6 Common Mistakes People Make when learning Chinese

Learning a second language comes with advantages. It can assist you to boost your business, as you have the opportunity to meet new people and extend your customer base. At a similar time, it has positive advantages on yourself because it enhances your memory capacity and decision-making abilities.

The mandarin language is a difficult language to learn, particularly if you’ve not lived in Asia for some time. There’re common mistakes every learner does when learning the Chinese language, a complicated language with many characters.

But becoming aware of the most common mistakes every learner makes while learning mandarin can help you avoid them and become fluent in the Chinese language.

1, No focus on the Chinese Tones 

Mandarin is a tonal language and if you mess up the Chinese tone, you might sound like you’re saying an entirely different word. There’re 4 different tones and every tone has a different meaning, if you speak mandarin without the right tones you might as well be half deaf and dumb.

Some words in Chinese share a similar Pinyin and tone, making the capability to distinguish what every character means extremely important. For instance “MA 妈 (mā), 麻 (má), 马 (mǎ), 骂 (mà).

Somebody who’s not well versed in recognizing and knowing mandarin characters has difficulty in selecting them to use. Misuse of Chinese characters not only makes sentences nonsensical but also shows fundamental mistakes in your understanding of Chinese and what meaning any character holds.

Several beginner Chinese learners find the tones hard, they try to ignore them, and some learners say he or she did not know the Chinese tone. This is similar to learning the English language but pronouncing every vowel as the letter “a” exactly, that das nat Maka Sansa. You’ve to recognize that the 4 Chinese tones are a vital part of the mandarin language.

I suggested every Chinese learner take more time to focus on practicing them and trying to get them right wherever you learn or say something in Chinese. Even if it’s harder at the starting, or you speak slower, the effort it takes to get things current and get into a fine habit is truly worth it!

2, Neglecting to learn mandarin characters 

One of the most complicated aspects of the mandarin language is without a doubt its writing method. Learning how to write and read Chinese characters is a tough job that can discourage several learners. Several learners who’re anxious to learn mandarin as fast as possible decide to put aside studying writing to focus on understanding how to speak mandarin through Pinyin.

There’s no doubt that learning mandarin exclusively via Pinyin is the most common error committed by people when starting to learn the mandarin language. Aware of this mistake, over the past years, several miraculous mandarin courses based on this law have appeared, promoting it as a simple way to learn mandarin in few months. 

Nonetheless in mandarin, just like any other, there’re no shortcuts, some methods of learning Chinese are indeed more effective than others, but learning mandarin only via Pinyin is surely not the ideal way to go.

When Pinyin is very helpful in the starting, its issue resides in the phonetics of Chinese. As opposed to in Western languages, the words are fairly short in mandarin and there’re relatively some people's possible sounds (somewhat more than four hundred syllables). Combine this with the reason in the starting, the majority of learners have trouble differentiating certain sounds and above all the Chinese tones, it is extremely common for learners to rapidly feel like all sounds the same.

The basic unit of mandarin is the character, which represents meaning and not sounds. It is extremely common to run into characters with extremely different meanings with rightly the similar sound. Moreover, the formation of new concepts is carried out by combining Chinese characters. In other words, the basic logic of mandarin is found in characters and not in the sound.

As opposed to small kids who learn via imitation, we adults mainly learn via association, in other meaning, by using our logic. That means that if you overlook the main unit of the language (character), it’ll be impossible for you to understand via association and you’ll have to limit yourself to imitation, which is very hard for adult learners.

To put things easy, people who device to not learn writing make much quickly initial progress by omitting one of the hardest parts. Though, their learning rapidly comes to a standstill as learning new words becomes harder every day. Several words appear to be similar and meaningless.

On the contrary for learners who include Chinese characters in their learning program, their first progress is slow, tedious, and very times frustrating. Nonetheless, their learning progressively accelerates, and incorporating new words becomes increasingly simple.

If you want to understand Mandarin and not a couple of sentences to survive, you’ve no other option but to learn its writing as well.

3, Understanding the most commonly used 3000 Chinese characters 

One of the most common urban experts surrounding learning mandarin says that by learning the most commonly used 3000 Chinese characters, you can read almost 99 percent of texts in the Chinese language. it is true that the 3 thousand most common characters cover 99 percent of the text in mandarin. Nonetheless, knowing them is not a similar thing as being able to understand a Chinese text.

in modern mandarin, the majority of the words are formed of the union of at least 2 Chinese characters. While individual characters have a proper meaning in themselves, when they’re combined to make a word, their meaning, though, it tends to be related, is not forever simple to guess.

Basically, understanding the most common 3 thousand words, despite being a fine memorization a real challenge, is probably one of the most frustrating and inefficient ways to understand mandarin, as it would not let you speak or read. There’s numerous frequency of use lists based on words and not Chinese characters that are surely more useful.

