I spent the whole week trying to figure out my Mandarin-learning curriculum.

One thing I realise – as a “heritage speaker”, meaning someone who has a foundation in Mandarin due to her heritage, I have a leg up when it comes to learning.

Some language learning experts say that we should focus on listening and speaking first, then learn Chinese characters.

I agree because that’s how I’m learning Mandarin right now lol.

I spent most of my life with this HSK3-level comprehension of Mandarin, but this has helped me massively in learning Chinese characters now.

I can’t imagine grappling the complexities of tones, pronounciation, increasing vocabulary and understanding the grammar all at once!

This, btw, is a very good video about how to learn languages. This is the clearest explanation I have heard so far about the comprehensible input method.

BTW, this was how I learned English. English lessons in Malayisan schools are very basic. If you depended on them to increase your proficiency, you won’t get very far. However, I read and watched a lot of English TV. Like, A LOT.

Especially reading. I read like a demon.

And I think I’ll be doing the same with Mandarin, though I need to take care to take off the crutches – pin yin and English subtitles. For that, I need comprehensible input, which means I need to understand 95% of what I’m reading/watching.

That’s tough for the reading bits because there’s so few reading materials for those with a proficiency of 200 characters (where I’m at now).

Listening – I’ve watched dramas at 70-80% comprehension which, apparently, isn’t great, so I need to downgrade my content to simple HSK2 level stuff and really focus on learning characters I don’t know rather than “assume” and “brush off” words I don’t know.

This has been a fun adventure. Exhausting, really, but really exciting to see myself progress from just being able to read 10 characters to 200+!