I signed up for a spring semester Mandarin course at a university and have a month or so to spare before the course begins. I am willing to spend this time with private tuition but the money should be spent efficiently, meaning:-
The tutor’s prices should be fair. What are the ballpark figures for Mandarin tutor prices in the North, Center and South? How can I find a good teacher?
When the Spring semester starts, whatever I have learnt up to then should merge preferably seamlessly with the curriculum we will be taught. So I guess I should aim to complete, in this time, a HSK level or so under private tuition?
Do you recommend me asking the university’s Chinese course center to see if a teacher there is willing to teach me privately? I expect them to be more familiar with the syllabus and what are the more common beginner levels to reach, so that there will be a class at my level for me when the semester starts, and I won’t be put in a class that is too easy or advanced.
The tempo of the private lessons should be appropriate. Not too many so that I end up saturated, and not to few that I am not challenged. Please assume I am of average aptitude at picking up languages, although I am prepared to devote all my time to whatever work the teacher gives me to do. How many lessons a week should I do, and for how long?
How did you learn the language? I took a few lessons with simplified Chinese using the pinyin system abroad but do not remember much of it.
I want to learn the whole gamut of the language - reading, handwriting, typing, listening and speaking.
Well I’ve been ranting on this topic across Forumosa for a while now, to the point where I think I could make some serious money if I got in front of a camera and shouted about it on YouTube, so here are my replies:
Anywhere you look, the average has gone up in the past month or so from ~NT$650/hr for online now to more like ~NT$750/hr. Plenty of private companies are more in the ~NT$950-$1200 range. ICLP has private tutoring for NT$2,400/50 minute class, with a minimum of 20 class hours. If you go on Italki, there are plenty of people on there willing to take USD$10/hr (~NT$300)
As for how to find a good teacher, if you search anything related to “learning Chinese” on here, you will find a lot more about bad teachers than good ones.
If you know exactly what you need from your lessons and how you need to be taught to learn well, you want someone that has little to no experience. (think Italki “community tutors”) That way, you can present them with what you want to work on and guide them in how to teach you.
If you’re a total beginner, see if Terry Waltz is offering classes. If she isn’t, make sure you find someone that teachers you spoken language in a meaningful way before they start trying to get you to read and write. You will waste your time if you try doing all four skills from the very beginning. Chinese is not hard, but most teachers make it impossibly difficult by telling you that pinyin is a crutch, complaining about how your grammar structures sound too American, and that your tones are all wrong. Rather than address that by providing you with (aural) language needed to be able to produce accurate language, most teachers will tell it’s your fault, spend a lot of time explaining to you why you’re wrong (using English), and drill your language instead of giving you more opportunities to HEAR it. If your teacher focuses on inputting sufficient meaningful, spoken language before ever expecting output, you won’t have these problems.
Are you taking university classes in Chinese? If so, you’ll need to be at least at an HSK 4, if not 5 or even 6(+), to be able to read the texts in a university classroom. Being incredibly realistic with you, this cannot be accomplished in a month. If you have a teacher that actually teaches you in an effective way and really knows what they’re doing, and you read an enormous amount of texts on your own (that you can actually understand without looking up every other word), you might be able to read ~HSK 2 without too much difficulty in a month. But that would require a really competent teacher and a lot of well-implemented self-study on your own too.
If you’re taking Mandarin classes and you just have some time to burn, you’ll probably want to work through 當代中文 (A Course in Contemporary Chinese), as that’s the book that basically all the training centers use. They recently released their most recent version and each level from 1-3 is broken into three separate books (making them lots of money, but perhaps to make it more convenient for you to pop in at a higher or lower level?)
Most universities have Mandarin Centers (of various names). They will probably charge you ~NT$750/hr and the teacher will get a small fraction of that. Those teachers will probably be very familiar with the content of the Chinese textbooks and how to explain the grammar and use the vocabulary in them, but that’s very different from knowing how to teach it to you in a way that allows you to apply it in your daily life or actually acquire the language, which should be your goal. Probably anyone with 當代中文 (A Course in Contemporary Chinese) and Chinese proficiency can muddle their way through the first few chapters with you. How much of the language you will acquire will be entirely dependent on how much other input of the related language you get. As I have ranted many, many times on here, most Chinese programs involve you being handed a text that is way beyond your comprehension level and then expecting you to go and memorize all the stuff you didn’t comprehend by memorizing the vocabulary. This doesn’t work, but it’s “how it’s always been done”.
How much time you are willing to spend on Chinese is going to be up to you. Everyone is of “average” aptitude for learning a language, but if you’re being given texts that are too hard for you (more than one or two new words tops), you will think you’re an idiot while you struggle along. I find that 30 minutes daily of 1:1 class is my limit for time with a language teacher. I know I could last an hour or even do 4 hours of class a day, but at some point, diminishing returns kick in. This is especially true if you plan on doing any self-study. The more time you spend with a teacher being directed on what to do, the less time you have to explore the language on your own.
