0:00 Most people who start learning Chinese lose steam or completely quit within the first few months. Not because Chinese is impossibly hard, but because they have no idea where to start or they start [music] wrong. And as a mandaring coach with over a decade of experience, I've personally helped hundreds of learners go from zero to understanding and speaking Chinese quickly and many thousands more through our courses. And today, I'm going to show you exactly how to start learning Chinese the right way with zero overwhelm and zero wasted time. so that by the end of this video, you have a clear road map that'll get you reading, understanding, and speaking Chinese fast. So, let's get into it. And before I give you the road map, I need you to understand why most people fail, at least in my experience. It's not because Chinese is too hard. It's because of the decision fatigue that
0:45 people face. So, here's what happens to most learners. You Google how to learn Chinese or a particular question that you're struggling with and you're hit with a thousand different opinions. Use Dolingo. No, use Hello Chinese. Actually, just immerse yourself in Chinese TV and magically become fluent. Wait, you also need a textbook. Go find a tutor. Learn characters first. No, no, no. Don't learn characters. Learn speaking first. Grammar matters. No, grammar doesn't actually matter. It's super confusing and you don't really know 100% what to do, but you're not going to do nothing, right? So, you choose something, whether it's Dualingo or just you go with a tutor or just sign up for an immersion program. But because you're not 100% sure, whatever you choose, there's always that nagging voice in your head. Uh, is this actually the best way? Am I wasting my time? If so, am I wasting a little or am I wasting a lot? And you spend weeks,
1:30 sometimes months, using methods you're not really that sure about. And then this constant doubt that you have, this second guessing is super exhausting. Right? And that's exactly why most learners quit. Not because they're lazy, but because they're overwhelmed by choice and lack of direction to a lack of knowledge and experience in this particular area. Right? So, let me give you that direction right now. So to get fluent in Chinese fast, you need what I call the three pillars of fluency. And the first pillar is structure. Learning the right words at the right time, so you're not wasting energy on irrelevant vocabulary. The second pillar is methodology. Using techniques that actually work with your brain instead of against it, so you can learn words fast and actually remember what you learn. And last but not least, consistency.
2:16 Showing up daily no matter what to take advantage of compounding progress. So if you miss even one of these three pillars, you're in trouble, right? But get all three right, then fluency becomes predictable. And the system that gives you all three of these is what we call the BGAI framework. So let's just go through these one by one. Build comprehension simply means learning characters and words using memory techniques. Get comprehensible input simply means consuming Chinese sentences you understand through listening and reading practice. Now, as you're building comprehension and getting comprehensible input, you also need to activate your passive vocabulary. Unfortunately, it's not enough just to consume. You have to also practice producing. Those are two different muscles if you like. So, there are some activation techniques that I'll share with you later on in the video. Then,
3:01 finally, you need to integrate Chinese into your life by building habits that make sure that you actually do the build and the get and the activate activities. So, everything we do and everything I'm about to share with you in this video follows this framework. So, let's get into exactly what to do on day one. Here's what most beginners get wrong. They dive straight into learning words before understanding how Chinese sounds work, which is a big mistake. You need to spend just a few hours, not necessarily weeks, just a few hours, understanding Chinese pronunciation. This means learning pinion, the four tones plus the neutral tone, and ideally the problem initials, the sounds that don't exist in English that are in Mandarin, and where to put your tongue to say these sounds like a native. Now, you don't need to master pronunciation before moving forward. You just need to
3:47 understand the basics. We have pronunciation training on our YouTube channel that covers everything. There's one with like over a million views. I actually recommend the 2hour one with way less views because there's a lot more information in there. But either way, watch one of these, take notes if you want. Just listen, repeat, practice, get get the gist of what I'm saying, and then move on. Because here's the beautiful thing. Your pronunciation will improve naturally as you learn actual words in context and do lots of listening and repeat practice. You get better at tones just by using them in real sentences. You don't need to spend weeks drilling tones in isolation. That's not how Chinese people learned it, and that's not how you need to learn it either. Now, after those first few hours of pronunciation training, here's exactly how to spend your time. 70 to
4:34 80% of your time learning characters and words. Why? Because vocabulary is by far the most important aspect of language learning. Not grammar, not even pronunciation, vocabulary. If you have vocabulary but bad grammar, people can still get what you're saying. If you have vocabulary but bad pronunciation, people can still understand you. Although, yeah, it's harder. But if you don't have vocabulary, I mean, you have nothing. You literally cannot communicate at all. And that's why for your first 30 days, you're going to be focusing very heavily on learning words. And you can't really learn words efficiently or effectively without characters. And here's why. Chinese has zero cognate. That means words that sound similar to English or have a have
5:20 a common root word. This happens a ton with Spanish and French, right? Spanish has words like interesante, which obviously means interesting or entrench. You don't really need to work hard to learn these words, right? But with Chinese, you are starting from scratch with pretty much every new word. And without characters, the language becomes a confusing nightmare of homophones. Sh, [snorts] for example, can mean to be, matter, city, room, to look at, to try, and about 50 other things. So without seeing the characters, Chinese words are just way too similar. And so learning words will just get way harder and harder over time. But here's the good news. You don't need to learn characters the old way. writing them over and over again until your hand cramps. We use something called the Hanza movie method. It's a memory palace technique that lets
