It’s been about 2 years since I started learning Mandarin as

a hobby. I think I’m going to write a series of short posts about it.

These are the first thoughts that come to mind:

- “You don’t need to learn characters in the beginning” is a lie teachers tell to students so they don’t quit.

- All Mandarin learning resources on the internet are bad at teaching pronunciation and tones. This includes everything on Y*uTube and all the popular and expensive video courses that most people use.

- Posting voice moments on HT has been extremely helpful for pronunciation. Many Chinese people helped me a lot. There are many of them I didn’t thank enough.

- Chinese people really want to know why you want to learn Chinese. If it’s not for business or family reasons, they seem to get confused and mistrust you. (Sorry but this is just my personal experience with many random people on this app. I’m not talking about you, of course.)

- Most Chinese people under 40 have been learning English their whole life, but most of us are starting Mandarin from absolute zero. *For me*, this makes it almost impossible for language exchanges to work the way they’re supposed to. So I mostly stick to posting moments. I have private chats with friends, but I don’t pressure myself to use Mandarin when I just don’t know how to say something.

- You need to spend a lot of time practicing counting and reading numbers. It doesn’t matter how many fancy vocabulary words you’ve already learned.

More to come, when I feel like it...