For learning on one’s own (assuming you don’t have a teacher who uses comprehensible input)
Step 1: listen to the audio recording (no text in front of you!) a few times
Step 2: listen to the audio recording while looking at the pinyin (only, no characters at this step)
Step 3: listen again, following along with the pinyin, at least 2 more times
Step 4: look up the meaning of the words you didn’t understand
Step 5: listen again, again following along with the pinyin, probably at least 5 more times.
Step 6: Find another text that has almost exactly the same content but slightly different and do the above again.
Step 7: Once you’re very familiar with the sounds of what you’ve heard from those texts, find a speaker of that language to practice only that language with
Step 8: Once that language is solidly in your brain, read the text with the characters. Do not look at the characters until you’ve made a solid sound-meaning association in your brain.
The above assumes you’re learning on your own and staring from basically zero. If you have a tutor, look up TPRS and teach your tutor how to “circle” for you. Have them ask you “yes/no”, “either/or”, and Wh+how questions about every line of text (in Chinese, obviously). Look up Terry Waltz and all her research on the topic for more information. I am excessively oversimplifying things with my above description.
Take it one step at a time. Learn to listen for understanding before speaking. Learn to speak before learning to read. Know the pinyin (because you followed along with it when you did your listening!) before you ever go near characters. Learn to read before learning to write.
If you take things in that order, you open yourself up to more opportunities than doing it in any other direction. Listening skills are necessary before you can develop speaking skills. The more you listen to the language, the better all the following skills will be. Having a sound-meaning association is necessary before you can connect the “scribbles” of Chinese characters to any meaning. Knowing what the characters look like is obviously needed before you can start to write them. And you can’t type Chinese if you don’t know the precise pinyin or zhuyin (there’s only one correct way to spell Chinese words in pinyin/zhuyin. If you’re off slightly, you won’t find the character you’re looking for.)
Wow, thank you for your comprehensive reply. I just wanted to clarify this:
I am planning on taking a Mandarin course at a university. I’ve now clarified this in my OP. So the other students there would be in a similar boat to myself, and the working assumption of the teachers would be that our Mandarin is a work in progress.
There is axiom I use in Language Teaching: fast is slow … slow is fast. Pace yourself appropriately so that the language stretches you but doesn’t frustrate you. And make sure to get outside the classroom to hear it used by people every day. Most students vastly overestimate what they can accomplish in one day but fail to understand the cumulative “snowball” effects of extended learning.
Great advice. I also do this, though my listening is by far my worst skill.
I don’t have any access to listening live to people, so I use youtubes, but have to slow them down if speaking at full speed and not teaching classes.
I’m also planning to go to a uni to study Mandarin. (next month in fact)
I’ve been on there online for 6 months so far.
My goodness, the teacher speaks fast on the latest semester
There are a number of (free) beginner Chinese podcasts if you just want to listen to material aimed at learners. Some have free transcripts in pinyin and characters. Chinesepod allows you to listen to all their lessons (after an ad) for free now (and then they charge USD$30/month if you want access to the other material). I saw a podcast that was “TPRS Chinese stories” or maybe “Chinese through comprehensible input for beginners”. If they really use Comprehensible Input, they’re going to be a great supplement to whatever class you’re taking. I didn’t listen to more than a few minutes of one, so I have no idea what the quality is.
If you’re on YouTube, there’s nothing stopping you from changing the playback speed.
There is a (very incorrect) assumption that, when learning a new language, you should hear it at the pace that native speakers speak at, from the beginning. And that is very untrue. As a native speaker of English talking to other English speakers, I say things like “Ahm gunna go-dothe store”. I actually had a student in TW ask me “what’s ‘ah-kah-nah’ mean?” because he heard me say “I’m gunna…” instead of “I am going to…” to the other adults so much. But when speaking directly to a learner, I would enunciate, speaking slowing and clearly (not too sllloooowwwwlllyyy though. That just makes me sound stupid) and make sure I use the words that are encountered in leveled reader books — “I’m going to the store” (or maybe even “I am going to the store”, if the child has only ever been to TW’s cram schools and never interacted with the English language outside of that.). It’s a lot easier to realize that “ah-gunna” = the spoken form of “I’m going to” than for a learner to hear “ah-ka-na” and have no way to realize that’s “I’m going to”, since it’s not written anywhere and they don’t encounter it in any of their readings.
If your teacher is speaking too fast, you can tell them to slow down. There is no reason to ever not understand your teacher in a language class, whether that’s due to speed or the words being used. That’s another favorite thing Chinese teachers do — make you “guess” what things mean “through context” when you don’t understand more than about 20% of what was just said. One more reason people think Chinese is “hard” to learn. No shit, the classes aren’t helpful.
