [okay]. For the near future, the plan is to do just a little bit of speaking each week, focusing on getting pronunciation down by chorusing, continuing to read about the language, and getting corrective feedback from native tutors. Once I feel like I've mostly got the sounds down, then I want to focus more on comfort and endurance over correctness by outputting every day and with different people.
Mandarin Content
Grammar & Pronunciation
As always I've been referring back to the Standard Chinese phonology article on Wikipedia, and more recently the Taiwanese Mandarin article for information on pronunciation differences between the standards.
I picked a language parent and started chorusing from clips of her a couple weeks ago, and I'm up to 5 hours now. I decided I'm not bothered by sounding feminine, so I went with a female streamer whose content and accent I like, and since my voice is deeper, I just chorus an octave lower.
Although from what I've heard Refold is moving away from the language parent concept, having one for Mandarin feels useful, particularly compared to Russian, as there's so much more variation in how Mandarin is spoken. It's nice to have one set of features to aim for.
In Taiwan, the Standard Chinese retroflex consonants (zh/sh/ch/r) are often pronounced instead as postalveolar or alveolar (more like English sh or s) depending on the speaker and context, and I found my language parent's way of saying them (pretty consistently postalveolar) much more comfortable as a native English speaker than Beijing-style retroflexes. Otherwise she speaks fairly standard Mandarin (e.g. doesn't often merge -en/-eng or -in/-ing), which I think will be useful for being understood by many people.
I think the only grammar study I did was some reading on Taiwanese Mandarin's modal particles. I don't think it really stuck, but I think I'm getting a feel for them through immersion.
Reading
I started several great manhua (Chinese comics) in this period, but the only one I've finished that also really stood out to me is Soulmate, a fairly short lesbian romance series, in which the protagonist switches bodies with her past self, and the story then follows both timelines as the main couple fall in love again in each. Can't recommend it enough!
I'm currently enjoying 我的食物看起來很可愛 [My Food Looks Very Cute], an urban fantasy lesbian romance/slice-of-life series with a vampire and a werewolf as the protagonists. I'd like to read some comics from Taiwan now and I have a couple in mind to try, but there are very few compared to China or Japan, and many of them aren't accessible on convenient platforms (i.e. the Android app Tachiyomi).
I started probably a dozen web novels and visual novels in this period before I finally finished my first and only novel I've read from China, 少女樂隊Legend [Girl Band Legend], a ~700k character web novel about five girls from China in their late teens through late twenties that form a rock band and have wacky adventures on their way to becoming the best band in the world. A lot of web novels I've tried have had super bland and samey characters, which made this stand out for having a large cast with distinct backgrounds, personalities, and mannerisms. Most of Legend was a really light and fun read--especially chapters dedicated to the rivalries between various bands in the series--that I always looked forward to, but be warned, the ending is very sad!
After finishing 少女樂隊Legend, I pivoted to traditional characters, and I've been trying to read only books written by Taiwanese authors or translated from other languages by Taiwanese publishers. My first were a series called 地府犯罪調查中心 [Underworld Crimes Investigation Center], an urban fantasy story with a fairly underdeveloped romance between the two female protagonists. I really didn't end up liking it despite finishing all 3 books--the stories were much more gruesome and violent than I was anticipating, most of the characters outside the protagonists were horrible people, and the investigation center aspect didn't feel like it got enough development. Often I felt like the protagonists were just randomly stumbling into horror movie plots. I did like that the second book included a lot of elements around indigenous Taiwanese, but I can't say how accurate they were.
The next book I read was 裏台北外送 [Inner Taipei Delivery], a comedic urban fantasy novel in which a woman fresh out of Taiwan's best university can't get a job with her anthropology degree and starts delivering for UberEats late at night--when all manner of ghosts, witches, and other magical beings place their orders. It features class-conscious zombies, cats marching for witches' familiars' rights, and a few figures from Taiwan's urban legends and local myths. I really enjoyed it, except for the weird and icky element of the 300-year-old vampire with the body of a 13-year-old (who at least also has an adult form). Some of the political aspects felt quite clunky as well. Overall it was super funny and a pretty easy read for my level, and it felt like it conveyed a lot of the thoughts and worries of young Taiwanese people and some of the atmosphere of Taipei (speaking as someone who hasn't been there).
