Hello & 您好!
我的名字叫西蒙. 我从今年2月在学习过中文.
*Note: I will only write in Chinese characters that I know or recognise from reading and writing or if I can speak the sentences into voice -> character transcript software. Nothing is translated from English - Chinese, so at the moment my Chinese writing is fairly limited. However, if there are any mistakes, please let me know so I can continue to learn! :)
Exactly 4 months ago I decided to embark on a journey to become fluent in mandarin Chinese. Instantly after making this decision, I realised just how ridiculous the idea was.
ME? A native English speaker, talking fluent Chinese? Nah.
Unfortunately for my housemates, I quickly overcame those doubts, and began filling the house with orange lanterns, Sichuan peppercorns and a daily dose of Michael Wong's - Tong Hua on repeat whilst in the shower. But this wasn't enough to turn my first steps in to leaps in what I imagined would be a metaphorical 8,000,000 mile journey. I realised if I really wanted to learn this, I would probably have to do some deeper digging.
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Here's the first book I ever read printed in Mandarin - if you'd like your own copy, visit any Sydney International Airport and pick one up, free of charge!
So, with my self defeatist attitude put to one side, I scoured the internet in search of just how difficult this adventure would be, and after minutes of research about the differences between native English and Mandarin Chinese, I found that basically, it boils down to this:
- Mandarin is a tonal language, English is not.
- Mandarin has a character based system, as opposed to an alphabet.
- The pronunciation is incredibly difficult for non-native speakers.
- The grammar is quite complex.
Reading these points alone made it incredibly easy to take a pass and instead use the time to kick back and watch every series of New Girl back-to-back on repeat. However, after having been there, done that I had nothing to fall back on, and instead dived headfirst into a mass of youtube videos.
(*Spoiler - I'll touch on all four of these point in a future post, turns out things weren't quite as complex as originally suggested!)
Unfortunately, I didn't learn a lot from this style of learning platform. But fast forward a couple of weeks and it turns out the the algorithm for facebook ad's had amassed enough data to start recommending me courses in Mandarin Chinese (God bless you Mark Zuckerburg). I skimmed through all of them, but then one caught my eye...
There, glowing like the Dalai Lama himself, was Luke Neale. Luke is one half of the founding members of Manderin Blueprint alongside Phil Crimmins. Both of these guys have uniquely interesting stories, but what really caught my eye was the video of Luke speaking in Mandarin and suggesting that fluent Mandarin could be learned within 6 months - I was skeptical, but hearing him speak more on how that could be achieved (with 8hrs+ study every day) seemed a lot more realistic than that courses offering fluency in 1 month with very little explanation on how.
So I went for it. I signed up.
Phil Crimmins & Luke Neale, both founding members and creators of the Mandarin Blueprint Method
This is the first online course I have ever paid for and taken. I would like to go into a little more detail about the Mandarin Blueprint Method in a future post, so for now I'll just tell you I'm still working my way through the HUGE amounts of content (7000+ videos) and resources these guys have to offer and I study 2-3 hours every day.
So far the learning experience has been somewhat challenging, but when I take a step back and think at christmas, I would not be able to recognise even 1 Chinese character. Compare that to now where I can read simple short sentences without the aid of pīnyīn, it's absolutely mind blowing.
I said when I began studying this there would be no time limit set to reach fluency so I have no idea how deep this rabbit hole will go. But one thing for sure is I get really excited when I wake up every morning and can look forward to learning new Chinese characters and words.
Feel free to follow me on this pathway, I would love to share my learned experiences so far, with anyone interested in Chinese culture or maybe even in learning the language, as well as searching for critical feedback from native speakers.
For now 保重 and thanks for reading!