I will reiterate over and over again that anything you interact with, whether that’s YouTube or textbooks or picture books or anything else: understand AT LEAST 95% of the language you are encountering. I have never seen a Chinese textbook that doesn’t have at least 30% new words in every single lesson and then basically never repeat most of those words again in the entire textbook. This is no good. You learn much faster when you take lots of text that you do understand mixed with a few new words here or there than you do when you take a tiny bit of text mixed with a LOT of words you don’t know.
The most efficient way to learn Chinese is to hire an articulate college student for 400 NT per hour to go around town with you and talk about anything and everything you encounter. Only one rule: no spoken English. Take plenteous notes and draw pictures galore. After all, that’s how you learned English.
The most efficient way is to hire an articulate student to go around and speak to you about everything you encounter and do…while also letting you know in English what things mean. Just because you learned a first language without any translation is no reason not to take advantage of that tool now. Saves loads of time and ensures accuracy. My advice would be to go to one of the interpreting schools and try to get one of their students. They’re conscientious about staying in whichever language they’re supposed to be, they’re accurate in translating, and they don’t have any illusions about “knowing how” to teach Mandarin, for the most part.
95% is no good.
For independent reading, 95% is too low a standard. You need 99% or so. I do a demonstration in workshops where there’s a reading with all English words, but the syntax is different and it includes one or two unknown words, and no one can work it out even though they know well over 95% of the words perfectly.
There’s also the idea of ‘proximal repetition’ for new items or words – you want to be bombarded with the new things when you first encounter them. If there are too many new things, that’s not possible. And in different contexts. Repeating the same darn thing doesn’t have the same effect and it doesn’t enlarge your proficiency.
You know better than I about learning/teaching languages but the “no spoken English” rule doesn’t preclude written English when you get stuck. Not hearing or speaking any English though is what worked best for me.
particularly the part about a teacher who will speak in front of you in place of correcting you. i had a teacher like that in a uni here and when i had to leave i tried my hardest to get private tutoring but he was just too busy. phenomenal teacher - not only the best language teacher i’ve ever had, but one of the best teachers i’ve had in general. he works at NSYSU btw
I didn’t speak English until I was three years old. I was playing in the dirt with my five-year-old sister when she said to me: “You’re stupid. You can’t even talk.”
My first words ever were “I can too. I just didn’t have anything to say.”
I remember her looking shocked and running in to tell our mom that “____ can talk!”
. I know you’re right (I read your book and also I’ve seen the 99% vs 95% vs 80% comprehension text examples), but I have to wonder: how do you get texts that are 99% comprehensible? Obviously Squid For Brains has materials if your teacher has properly used comprehensible input, and there are a few decent enough graded readers out there, but where does one go from there?
I’m reading Taiwan elementary school textbooks as reading material right now (for anyone who’s looking, 社會 (“society”, basically social studies) textbooks are basically the same sort of content that’s in a Chinese language textbook. 康軒 has an app that allows you to follow along with audio to the main text. 綜合活動 is also very life-relevant Chinese, but there’s no audio). But 99% comprehension seems impossible – I just randomly flipped to a more text-heavy page in one book with 117 characters of text. I counted 8 characters that I felt I had never seen before, which would mean 93% comprehension. But those characters are repeated a number of times on the following pages. And there are diagrams and other visual aids, since this is an elementary textbook and the concepts are being introduced to the target audience of the book for the first time. At what point does a learner need to accept that the Chinese language teaching/learning industry doesn’t have 99% comprehensible texts and just accept that some words will need to be looked up? Or is there a magical site that I don’t know about?
Anyone know how to program chatGPT to write a story only using a specific set of words/characters? (I’ve asked it to in a number of ways, but it promptly added more characters than the limits I attempted to place on it)
Yeah, that’s what I was finding too. I was thinking maybe there was specific code that might make it possible (as opposed to “write a story using only these words”), but my coding skills are limited pretty much to what I can do in excel.
A pity chatGPT can’t be more helpful with this. I feel like the very few good Chinese graded readers out there comes from the fact that a human has to write a story with a very specific limit to the characters that can be used. If there were a career that machines should be able to replace, it would be the one where you write stories within a tediously specific language framework. Some people might enjoy doing it, but I imagine it’s too much work for too little reward, given there are maybe a total of 20 Chinese graded readers (that are novel/novella lengths, I’m not talking about short texts, which also have their place). I haven’t seen much of anything come out since ~2014-2016, which seemed to be peak “Chinese graded readers will make you fluent without you even noticing” time.
At one point it suggested I provide it with a dataset of short Chinese Stories containing only the characters I wanted it to output. So it is potentially able to output stories containing only certain characters, but only if it were trained to do so first.
. I know you’re right (I read your book and also I’ve seen the 99% vs 95% vs 80% comprehension text examples), but I have to wonder: how do you get texts that are 99% comprehensible? Obviously Squid For Brains has materials if your teacher has properly used comprehensible input, and there are a few decent enough graded readers out there, but where does one go from there?