I tried several web novels from Taiwanese platforms and haven't been able to get into any, so lately I've just been reading Japanese light novels from series that I already know I enjoy but never finished in Russian. I feel a little bit embarrassed that I haven't been reading more serious novels or news, but based on my experience with Russian, I think consuming lots of easy and fun trash will work out okay. Eventually my abilities in that language reached the point where articles and serious literature started to naturally become interesting, because I could better appreciate some of the nuances of the language and how the stories or information fit into the wider cultural background. With Chinese I'm often still flailing for the next thing that might hold my attention long enough for me to make progress.
Listening
Learner Materials
I'm basically done with them, what a relief! A few weeks after my last post in April, I finished all episodes of Chinese Podcast with Shenglan, including about half of the Patreon bonus episodes, cleared all 9 seasons of Peppa Pig, and watched a couple dozen more episodes of Bluey. I haven't felt much need to consume any learner or kids' content since. Watching Peppa again with a friend recently it was amazing to see how far I'd come--I remember how much of a struggle it was to understand anything when I started last year, at the time of my last post 8 months ago I could understand nearly everything but still needed to focus pretty hard and relied heavily on subtitles, and now I rarely miss anything without subs!
YouTube & Bilibili
As before, a ton of my diet has been let's plays and game streams. In addition to watching lots of the new Zelda and yet another Undertale playthrough, I also sentence mined/intensive-watched several TTRPG actual plays (people record themselves playing Dungeons & Dragons, Call of Cthulhu, etc.) from China's VirtuaReal vtuber organization using AI-generated subtitles. A friend also showed me there's generally just a ton of great Chinese content on YouTube, even from China where YouTube is blocked.
王局拍案 [Wang Ju Pai An], an independent news show by a blacklisted former CCTV journalist living in Japan has remained a staple for me. Leya蕾雅 is a recent favorite--she makes in-depth video game reviews and essays, and almost all of her newer content has soft subtitles. When I do fall into the English content trap, I often end up watching challenges and infodumps on the Pokemon game series, and I've recently noticed there are a lot of large channels in Chinese also dedicated to it, so I'm looking forward to exploring those more.
百靈果News [Bailingguo News] is a YouTube channel from Taiwan which has the popular KK Show podcast, where the two very funny hosts interview various interesting people and internet celebrities, usually in Chinese but sometimes in English. I've only seen a few episodes so far, but it seems to be a hit with the Refold Chinese server for good reason!
Movies and Shows
I watched a couple dramas from China, one from Taiwan, a couple movies, and a decent smattering of donghua and anime. 隐秘的角落 [The Bad Kids] is a popular Chinese crime drama, and while I felt like the acting and editing were really good, the story had some moments that didn't make sense to me, and it was overall much darker than what I usually like to watch. 喜歡一個人 [Pleasantly Surprised] is a random Taiwanese romcom set around a restaurant that I don't know how I got into and has pretty bad production and dumb writing, but somehow I really liked it, even as someone with little interest in cooking and not particularly fond of French cuisine.
霸王别姬 [Farewell My Concubine] is one of the most celebrated Chinese movies for good reason. It tells the story of two male opera actors from 1938 through 1977, with very clear gay themes and touching on a lot of China's troubled modern history. It's dark and tragic and was very hard for me to follow at times, but still a fantastic movie I look forward to rewatching.
In order to listen to a podcast discussing it, I also watched 宇宙探索编辑部 [Journey to the West] (terrible English title that will easily get mixed up with other movies, idk what they were thinking with this), a Chinese comedy/road movie with sci-fi elements about the editor of a sci-fi magazine on his deluded quest to rural China to find aliens. I loved the cinematic style, but it was very hard for me to follow at my level then. I also gave 臥虎藏龍 [Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon], a wuxia (Chinese martial arts fantasy) movie that was pretty popular in the US, a shot without knowing it actually wasn't much of a hit in China, but I still enjoyed it quite a bit, and it's made me look forward to getting more into wuxia novels as my Chinese improves. It was also a minor ego boost that I could hear how weird the lead actors sounded--neither of them are Mandarin speakers and from what I understand just learned their lines phonetically.
Some donghua that stood out to me were:
- 時光代理人 [Link Click], a time-traveling detective show with incredible production and a decent story that managed to find popularity even in the west. Of course it was great, and I still need to get around to watching the recently released season 2.