6:06 you learn any Chinese character in about 10 to 30 seconds, including how to read it, how to write it, how to pronounce it with the correct tone as well. I'm not exaggerating. Our members regularly learn anywhere from 15 to 50 characters per day using this method. One guy, Dennis, learned 1500 characters in 33 days. And there's a ton of other testimonials like this in our community. A really cool bonus that you get from learning the using this technique is that this same method massively improves your tones as well because you mentally associate the tone with specific rooms within buildings that you know well. Really is a two birds with one stone thing. Works amazingly well. Now to learn words fast, you'll use what we call living links. That means pneummonic associations that make the words stick
6:51 almost instantly. Let me give you an example with a word that's actually quite difficult to learn. Duan meaning to plan, right? It's made up of two characters. Da meaning to hit and swan meaning to calculate. So to make a plan, you strike out a strategy while calculating all the steps. Now that might not make immediate sense and nor should it, right? But you can make it make sense by just making a connection between these two characters and the final meaning. So and then visualizing it. So you'll imagine someone hitting a calculator, right? they're trying to make a plan of something uh and they hit a calculator because they get frustrated because the plan is not coming together the way they want or something like that. And that's it. You just visualize that and just move on. Literally takes like 10 seconds. And that logical yet kind of absurd connection makes the word
7:37 easy to remember. So as you're learning characters and words in this way, the remaining 20 to 30% of your active study time should be spent listening and repeating. From day one, you want to be listening to Chinese and repeating what you hear. Ideally, entire phrases and sentences, not watching TV shows. That's way too advanced at this point. I'm talking about listening to simple, useful, comprehensible phrases and sentences and repeating them out loud. Now, when you're first starting out, nothing is comprehensible. But the faster you learn characters and words, the more rapidly your pronunciation and comprehension will grow. So, if you're doing this all on your own, you'll probably need to learn the most common 1,000 Chinese words and their characters, which roughly works out to about six or 700 of them. You probably need to do this before you can really
8:23 start diving into example sentences with much level of comprehension. Now, with AI, you could use it to help you to find example sentences that use primarily vocabulary you already know, but there will still be a bit of a grind in the beginning that you'll have to sort of get through. And this is why we built our course the way we did. So that after just 100 or so characters, you're already reading entire sentences. How? Because the common characters that you learn in the very beginning are made up of common components. And the characters that you learn unlock common compound words. And we show you sentences as examples for how to use these common compound words using characters and words you've already learned. So you get that comprehensible input way faster. Now, there's a link below this video to just go get started with our free stuff. And as you join the community in the
9:10 free course, you'll also get another free course called the Mandarin Speaking and Listening Kickstarter. This is a listen repeat program, perfect for beginners, that'll teach you a thousand survival words and phrases with 7 hours of highquality audio lessons. You don't need to complete this before learning characters. You just need to start it and split your time. again 20 to 30% on that the listen and repeat course and the remaining time spent learning words with our core curriculum the blueprint. So spend your first 30 days doing this routine for an hour or two a day and you'll go from zero to being able to understand full Chinese sentences and phrases and at the same time you'll be able to start confidently producing them and understanding them. Now here's what not to do in your first 30 days. Don't study grammar rules. You'll absorb
9:55 grammar naturally through sentences just like you did with English. Don't watch Chinese TV shows, at least not with the purpose of learning Chinese. You won't understand enough for it to be useful yet. Don't even hire a tutor right now. Save your money until you have a foundation to actually practice with so you can actually talk about some substantial stuff in the sessions. Now, after that first 30 days, what do you do? Simple. Keep doing more of the same. Keep learning characters and words. Keep listening and repeating. And as you progress, upgrade from simple listening repeat to full shadowing practice as early as possible. So as soon as you find or get access to example sentences, you should be repeating them multiple times each every day. 3 to 10 times ideally. Five times seems to be the sweet spot though for most people. So
10:41 for example, you could just do this with a media player. Just you just have a list of sentences on your phone in an app that you use to play some sort of media such as VC media player for example and you can just play each sentence multiple times each. >> Maybe two, three, maybe even five times and then move on to the next sentence and the next one. next one and then you can maybe play them in random order. Play them all and shadow along with them. That's basically you repeat but at the same time. So for example, so as you hear it, you immediately say it along with the speaker. So you want to do this daily while continuing to
11:28 learn new characters and words at the same time. Your sort of first major milestone is to get to a,000 common words, which typically means around 6 or 700 characters. Why 1,000 words? Well, because that's 80% of the language by frequency. Now, of course, you won't be fluent at this point, but here's what you will be able to do. You'll be able to crush any graded reading or listening content aimed at beginners. You'll start noticing words and phrases in even native content like movies and TV shows. And you'll really start to feel your momentum growing from this point. This is the phase where Chinese start to click and momentum really start to take over where you stop feeling like you're just memorizing random symbols and start actually understanding the language. So the key here is consistency. It's a dance between building and getting
