I have currently started the second year of my degree. Quite disappointed with my progress so far and wanted to see if any other skritterers are studying a degree and how they feel they are progressing and maybe share some advice with each other on study methods.

What were you expecting after only a year? The ability to speak fluently or read books? I don't know what you want to hear: Chinese is hard for English speakers.

The best study method is to practice, practice, practice.

Not knowing anything about the style of program you're enrolled in I have a short story that might be useful.

Two friends enrolled in a University level Chinese course together already having a very basic understanding of the language. One friend was the kind of person who generally kept quiet in larger classes, while the other was the complete opposite. The quiet friend would sit, take notes and try to absorb everything. The outgoing friend would always raise their hand, try to make wise cracks and answer every question even if they had no clue how to say it.

Who do you think progressed the most?

Without a shadow of a doubt the outgoing friend progressed more. Yes, the quiet friend could explain Chinese grammar in English and correct other people when they made mistakes, but the outgoing friend could hold a conversation in Chinese. The outgoing friend had a more natural intuition for grammar that couldn't be explained, while the quiet friend could analyze and break it apart better.

The point of the story is that when studying a language in a program it's up to the learner to get the most out of it. It's very easy to pass a language course and get very little out of it at the same time. It's also easy to sneak through a day without speaking Chinese at all and writing it off as a day where you'll work on other aspects of the language. Don't do that! Make every day a speaking day. Interact with your teachers as they don't always directly interact with each student. Use humor in the classroom to make it all more appealing and encourage others to talk.

Might not apply to you, but it's a situation I've seen in several students who get a lot out of their language courses in a short amount of time.

I don't think it's very unusual to be struggling with Chinese even years into a degree program. There are many many graduate students in Chinese (studied Chinese for probably 4+ years) at my university who struggle at speaking and reading things that a Chinese native would find trivial (at least in terms of grammar and vocabulary). The only thing I can say is that one just has to work harder.

@ Josh

Your story is flawed. There is no positive correlation between being outgoing and having a high understanding of a language. In fact, at least in my experiences here in Japan, it is negative: the dumber students are almost always the louder ones.

Not only that but your definition of "progressed" is vague and doesn't make any sense. In your story it sounds like they progressed in different ways. Speaking only plays a part.

@ Ringil

That's a universal phenomenon.

I think Josh's point is that if you tend to be shy you really have to push yourself to become shameless. Make mistakes, and lots of them. Crack jokes that risk meeting silence. We learn far more from mistakes than from methodical analysis. There are maybe 1% of the population that are gifted linguists who can incidentally learn to speak a language by learning ABOUT the language. The rest of us can only learn by doing. Of course one could gain reading proficiency without being able to speak. But it's so much easier to do it the other way around.

Clavis Sinica has a great tool for comparing your progress in learning characters with other university students at:
http://clavisinica.com/character-test-applet.html

When I did it I got the following results:

Average Scores
Thank you for submitting your score.

The table below displays average scores on the Chinese Character Test for students at different stages in their study of the language. The numbers in the "Semesters" column refers to the number of college-level semesters of Chinese language study completed (or the equivalent); the "Average Score" is the median score of students at that level who have taken the test and reported their score using the reply form below. After four semesters of college-level Chinese, for example, the typical student recognizes approximately 1,212 characters. These averages, based on a sample size of over 1,000 responses, can serve as a useful benchmark for comparing your progress over time with other students of the language. The averages reported here will be adjusted periodically as additional scores are received.

For complete information and tips about using the Chinese Character Test, interpreting your results, and improving your score, please visit the Character Test information page. To purchase your own copy of the test on CD, see the Clavis Sinica ordering page.

Semesters / Average Score
1 170
2 421
3 925
4 1212
5 1709
6 1883
7 2079
8 2335
9+ 2826

Scores reported to date: 4671

Where did you start from? Were you a complete beginner? I remember spending ages and ages and ages on tones, and it feeling hard, but it being really good groundwork for later stuff. But in terms of how much 'progress' I felt I'd made, it wasn't very much.

I'm not doing a class anymore, but keeping at it with skritter and chinesepod. For me, being able to picture the character is important, so skritter has really helped with that, and I'm finding chinesepod easier because of it. I think that's progress, but I really don't understand every word. But, I'm putting my perfectionist aside, and have realised that understanding the gist rather than every word, does have value.

Other people learn in different ways, so it does depend what sort of a learner you are. I came to Chinese because of the characters, and I don't think I'll ever be a fluent speaker, but may get to be a fluent reader. And I'll be happy with that if I can at least hold basic conversations. I know others find characters difficult (though probably those people aren't on here) and would be happy to be able to speak well.

You will be making more progress than you know. Just that as with learning anything, there are times when it feels hard. And if you've just had a summer break that may not have helped either? You'll get back into it though, I'm sure you will. Let us know!

@ 石磊

I hate to keep saying everything is flawed today but your list is flawed as well. Most of the people who submitted the survey are special. They are the high-level students. The "average" student dropped out or had no motivation to complete the survey only to be reminded of how he or she has made little to no progress in the language like the OP. Hence, it's not nearly as accurate as you make it out to be.

Or at least that's what I tell myself because otherwise I am retarded. Even after living in Japan for a year and a half -- and studying each and every day -- I am nowhere near having command of 925 characters or words. Chinese and Japanese are simply hard.

