How the Dunning Kruger Effect Makes Chinese Learners Overestimate Their Skills

Will Hart is an Educator, fluent Chinese speaker and I’m Learning Mandarin contributor. In this blog post, he explains how a psychological phenomenon known as the Dunning Kruger effect led him to overestimate his ability at an intermediate level in Chinese. He offers three key lessons Chinese learners can take from his experience.

The Dunning-Kruger curve is a concept in psychology that involves a cognitive bias causing us to overestimate our ability of a given skill or within a given field.

Without getting too technical, researchers Dunning and Kruger conducted a number of studies showing that when participants were asked to rate their competency in a particular field, many tended to overestimate their level relative to others.

For example, in one study, 88% of American drivers rated their driving skills as “above average” – which is obviously mathematically impossible. And studies across a range of different fields have shown a similar trend.

Further research shows that participants with the lowest ability in a given field are often the most prone to overestimating their ability at that competency.

On the other hand, those at a higher level, tend to have comparatively less confidence in their abilities, as the better they get the more they find there is to learn.

These findings led to the popular meme below which you may have come across before.

Now it’s important to note that the graph above is not intended to be a scientific representation of the Dunning Kruger effect.

Nevertheless, I’ve found that it depicts my experience of learning Mandarin to an uncanny extent.

My Dunning Kruger Journey

When I had been learning for just over a year my level was alright, I could communicate well enough to get by in the language and impress people (yes Chinese people are easily impressed!), but I was far from perfect and really wasn’t anywhere near a native level.

I mean, I was good for having only learned for a year, but from the amount of praise I was getting I thought my level was much higher than it truly was.

This led to me reaching my peak “Mount Stupid” and probably led to me becoming slightly arrogant. But as time progressed I quickly realized it’s very difficult to master Mandarin at all, let alone in a year.

Preparing for Mandarin speaking competitions, starting a YouTube channel, increasingly expanding my vocabulary and constantly challenging myself made me drop down into the trough of the curve, leaving me doubt if I could ever reach my goals.

Having learned Chinese for nearly four years now, I’m much closer to a near-native level than I was previously, being able to hold conversations on pretty much anything. But I’m still climbing my way out of the trough, trying to get over my perfectionism and just trying to enjoy the journey.

The biggest problem with Mandarin is that you never finish learning the language no matter your level. But in some ways, this is also the beauty of language learning, it’s a lifelong journey or, as they say in Mandarin: 学无止境 xué wú zhǐ jìng, (learning knows no bounds).

So now let’s look at 3 lessons we can learn from Dunning-Kruger that we can apply to our Mandarin learning.

Three Lessons from Dunning Kruger

1. Always strive to be better, don’t let arrogance and ignorance affect your progress

Once you’ve reached a conversational level in Mandarin it can be all to easy to stay in your comfort zone and get a bit arrogant. After all, Chinese people are all too polite when it comes to foreigners speaking Mandarin. But I want to encourage you to keep on striving to be better and keep learning new ways of expressing yourself.

Try and keep a humble attitude throughout your journey so that you’re open to learning new things and are willing to accept constructive criticism. I found constructive criticism, although it can be really difficult to accept, is what helped me the most to improve my pronunciation as it helped me hone in on areas that needed more work.

2. When you get to the bottom of the curve, don’t give up!

When you have the realization that Mandarin is much harder than you may have initially felt at your peak, you’re going to feel disappointed and potentially even want to give up. This is where making good habits and setting realistic goals will help massively. Try and do something every day, even if it’s just something little.

It’s much better to learn 5 new things a day for a year as opposed to trying to cram in thousands of new things in a single day. Once you’ve made good habits, the decision to learn Mandarin no longer depends on your confidence level or your motivation. With regards to goal setting you want to set small manageable, realistic goals that keep you on track.

For example, I want to learn 5 new words a day, or I want to learn to speak about language learning in a given time period as opposed to I want to be fluent in Mandarin in a given time period. The latter goal is much more likely to keep you in the trough than the former.

3. Don’t try to learn everything!

Finally, don’t try and learn every single possible word in Mandarin, remember you don’t know everything in English either. It’s always a good idea to start with learning the basics and then focus on learning things that are interesting to you and relevant to your life.

For example, your hobbies, your work/studies, where you’re from, etc. From here you can gradually expand outwards to topics such as the news, current affairs, science, and politics. But whatever you do, don’t try to learn every new word you come across as doing so will quickly put you back in the trough, leading to burnout and feeling overwhelmed.

Honesty is the Best Policy!

In summary, our confidence in our Mandarin ability will vary throughout the process and may follow a pattern similar to the Dunning-Kruger effect described above. To avoid falling into this trap we have to be brutally honest with ourselves, accept constructive criticism, and strive to be better whilst setting realistic goals and making good learning habits.

How about you? Have you been through a similar Dunning Kruger experience when learning Chinese? Let me know in the comments!

Will Hart