12:14 learning new vocabulary while also absorbing it in context through sentences. But here's where most learners hit a wall. They can understand Chinese when they read it or when they hear it. They can even repeat and even shadow with decent pronunciation. But when they try to speak, nothing comes out. Or what does come out is slow, awkward, and full of mistakes. This is the gap between passive knowledge and active fluency. And closing this gap requires another key technique. So here's something that most learners don't realize. Understanding Chinese and speaking Chinese uses completely different brain systems. You can understand thousands of words but still struggle to produce them in conversation. Why? because you haven't activated them yet. Think about it like learning the piano, right? You don't get good at piano by just watching people
13:01 play or listening to piano music. You get good by practicing, by forcing your brain and hands to produce music from memory. Chinese or any language learning is the same. So once you can comfortably shadow sentences and understand them, you're ready to start activation practice through retrieval. Here's how that works. So retrieval practice is simply where you try to say one or more Chinese sentences from memory. This forces your brain to actually produce the language, not just recognize it. You can use flashcards with English on the front and Chinese on the back. Or you can practice with AI. Have it ask you questions in English that you answer in Chinese. Or you can just talk to yourself in Chinese. Narrate your day. Make a journal in your phone like with
13:47 the recording app. Something like that. The key is you don't need to rely on native speakers as your primary practice method if you don't want to. Native speakers are really for performing what you've already practiced. You don't necessarily have to rely on them for building the skill in the first place. I would recommend that you build a habit of solo practice first and then perform with native speakers maybe once or twice a month and then just go up from there. This is not only way more convenient and way cheaper, but you get to make all of your silly mistakes alone without an audience. And another bonus on top of this is that every time you have a native speaking session, as long as you're doing the regimen as well privately, you will notice improvement almost every time. So that's the system. Build vocabulary with memory techniques. Get comprehensible input through
14:32 sentence practice. And finally, activate through retrieval practice and shadowing as well. But how far do you need to take this? What's the actual goal for you? Let's talk about what fluency actually means and how far you need to go. So, the first thing you should know is that fluency and proficiency are not the same thing. Fluency means you can speak comfortably and naturally on all kinds of different topics without constantly stopping and searching for words. You can have real conversations, express your thoughts, and understand most of what you hear. You can reach a more B2 level like conversational fluency with a 5,000word vocabulary. That's passive vocabulary with about half of it, maybe two or 3 thousand words in your active vocabulary that you're able to actually use correctly in conversation. That's
15:18 your first goal. Get fluent and go deeper, not broader. It's far more effective to know those two or three thousand common words on a very deep level with lots of practice, lots of example sentences, graded reading content, and retrieval practice to activate them than it is to rush towards 10,000 words or 3,000 plus characters. Why? because the law of diminishing returns kicks in. The 5,000th most common word is far less useful than the 500th most common word. So get fluent first with a smaller vocabulary that you can wield confidently. Build that foundation, build that confidence. Then once you're speaking comfortably, you can continue gradually towards proficiency at C1 and C2 levels. But fluency comes first in my opinion. And
16:05 fluency is absolutely achievable with just a few thousand wellpracticed words. So to recap, here's your complete road map. Spend your first few hours learning pronunciation basics. Watch our free pronunciation training to understand pinion tones and how Chinese sounds work. Then split your time 70 to 80% on characters and words using memory techniques. 20 to 30% on listening and repeating simple sentences and phrases. Keep building towards a thousand common words. That's 80% of the language by frequency. As you progress, you'll start reading real sentences, crushing graded content, and feeling that momentum build. And once you can comfortably shadow and understand sentences, start trying to do retrieval practice with them. Force your brain to produce Chinese from memory using flashcards,
16:50 AI, or talking to yourself, and sessions of course with native speakers. Practice alone, then perform with natives. Keep building, getting, and activating until you reach fluency at roughly two or three thousand word active vocabulary. Then push towards proficiency by increasing your vocabulary further through more sentence practice containing rarer words and also include an increasing amount of native speaker content and native speaking sessions into your routine. Now, you can figure all this out on your own or you can let us guide you step by step. Our free courses teach you the hands to move method for learning characters in seconds, living links for memorizing words ridiculously fast. We also provide proper space repetition flashcards with amazing audio. Many hours of listen repeat audio lessons, comprehensible
17:37 input at your level, material for activating your vocabulary effectively. Plus, you'll join a community of thousands of learners on the same journey. You'll get access to our weekly live Q&As with myself and Phil where we answer all your questions and you'll have a clear gamified road map that eliminates decision fatigue completely. And it's all completely free. So just click the link in the description to sign up and learn your first few characters, listen to your first few sentences, shadow them, then do it again tomorrow. So we've just covered build, get, and activate already. And that also covers the structure and methodology that you'll need to get to fluency fast. But we're also missing that key fourth element, integrate the consistency part. And here's the reality. Most people quit Chinese, not because the method doesn't
18:23 work, but because they can't stay consistent long enough to see results. So, in this video right here, I break down the real reasons learners quit, and more importantly, how to build the kind of consistency that makes fluency inevitable. So, if you want to make sure that you're one of the few who actually makes it to fluency, click this video now and I'll see you