4, Understanding Mandarin because it is the most spoken language on the planet 

Learning a new language takes a lot of time, effort, and continuous motivation over a long time, particularly if it is a language as different as mandarin. Because of this, before starting to learn a language, you’ve to be clear about the goal that you’re pursuing and make a detailed plan of how you’re going to reach this goal.

When learners come to the academy and ask me about mandarin lessons, the primary thing first thing that we tend to the task is why we want to learn the Chinese language. An answer that I commonly receive is, I want to learn mandarin because it is the most spoken language on the planet. When I hear this, I normally tell them how much effort and time they’ll have to dedicate to learning mandarin if they want to be able to efficiently communicate. Most of them never come back.

This learner profile is the major target of miracle courses, as in my opinion, they do not have the adequate motivation to understand the language. Their attention is mainly the outcome of a passing trend that has been bought into the spotlight by Chinese economic strength. Because of this, the single thing that they’re looking for is for somebody to tell them that they can learn a mandarin language without putting in an effort.

It’s vital that before learning mandarin, you ask yourself what you want to do and what you’ll achieve by doing so. The more specific your targets, the easier it’ll be to keep up your motivation over time. Below I give some useful instances of concentrate targets:

• Learning a mandarin language to be able to communicate with suppliers or clients from the country and by doing so improving your work prospects 
• Learning the Chinese language because you have a partner or family member from the country and want to demonstrate your attention to their language and culture
• Learning Chinese to go to Chine to a master’s degree or an exchange during the following year.

Like these, there’re tons of great reasons to learn mandarin, but learning must be highly motivated and contain a reward for the effort made. If you are not going to use the language at all, what main point is there in learning Chinese?

Learning mandarin is much more than learning a language, it is a doorway to knowing a thousand-year-old culture and society that at times is not as different as we might think it’s. Making yourself the habit of learning and giving yourself the correct motivation will be your finest ally in overcoming the numerous hurdles and frustrations that you’ll encounter.

5, Putting a lot of effort into grammar and pronunciation

Do not get me wrong – pronunciation and grammar are extremely vital in Mandarin, but they are not all. Pronunciation and tones in Chinese tend to be a headache for several Chinese learners. Pronunciation mistakes can be one of the main barriers to being understood by a native Chinese speaker. In addition, for several learners, mandarin grammatical structures appear very confusing and unnatural to them, because they’re very different from those of their native language.

Because of this, it is common for students to end up speaking endlessly in a zealous try to pronounce every tone rightly and to lace each word in its right place. The issues with this attitude are that the student listening ends up not learning anything.

Mandarin is a language in which the contact where a character is pronounced is vital for understanding its proper meaning. When speech is not fluid, in addition to becoming clear for the listens, the context of the line is also lost. The issue is that if the listener loses the actual context, they would not understand anything.

Forget about speaking righty, as a non-native Chinese speaker, you cannot set your sights on impeccable pronunciation and not making any grammar errors. Improving the fluidity of your speaking will surely give you a better outcome than avoiding a couple of errors. Remember that what is important is communicating.

6, Believing that you have learned other languages, and you understand how to learn Mandarin

Something that I often run into people who want to study mandarin and the primary thing that they say is that they already learn and speak a couple of languages.

People who already an expert in multiple western languages mistakenly believe that they can apply their skill and experience with the mandarin language. While it is true that they’re at a benefit compared to a monolingual person, as they already understand the efforts implied by learning multiple languages, it is also true that they’re more likely to commit errors in the learning procedure.

Despite coming from various linguistic branches, Western languages have general roots and have influenced one another a best deal over history. This makes it so that their logic and beyond every grammatical framework are very same. The origins of mandarin and other Asian languages are extremely same. The origins of mandarin and other Asian languages are distant from that of Western languages, because of that it is a mistake to reach them with the similar logic as in learning much more same languages.

The common issue among learners who speak multiple languages is that they try to apply their structure to the mandarin language, and over time become frustrated. In the last, they had up said that mandarin is illogical and impossible to understand. 

Mandarin has its logic that’s simply very different from yours, because of which is the best thing to do is to forget all you think you understand and to try to completely submerge yourself in a different method of communicating.

Bottom line 

When starting to learn the Mandarin language that’s different from your skills, like mandarin, it’s helpful to completely forget all the logic, spelling, and grammar principles. It’s vital to learn mandarin not only from the phonetic point of view but focus on characters and mandarin writing too. After you discover and understand its mysteries, it’ll be simple to continue the learning procedure. Set yourself, specific aims to help you maintain your motivation level high, and understanding mandarin will be easier than ever.