- 昨日青空 [Crystal Sky of Yesterday], a coming-of-age movie about Chinese high schoolers. It kinda felt like an imitation of many similar Japanese anime movies, but also like it was setting the stage for more unique, high-quality Chinese animation to come.
- 爱上她的理由 [The Girl Downstairs], a harem-ish romance story based on a Korean comic about a male college student whose neighbor turns out to be a former female idol. It was kinda fun rooting for the different pairings, the production was good, and the story was just so-so for me.
- 爱幽的密室 [Aiyou's Secret Room / X&Y], a mystery around an escape room with fantastic art and music that crashes and burns partway through. If you're interested in donghua as its own movement I would watch still recommend watching it, but the story itself isn't great.
- 降灵记 [Tales of Exorcism], a brash swordswoman in a wuxia setting wanders around doing exorcisms. Production-wise not the best, but still a fun adventure.
- 风灵玉秀 [Soulmate Adventure], a wuxia series and also China's sole girl's love/yuri/baihe exemplar, had its season 2, and while the production was excellent--we got many extra-long episodes with awesome fights, an amazing OP, and a super cute ED, but the story focused way too much on side characters, cut short interesting growth from the main trio, and reset some of the growth from season 1, so overall I was unsatisfied. It's still my favorite Chinese series, so I hope to see improvements in the next season, which unlike this season looks like it should be written by the original creator if it does happen.
I've also been having a lot of fun watching Japanese anime with friends--they watch in their language's dub, I watch in mine, and we all have fun and improve together. Most anime dubs are done by Taiwan, so they fit my accent goals, but there are increasingly more dubs from China, and they are of much higher quality. There isn't a huge selection compared to Russian either way (Russian has fandubs of almost every show and official dubs of many new shows), but Life with an Ordinary Guy Who Reincarnated into a Total Fantasy Knockout, a fantasy comedy, was definitely my favorite from what's available that I hadn't already seen before.
VTubers
I shifted hard from Chinese vtubers (streamers/video makers that use a virtual avatar) on Bilibili to Taiwanese vtubers on YouTube. There are an absolute ton to choose from on either platform, so regardless of which accent you're interested in you'll definitely find streamers you enjoy. I'll mention a couple of my favorites from Taiwan so far.
妮卡沃爾 [Nica Wolper]
Nica has a very clear accent, on top of being chatty while playing games and having a ton of 雜談 [just chatting] streams, so her content is very language-dense, and I enjoy having it on while I'm walking or driving. I really like her attitude and find her very funny and cute, and she talks a lot about Taiwan's culture and languages and its relationship to other countries.
I normally keep YouTube blocked on my phone so that I don't waste too much time on English content, so I downloaded all of her 雜談 streams as mp3s using yt-dlp, then added them as an audiobook in the Android app Smart Audiobook Player, and they've been my main source for passive listening lately. I'm over 100 hours in to the playlist, and it's been neat seeing how much my comprehension has grown over this time.
魔法布丁罐 [Magic Pudding Jar]
Buding happens to be friends with Nica and also happens to be into my favorite hobby outside languages, tabletop roleplaying games! She has several actual play streams of Call of Cthulhu, a TTRPG popular in Taiwan and Japan, which involve other Taiwanese vtubers. She also has some nice introductory videos on TTRPGs which were great for helping me explain them to my Chinese tutor, as well as the streamer staple chatting and video game streams.
Russian
I haven't been doing much Russian--still seeing a few Discord messages and memes each day at the very least, and before I was able to comfortably understand most of Nica's just chatting streams, I sometimes listened to Russian videos or audiobooks while walking or driving to at least not "waste" time on English entertainment. I had a couple conversations in this period and my speaking ability has noticeably deteriorated, particularly my active vocab and accent. I still feel pretty confident I could be in fighting shape within a couple weeks of focus like I had last February, and my listening and passive vocab still seem to be mostly there. I recently started listening to the audiobook of Dostoevsky's Записки из подполья [Notes from Underground] with some other members of the Refold Russian Discord server, and although it's definitely tough material, so far there aren't many words in it I don't know or remember and I feel like I can hear everything quite clearly.
Plans & Goals
- Get totally comfortable with zhuyin and traditional characters
- Continue chorusing every day
- Speak at least once a week
- Go to local Chinese cultural events and stores
- Read some "real" literature
- Make plans to visit Taiwan
Thanks
Огромное спасибо and 多謝 [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.