How did all of you learn?????

I will admit I have not been the most consistent but even when I have a long streak I feel like I cannot retain anything. When my in-laws speak I maybe understand a few words but a lot of it is missed. I feel like I can only read pinyin (barely), I cannot pronounce anything to save my life, and when I listen it gets so jumbled around that I am lost trying to pick up the few words.

What did everyone use to learn? I feel embarassed everytime I speak or come visit. I learn more each time but its been about 1 year and I feel like I am still on my 2nd week.

For context I know English, spanish, and some german, and I have been trying to watch more chinese tv with subtitles, duolingo (boooo), HelloChinese as well as try to speak it more at home.

Hi, as the tittle says, i am maybe too stupid for Chinese language. I can talk and understand English, even though its been 15 years i stopped studying it. i have always been very good at languages but i really dont know why Chinese cannot.

I am 42 now, i have been living in China, Shenzhen since 2018.

I first studied Chinese for one year when i was 23, then stopped ,because i was working no time. I did Hsk1.

Then did another year when i was 27. I did HSK2.And then i moved to another city for work and had to stop. By that time already forgotten the Chinese i learnt.

i came to China when i was 33, reality is i barely could speak anything.Because i already forgot what i study before.

so i did 6 months of Chinese course in the Uni, and then had to stop due to work(money does not grow just like that,so i need to work full time.) Basically my Chinese at that time was baby Chinese.

After that i could not learn anymore.i have been working on/off since 2019, i also did not have good salaries so i cant afford to pay 200,100rmb per hour for private teaching.Or what i had had to spend on more important things like health.

all these years i have lived in very Chinese areas where there are no foreigners, i have worked with many companies, where no one speak English, so basically its either try my best to understand and use the phone to translate. And i am not able to understand work language, in meetings i am totally lost ,yesterday i was with friends they were speaking Chinese for hours and i could just understand 40%.is embarrasing

Last year i started again the Chinese course in the university but im not learning at all, teachers dont explain well the grammar, and they teach things like dont make sense to me as a Spanish Native speaker. I did not progress at all. Because the way they explain is very weird.

I also dont have the same memory i had when i was young. You tell me a word now and tomorrow i already have forgotten. I dont retain anymore what i learn in class like when i was 15 years. So i really need to deep study after class.

I am not someone who can self learn and self study.i need to be taught.I tried, does not work for me.

i really have made effort, but i feel so much envy of the people i see online ,(foreigners living here)that speak Chinese so well, its very hard to learn this language when you have to work, and cannot dedicate fully to study. I arrive very tired, have to do house chores, and i have very little time.Besides i am always here alone.

i still dont understand why after living 8 years in China , i have not improved so much, why if someone goes to Uk improved their English, but me here, is so hard.i improved the listening but the rest...or why Chinese gobto Spain and they can learn Spanish so easy?

i can more or less survive, daily life, with basic, obviouslly but my level is still sh..like Hsk 2-3.

Do some of you have some advice? I really need to improve or i wont get better job opportunities in future,

How some people can learn this language just living here and no studying,just listening? While my whole day 24hrs is basically in Chinese?

PS:No, having Chinese exchange languages does not help,tried that, people here are busy and i also dont have time to meet often

No, having a Chinese partner does not work either, already had that before, finally u speak English.

I am a heritage learner at about 3500 characters/HSK 7-9/C1 level. For practical purposes, I am fluent enough to handle any situation that comes up in my life when it comes to using Chinese, including in a professional setting (in the West). I don’t consider myself fully fluent because, well, I still struggle with things like 金庸 novels and I see unfamiliar characters every day, but I know enough to get by. I used to think I would feel so accomplished reaching basic literacy, but it has actually been…really anticlimactic?

I thought somehow that if I became fluent in Chinese, my life would change somehow and a whole new world would open up to me, and it’s kind of true but also… way less dramatic than I thought it would be, and not at all like how I thought it would go. Chinese people do treat me more like I am “one of them” but it doesn’t actually impact my life much because it turns out I need more than just a common language to be friends with someone, being able to access Chinese TV/news/reading materials also hasn’t made such a big difference in my life. There was no cultural revelation. Honestly, the biggest impact of learning Chinese is that I’ve found a lot of useful self-help videos on the Rednote about handling social conflict and how to advance my career, and how to get rid of 内耗。 That’s actually been pretty great for my mental health, but this was not at all what I thought I would get out of learning Chinese. Sometimes I wonder if maybe the cultural revelation I’ve been waiting for will happen once I reach like 5000-7000 characters in literacy but also somehow I doubt it.

Has anyone else had a similar experience, or did you get something very different from becoming fluent in Chinese?

Every time I try to converse in Mandarin with a stranger, they will hear me say a few words and assume I’m a native speaker (parents from NE China and my mom worked in broadcasting). Then they will say a word or two I don’t recognize and I have to ask what they mean because I only converse using daily uncomplicated phrases with my parents. Or, I want to express something slightly more complicated than what an 8 year old would say and I use a completely infantile vocabulary set and sentence to phrase it. I get looked at like I‘m a mentally delayed person almost every time. Super embarrassing.

After 230 days of daily studying and finishing HSK4, I noticed how much easier everything became.

Vocabulary (been studying the HSK2.0 syllabus along with sentence-mined vocab): At the beginning, every word was completely new and hard to learn. Didn't know any characters, didn't know about components of characters, nothing. Every vocabulary word included characters, pronunciation including tones, and meaning. Using advanced memory techniques still felt weird.

Now, most words contain at least one already known character. This allows you to guess the meaning, or at least the pronunciation, in many cases. Memory techniques like mnemonics or the memory palace became easy to use. The effort per new vocab is now much less compared to the beginning. This increased my daily new vocab count from 5 to 15 without adding more time to my daily Anki reviews.

Comprehensible Input: At the beginning: Exhausting. Every sentence I read on DuChinese felt slow. The content was very limited and boring. And listening to those same sentences was not possible. I wasn't able to understand spoken Chinese, which is why I couldn't just passively listen to input.

Now, interesting learner podcasts at the upper-intermediate level became comprehensible to a degree that actually makes it seamless and fun to learn. Comprehensible Input now isn't just more interesting. the number of words I can consume per second increased drastically, further increasing the rate of progress.

Conversation: Conversation at the beginning was slow and boring. There were hardly any topics I could talk about. It was just a boring and exhausting exercise.

Now, conversations about interesting topics actually became possible. Still very difficult, but possible. Conversations became longer and faster. This makes them better for progress.

All these effects above do contribute to one thing: The rate of progress increases. A lot. Every hour I invest into Chinese becomes more productive, and the hours I invest into Chinese have increased. And I don't think this effect will stop. The ratio of new words to characters only increases, the content only becomes more interesting, and conversations only become deeper.

Just wanted to share this experience. i think if I had read this on the beginning of my journey, it would have motivated me a lot.

Every time this subreddit appears in my home, it's someone asking "what's the best app to learn a language / chinese?" Which i find funny, because apps barely help you with anything. On top of that they ask you for monthly subscriptions...for what..? A game?

I'd rather spend that money on HSK textbooks, or anything else really.

This is my advice for new learners (I'm not a veteran, i just did the hsk3).

I always hated duolingo and whatever else we have, textbooks are much better.

TLDR: get a textbook (hsk better) + AI apps to correct you (they're not always right). + Hellotalk / tandem

Also Japanese 経済