How to Learn Chinese Beyond Textbooks
How to learn Chinese beyond textbooks is a question many language learners grapple with as they navigate their Chinese language journey. While textbooks provide a structured approach, they often fall short in preparing students for real-world conversations and cultural nuances. To truly master Mandarin, it’s essential to explore diverse methods that engage with the language in practical, meaningful ways. Let’s discuss the limitations of traditional textbook learning and introduce effective strategies to enhance your Chinese language skills.
Problem: Lack of Reinforcement
A major issue with using textbooks that’s difficult to get around comes from the overall structure and approach that textbooks take when guiding learners through material. The main problem here arises from a lack of reinforcement or repetition of old material.
In order to maximize the amount of material that learners are exposed to, textbooks often center each new lesson around a completely different subject. This means that after memorizing a bunch of vocabulary about traveling or giving directions, the book might immediately pivot into ordering food or some other completely unrelated topic. This approach makes sense on paper, but fails to reinforce vocabulary over time. This issue can lead to learners feeling like they’re forgetting words just as quickly as they’re learning them, and can cause frustration. In order to really grasp new words and grammar structures, it’s important to see them used in different contexts and situations.
In short, textbooks introduce a large quantity of new words and material over a short period of time with little to no overlap or repetition, leading to low retention.
Solution: Reinforce Vocabulary with Repetition
To get around this problem and really commit new words to memory, it’s important to revisit and use them in different contexts. Instead of jumping from one topic to another, you can try:
Reviewing
When learning something new, try to reuse words you’ve already picked up from older material. For example, if you’ve just wrapped up a lesson on travel vocabulary, use those words when practicing a new lesson about food.
Diversifying
Practice using the same words in different situations. If you’ve just learned a new word about giving directions, try mixing up the different places you’re talking about, or including specifics like time and date. This helps you see how the words work in different ways.
Reading
Du Chinese allows you to do all of this naturally from within our app. Simply choose an article at or below your level and read normally to reinforce old vocabulary by seeing it in different contexts. If you are looking for a specific keyword to reinforce, you can use the Du Chinese search function to find all of the readings that use that word in different contexts. When you are reading, you can also save words as flashcards to review them in a more structured way!
By reviewing and reinforcing vocabulary in new contexts, you’ll remember words better and feel more confident using them in real conversations. This approach is the secret antidote to this tricky issue with textbooks!
Problem: Inorganic Texts and Rigid Structure
One major difficulty that comes with learning any language is that what beginners can read is often severely limited by their vocabulary. Textbooks are focused on guiding learners into more advanced stages of the language, but in doing so they tend to structure things such that they’re fast paced, and create reading material that’s more focused on introducing new vocabulary than on being engaging or interesting.
Solution: Engaging Resources and Extensive Reading
To make language learning more enjoyable and accessible, it’s important to focus on finding engaging content that matches your vocabulary level. Here are some tips:
Look for Simple, Enjoyable Stories
Find beginner-friendly stories or articles that match your vocabulary level but are still fun to read. This makes practice feel more engaging and less like a chore.
Reading at the right level
To maximize your enjoyment and learning while reading, it’s important to choose readings that are at the right level for you. Aim for texts where you can understand about 98% of the content. If you’re looking for a convenient and structured way to find reading material, Du Chinese’s articles are tailored around this approach, called Extensive Reading, and are organized by level.
Check out our guide to finding the right reading to get started. You can also read about the science of this works and how we write our lessons here!
Take Your Time with Topics
Don’t rush through lessons. Spend extra time on topics that interest you, and explore them fully before moving on. This way, you build a stronger understanding of the vocabulary.
Problem: Awkward Approach to Teaching Pronunciation
Pronunciation is especially difficult to get a grip on when studying through a textbook. While many books often come with CDs or some other form of media to help get around this problem, they are still forced to tackle the issue of Chinese pronunciation by describing how sounds are supposed to be made, often by giving detailed instructions on tongue placement. Usually, it’s simply not possible to perfectly recreate the sound of a language by reading what it’s supposed to sound like.
Additionally, Chinese has the added challenge of being a tonal language. While tone charts and written explanations might help learners to understand the concept of tone, there’s no replacement for hearing the real thing.
Solution: Listening and Speaking Practice with Native Audio
Instead of settling for the CD or MP3 file that comes with a textbook, it’s important to listen to a variety of material by native Chinese speakers. Regardless of whether it’s a podcast, Youtube video, or Du Chinese’s audiobook mode, listening practice is essential for developing an ear for Chinese. Here are some are some tips for getting the most out of listening practice:
Shadowing
Shadowing is a form of listening and speaking practice where you listen to and repeat native audio, with an emphasis on matching pace, tone, and pronunciation as closely as possible. Shadowing helps with developing the rhythm, intonation, and flow of the language while also building confidence in speaking.
Echo Reading
Echo reading is where you listen to a sentence or passage, then repeat it back as accurately as possible. It differs from shadowing in that there is time to pause and process what you’ve heard before repeating it.
This method has the same benefits of shadowing, but without the pressure of having to keep up with the listening material and with more time to think and focus on your pronunciation.
Mimicking
Mimicking is similar to echo reading, but with more emphasis on imitating the style, emotions, and intonation of what you’re listening to. This can be very helpful in developing natural sounding speech and building the confidence to express yourself in Chinese.
Problem: Lack of Accessibility
Unlike most Western languages, like Spanish or French, Chinese is written with characters that don’t convey pronunciation in the same way that an alphabet does. This means that in order to be able to read a Chinese character, you’ll have to look it up in the dictionary or check a vocab list to find its pronunciation. This can be a cumbersome process that slows down reading and causes frustration. If you ever buy a used Chinese textbook, you’re likely to find that someone’s handwritten pronunciation notes across entire swathes of text.
This is a unique feature of Chinese which is especially difficult for textbooks to handle, and it’s just one facet of the language. Knowing the definitions of each character and understanding grammar points are equally important, and Chinese textbooks often leave learners flipping between a text and a vocabulary list constantly.
Solution: Accessible Resources
Du Chinese’s pop up dictionary allows you to check the pinyin of a character, and even save it as a flashcard with just one touch, which makes the process of getting through a text much easier. Readers also have the option to toggle pinyin over a text, or even choose to reveal pinyin for only difficult words via our “difficult words only” pinyin setting. Recently, we’ve also introduced a grammar feature which allows similar ease of access to explanations of common grammar points as well.
More generally, textbooks also fail to address that learners pick up languages at different rates and progress differently. Du Chinese’s expansive library contains thousands of articles across different levels, ensuring that readers at any stage in their language learning journey will always have something to read. Especially when first beginning to learn Chinese, having a variety of new articles at a comfortable language level encourages learners to engage with the language on a daily basis.
Overall, textbooks are usually designed to be studied with some oversight from a teacher or tutor, so they usually fall short when it comes to giving you the right tools to study on your own in an efficient way, and their rigid structure doesn’t allow learners to move at their own pace. Du Chinese puts all of the tools and materials you’ll need to read Chinese at your fingertips.
Chinese Beyond Textbooks
While there’s certainly a time and place for textbooks, there are a whole host of reasons why they might not be enough, especially for people learning Chinese on their own. Du Chinese’s Extensive Reading approach gives you the tools and resources to navigate your Chinese language learning in a more engaging, convenient, and accessible way!