Actually reading and writing I am happy with. Using memrise as an initial learning source and skritter for reinforcing the meanings as well as learning to write have been invaluable. Last year we had a terrible teacher which I blame, but I guess most of the study should be self study anyway. I guess I am just one of those people who does better at reading/writing, saying that, I am one of the more vocal people in the class.
I have theorised about why I can learn vocabulary pretty fast but just can't put it together. One problem i thought of is I have very little understanding of English grammar, although I'd class my English as very good. I don't know whether I need to start with learning English grammar to understand the Chinese grammar as this seems to be how the teachers like to teach. Or I need to find a different method, I recently bought "common Chinese patterns 330" from a recommendation from these forums which looks promising as a good self study method. I have also looked for a one on one private tutor, but there are none available in my city. Instead I have been looking into using one of the tutors from italki, Chinese tutors from china teaching over Skype. I wondered if anyone had used this website before?

@icecream, Yes of course it's flawed. It was a forum post story and a short one at that, not a definitive published text. As podster mentioned it was more to point out those who are having fun and actively participating in lessons you get more out of it. Yes, that particular person in my story did get more out of the speaking end. It was something I've observed time and time again, both as a student and teacher.

I disagree with the dumber students comment. While there are those students who simple don't want to learn. My story was referring to a louder obnoxious student participating in the lesson or poking fun at it. It's true, if you're loud and not listening to a lesson you're not going to learn anything.

I feel the louder students who goof off are either bored by the material or need to be more closely handled by the teacher. Some of my most naughty students a few years ago ended up getting the highest marks on the comprehensive English test they were given, much to my surprise. It just took a different approach for them on my part.

icecream> I wonder if a comparison between the numbers of words / characters learned between Japanese and Chinese is really valid. I don't know anything about Chinese really (other than they use the Japanese characters - errr, or something like that!), but I understand that one character has one sound in Chinese. In contrast we Japanese learners have to deal with onyomi and kunyomi for each character. I also understand that Chinese learners have to learn more characters overall than Japanese learners (we need something like 2136 to be able to read Japanese newspapers). Maybe Chinese has more characters and Japanese has applied some fancy (but a bit difficult) compression to its characters to allow Japanese people to get away with knowing fewer kanji.

One example with the difficulty of Japanese character learning is that in skritter you have to learn words rather than characters (as far as I know, skritter doesn't come up with onyomi and kunyomi and ask you to write them, it comes up with whole words: it never asks for　ショク　or たべ, it only asks for しょくじ　or
たべもの). I suspect in Chinese you have just one character, one meaning and one sound: that sounds kinda easier to me.

Well, I seem to have written a post based on a very skant understanding of Chinese and a dash of ignorance, so if some of our Chinese bredren can correct my ignorance then great...

zult: in chinese you have one character, one meaning, and one sound, but the sound will have a tone. It's OK to know the pinyin, but without the tone you're probably saying it wrong. So, I curerently know around 20 words associated with the sound "shi". Of those 20, around 2 have the first tone, 6 the second, 4 the third and 8 the fourth. Taking the fourth tone (again the ones I know) you say the same sound for words as diverse as "to be" and "market". The characters are quite different though. And that's just for single characters before we've even started on words made up of more than one character.

I'm not sure what onyomi and kunyomi are - are they anything like tones?

Also, some characters do have more than one possible pronunciation in Chinese. I think the most depressing moment in my whole Chinese learning journey was when I learned the word for "doctor" was 大夫：dàifu. But shouldn't 大 be pronounced dà???? My whole world was turned upside down!

Nicki - and tone changes! I learnt early on that 不 "bu" was the fourth tone, but I really may as well not have bothered as it chanages to often!

CC> With your "shi" example though, doesn't one character always have the same tone? I think in Chinese you can look at a character and know its meaning, its sound and its tone. However if you have one sound (like "shi"), you can't tell it's meaning and tone (as there might be 20 "shi" characters and 4 different possible tones).

In Japanese you have Japanese readings (kunyomi) and Chinese readings (onyomi) for some characters. So 食 has the onyomi (chinese) reading of "shoku" and the kunyomi (japanese) reading of "tabe". You can also have multiple onyomi and kunyomi readings of the same characters (so there can be 5 or 6 ways of reading the same character).

To be an engineer about it, I think most (I say "most", because Nicki has pointed out that Chinese Chinese characters can have more than one reading) have a one to one mapping to roman (pinyin??) readings whereas Japanese kanji have a one to many mapping to roman (onyomi / kumyomi) readings.

The great thing about Japanese is that it is not a tonal language. Although some people seem to worry about whether to say some parts of words with a higher or lower tone in Japanese, the Japanese people I know say that is a nicety rather than something that will either make you intelligible or not: e.g. if you say "kaeru" at the end of a sentence, you are probably talking about "returning" rather than "frogs".

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Just to avoid confusion: both the "Chinese" and "Japanese" readings are used in Japanese words, so the following words are both Japanese (even though the first uses Japanese readings and the second uses Chinese readings):

食べる　= taberu = to eat (Japanese reading)
食事 = shokuji = meal (Chinese reading)


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I've actually noticed from my dictionary that 食 has 1 other onyomi (chinese) reading and 3 other kunyomi (japanese) readings that I don't know.

@ Zult

For native English speakers -- the majority of the forum posters -- Chinese and Japanese have comparable difficulty levels. Both are strange and alien to us.

You are right: your posts show you don`t understand Chinese or Japanese. That`s ok. They are hard.

I would ignore pinyin and romaji. There is no correct mapping to English. It`s simply impossible.

Are you aware that languages --including Chinese-- change over time?

I'm with Josh. Being outgoing (or learning to be) is a huge advantage in language learning.

It gives you far more opportunities to practice, and forces you continually out of your comfort zone - which is great for learning.

Benny Lewis has some good advice on the subject:

http://www.fluentin3months.com/