I've been learning Chinese on and off for 8 years now. That's a while. Given that fact, you may wonder what I might have to say about it. After all, how did it take so long? I studied _on and off_ for that long but was only really dedicated for brief stints at various points, mostly the beginning. If you're native language isn't English this guide will not be totally applicable. # The Hard Parts As I said, Chinese _is_ hard, so let's start here and let's be more specific. Chinese is particularly hard for English speakers in a number of ways. ## Pronunciation 水餃 vs 睡覺 amirite? ### The tones Chinese is famous for this, and it is indeed difficult to grasp for people with no background in tonal languages. The good news is it is very learnable with practice, it just feels super foreign at first. Stringing together words into phrases and longer sentences is hard. Learning the "real tones" and not what they teach you in school is hard. Many teachers will exaggerate the tones to a comical degree. This is probably a good starting point, but not all teachers will move further to teach you the "real tones," the sounds spoken natively. Consider the example of hǎo (好 - good/yes). This word is extremely common, easily top 100 most common words, yet many students mispronounce it constantly. This is fine at first but one must improve in order to be taken seriously. This tone, the "up-down" third tone in Chinese is often mispronounced because the pronunciation taught in class is over exaggerated, ### The sounds ### The Feedback Loop This is hands down the hardest part in my opinion. But wait, the Chinese characters! Yes, we'll get there, but I would say pronounciation is _even harder_ than reading and writing chinese. Here's why: To get better at anything, you need a feedback loop. If you want to get better at basketball, you can shoot a basketball and see if it goes in or not. If your percentage goes up after trying a new technique you might be on to something. To get better at pronunciation you need feedback too, which means you need a human. Namely, you need access to a native speaker to correct your pronunciation when you're off. The standard move here is to start dating a native speaker. This really can work wonders, so if it's an option you should consider it. However, if you're not single, not interested, or not located somewhere with native speakers then you'll need another approach. This is why it's harder than learning to read and write—the feedback loop for reading and writing is just yourself and a book. Given enough time and diligence you _will_ master reading and writing if you want to. However, learning pronunciation is not merely a function of time but also of your access to native speakers who will correct you. Even if you have access to native speakers they might not want to correct you. I've seen this many times with people who took the aforementioned route of dating a native speaker. Their boyfriend/girlfriend had no interest in being a teacher, only in the romantic relationship, so their Chinese did not improve as a result. At this point you might be thinking "So what? This problem exists in every language." Fair point, perhaps in this regard Chinese is merely par for the course. ## Reading and Writing > [!important] What do I need to improve here? > > > > - Content, lots of it. I just need a variety and something I can just pick up and read. I'm thinking news for the constant stream that I can just read whenever time permits. Financial, business, tech, and maybe current affairs. > - A means of retaining new vocab. > > The reading will bolster my reading ability but also serve as the source of new vocab words. Still, if I don't review them I may not learn them. - [https://www.chinatimes.com/](https://www.chinatimes.com/?chdtv) - NYT has a Chinese version, and ~~some articles link to the English version.~~ They have dual language version! [https://cn.nytimes.com/technology/20201027/epoch-times-influence-falun-gong/zh-hant/dual/](https://cn.nytimes.com/technology/20201027/epoch-times-influence-falun-gong/zh-hant/dual/) - [https://tw.appledaily.com/realtime/international/](https://tw.appledaily.com/realtime/international/)