I have studied and taught Chinese in many different environments and observed many students trying to learn the language. There is a lot of individual variation in language learning, but some methods simply aren't very good. People who use these methods don't do so because they think it's the best way of learning, they often haven't thought about it or don't realise that there is a better way.

In this series of articles, I'm going to talk about some common learner errors and what you should do instead.


I will be as constructive as possible and the goal is to help you avoid the errors many others have made before you. Most learners find these things out for themselves at some point, but reading this will save you a lot of time and effort.

In this series:

1. Staying in the classroom
2. Aiming for 100%
3. Learning on your own
4. Failing to organise your learning
5. Not making learning communicative
6. Not enjoying yourself
7. Not knowing where you're going

Learning Mandarin through communication

If you learn Mandarin in a Chinese-speaking environment, it's hard to avoid communication even if you try to. You need to sustain yourself, be able to buy things you need and interact with the society in which you live. Typically, Chinese people don't speak English well enough to allow you to escape this.

Still, if you feel that you don't communicate enough, you can "force" yourself to integrate more with natives even if you don't feel brave enough to do so. Put yourself into situations where you have to communicate more, control the environment, not your behaviour.

You can do this by choosing to live where people don't speak much English or engaging in activities (sports, hobbies, and so on) where English isn't widely spoken. Naturally, you should avoid other expats as much as you can, so don't move to an area with high expat density and don't engage in too many activities where other expats gather.

Learning Mandarin in your home country

However, if you're studying Mandarin in your home country, the situation is completely different. It's perfectly possible to hide from real communication for a long time, perhaps even until you book your first flight to China.

Foreign language teaching is sometimes heavily focused on passive learning (reading and listening) or the more formal aspects of the language, such as grammar, vocabulary and character writing. If these are tested in the wrong way (and they often are), they don't really test your ability to use the language, but rather your knowledge about the language! It's not uncommon for people to study for several semesters without being able to converse in Chinese.

What is "real communication"?

All learners need real communication, but what does that mean? For instance, if you read a dialogue about a train ride in your textbook where you are ?? and your classmate is ??, isn't that communication?

No, it isn't. For real communication to take place, there has to be an information gap, meaning that the participants know different things, and that there is a point in talking about the difference. If you just read a dialogue, you're not trying to find or convey new information, you're just reading.

In contrast, if your friend has a complete time table in front of her and your goal is to ask questions to figure out which departure is most suitable for your planned trip, that's real communication. Your friend knows the time table, you know about your planned trip. You need to communicate to solve the problem of booking tickets for your trip.

Sadly, not all teachers will encourage this kind of learning, so you might have to do it yourself. Here are some examples of how you can turn your learning more communicative:

• Find a language exchange partner or just make friends with Chinese speakers where you live (or if this fails, look for them online). Conversing in Mandarin ensures that you practice both speaking and writing in a communicative way. It's not only more fun, it will enable you to learn much faster, too. I have written more about language exchanges here.
• Chat online to practice both reading and writing Chinese. This has a number of advantages, including bite-sized chunks of Chinese less likely to frustrate you and more like to make sense since you're chatting about things that matter to you with a real person caring about what you write. I have written more about chatting online in Chinese here.
• Use handwriting input on your smart phone. I have already written about the advantages of using your computer in Chinese, but the same can of course be said about a smart phone. It also has the added advantage that handwriting input is easy and nowadays also quite accurate. Can you imagine a better way of learning how to write characters than actually writing them because you need them?

There are of course more things you can do to turn language learning more communicative, but the discussion here should provide you with enough to get started. Whenever you find something boring or inefficient, stop for a moment and think about how you can make that part of learning Mandarin more communicative. That method is likely to be both more fun and more effective!