How to Build Your Perfect Step-By-Step Mandarin Learning Plan

Will Hart is an Educator, fluent Chinese speaker. In this blog post, he lays out the building blocks all learners can use to create an effective Mandarin learning plan.

In this blog post, we will cover how to build an evidence-based language learning routine to help you in your Mandarin journey. We’ll cover the four strands that make up a solid routine before giving an example routine that you could adapt to your own circumstances.

Recently, when I was reading some applied linguistics papers, I came across a paper that resonated with me more than anything else I’ve read before about language learning as it closely matched my own experience of learning Mandarin Chinese to fluency.

It was written by Professor Paul Nation, an applied linguistics professor, and gives a really comprehensive guide on how to learn a language. Here’s the link to the paper if you want to go and check it out.

There are four strands to this routine and each one should account for roughly 25% of your time. They are meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning, and fluency development. We’ll explore each of these in detail, going through exactly what they entail.

1. Meaning Focused Input

Firstly, meaning-focused input refers to listening and reading material to practice understanding the language as opposed to trying to analyze the grammatical constructions used. Professor Nation recommends that ideally, you should be able to understand 95-98% of this content, in other words, only about 1 in 20 words are unknown.

Understandably, such content can be difficult to find, especially at a beginner’s level, so it would be expected that occasionally your comprehension will drop below this. However, there are a variety of beginner podcasts, videos, and graded readers which would all make good materials for this purpose.

As a medical student, I often don’t have time to get much input in Mandarin, so I made a habit of listening to podcasts at any point my ears were free, for example, washing the dishes, walking to the hospital, and exercising. I really recommend you consider doing the same. I also encourage you to make notes of phrases and sentences that interest you so you can use your study time to learn them.

2. Meaning-Focused Output

The second strand is meaning-focused output, that is, attempting to convey your meaning ideally to a native speaker or advanced learner in the form of speaking or writing. Professor Nation recommends that to be worthwhile, output should only be about things you are quite familiar with so you’re not constantly struggling for words.

I personally think there is a balance with output so you’re not stressed which may negatively affect performance, but equally just staying in your comfort zone isn’t optimal either. Your main goal here is to convey your meaning to the other person and activate your knowledge from input and study time.

Apart from this knowledge activation thus reinforcing your memory of it, there are two main benefits of output outlined in Swain’s Output Hypothesis. These are testing hypotheses and identifying knowledge gaps.

When we’re learning a language we’re in the process of building a mental model or mental map of the language which ideally will get closer and closer to that of a native speaker. So inevitably throughout the journey, you’ll have some assumptions about the use of the language that you aren’t quite sure about and output can help you confirm or deny these.

For example, if I had learned that 电脑在桌子上 means the computer is on the table, I might have the hypothesis that 课本在桌子上 means the textbook is on the table, and this hypothesis would be correct. Output would give you a chance to test this hypothesis by seeing if a native speaker can understand or not, or whether or not they correct you.

When you’re consuming content in a language you can’t really tell how much you actually know of the language until you start speaking it and you realize there’s some gaps in your knowledge that are keeping you back from saying what you want to say. Identifying these gaps from output is really useful as you can then use more input and study to help fill these in.

For example, a while ago I realized that I didn’t know how to say doorstop in Chinese, after identifying this knowledge gap I went away and studied this word and now it’s part of my active vocabulary ready for when I need it (阻门器).

3. Active Study

The third strand is study – this includes pronunciation practice, grammar study, and intentional learning of vocab and getting corrections. The point of this strand is to help speed up your learning from input and output and fill in any gaps you have.

For intentional learning of vocab and grammar I would recommend taking sentences from your sources of input and textbooks (when you are at a beginner level) and learning them through Anki, this process is called sentence mining. I would also recommend dedicating time to practice pronunciation by imitating native speakers regularly as well.

4. Fluency Development

Finally fluency development – this is going to look different for everyone but it’s the idea of developing your fluency in each of the four areas, listening, reading, speaking, and writing. It could include things like shadowing, extensive reading, and retelling things you are familiar with in the language.

Professor Nation says that for it to be considered fluency practice, there has to be no new vocab and also a push for speed, i.e. you are forcing yourself to go slightly faster than you usually would. For example, I previously made videos in Mandarin introducing my story and how I learned the language. These videos contained no new vocabulary and obviously needed to be spoken very fluently so this clearly satisfied Nation’s criteria.

Putting Theory Into Practice

So let’s look at what some example routines could look like. Let’s say you can commit 8 hours a week to language learning, that’s just over an hour a day. According to this routine, you could do the following.

2 hours a week of speaking practice (with a tutor or with a friend)

2 hours a week of input (get listening and reading) – make a note of things you want to go over in dedicated study e.g. key phrases and sentences

2 hours a week of dedicated study including things like anki for vocab and grammar and imitation for pronunciation practice. Going over corrections and learning them e.g. learning how to properly pronounce sounds natives said you got a bit wrong, or adding the corrected sentence to Anki to help with your word order.

2 hours a week of fluency practice – listening to familiar stories read out by a native speaker at native speed or recording yourself talking about a familiar topic as fluently as you can and asking a native for feedback. Sorting out your mistakes can then be part of your dedicated study time.

Finally, I want to point out there will likely be some crossover between the different activities. For example, some of your output time may contribute to fluency practice and equally, when you’re outputting, it’s a good idea to get some corrections which could be technically considered dedicated study.

The aforementioned ratios (e.g. 25%) are going to be different at different times but come to 25% overall, for example at the beginning you may need more input and dedicated study but later on, you might do more output and fluency training when you’re at a higher level.

How About You?

How do you go about structuring your Mandarin learning plan? Do you find the strands mentioned above useful? Let me know in the comments!

Will Hart