How I Made Chinese Easy 

Get your FREE pdf- 418 Phrases To Make You More Fluent In Mandarin- mandarinbp.com/418-phrases-yt WATCH THESE NEXT Mandarin Pronunciation Guide ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-FlaJ12tmtu4.html How Chinese Characters Work ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-NryURgnLdlw.html

The character "匹" means "pair", because in the acient times, a horse pairs to a carriage, so the measuring word for a horse which tracts a carriage is "匹"

Greetings! I'm here not as a Chinese learner, but as a Japanese learner. I find that both languages present similar "roadblocks" and many of your suggestions were very helpful for me as well!

Honestly the reading sounds much more fun than the speaking

I’m a new learner (about 6 months in). A huge ah-ha moment for me was stumbling across character particles. Suddenly a whole bunch of characters made sense and I could make decent guesses at the context or even meaning of new characters. I’m still very much a beginner and can only use basic phrases, but realizations like that give us beginners a great sense of forward movement.

Amazing video. You're speaking from your heart with the wisdom acquired. The insights you share are priceless! I hope more people could realise all this before they make that long and unnecessary journey we took.

this video was really motivating and you story was very interesting to hear, i love your videos and thank you for helping us all

One thing that it has not been mentioned is “learning phonetics” for me it’s one of the keys to fluency and really mastering whatever language you want to speak

Could you read a mini story with your voice so that we can listen to it everyday. Thank you very much

love how pros tell you how easy stuff is that they ace at :)

Thanks for sharing your personal language learning journey with us, which I find very relatable! Great video on learning about Mandarin, or any languages really. Very inspiring!

in brief: This video discusses why Mandarin Chinese is considered one of the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn and provides insights on how to make the learning process easier. The speaker, a Mandarin coach with 10 years of experience, identifies the specific aspects that make Mandarin challenging to learn, including: 1. Tones: Unlike English, Mandarin uses tones to distinguish meaning. This can be difficult for English speakers to master. 2. Chinese characters: Learning the thousands of characters required to read and understand Mandarin can be time-consuming and challenging. 3. Pronunciation: Mandarin has sounds not found in English, and mastering these sounds can be tough without proper coaching. Furthermore, the language has a large number of homophones, words that sound the same but have different meanings. 4. Grammar: Chinese grammar, including word order and measure words, is substantially different from English, which can pose difficulties for learners. However, the speaker argues that while these factors make Mandarin challenging to learn, it doesn't have to feel difficult or take an inordinate amount of time. They share a revelation they've had after 10 years of experience teaching and learning Mandarin: The approach to learning is a major determinant of the difficulty level. Initially, the speaker struggled to learn Chinese using traditional methods like textbooks, rote memorization, and grammar drills. They found these methods boring, demotivating, and ineffective. Then, they discovered the power of comprehensible input, which is understanding messages in the form of written or spoken Chinese. They also began using memory palace techniques and spaced repetition software to learn and remember Chinese characters and words. This method helped them to master over 3000 characters in a few months, a process that usually takes years using traditional methods. The speaker also improved their understanding of Chinese by reading and listening to Chinese sentences repeatedly, which helped them naturally develop a feel for the language and understand Chinese grammar. They also found that mastering a few tongue positions helped them pronounce Mandarin sounds that don't exist in English. The speaker argues that with the right approach, learning Mandarin can be genuinely easy and fun. They recommend the Mandarin Blueprint method, a comprehensive curriculum that uses effective memory techniques, flashcards, and comprehensible input to take learners from zero to near-native proficiency. The speaker emphasizes that the efficiency, effectiveness, and enjoyment of the methods and tools you use greatly affect how easy or hard Chinese becomes for you. The speaker discusses the difficulty of learning Chinese and highlights three main factors contributing to the ease or difficulty of language acquisition. 1. The Methods: They recount how they used a biased approach and various video resources to learn Chinese and found these to be the best strategies for quick and effective learning. They suggest that different learners might find other methods more useful, but these worked best for them. 2. Life Circumstances: They share how they started a business, Mandarin Blueprint, and how life circumstances (like getting married, starting a family, and managing a business) affected their language learning journey. As their responsibilities increased, their dedication to learning Chinese dwindled. They discuss their struggle with motivation, bad habits, and a lack of physical health, which affected their enthusiasm for self-improvement and learning Chinese. 3. The Individual Learner: Ultimately, the speaker points out that the learner is the most significant factor in the language learning process. Their personal situation, motivation, discipline, mindset, and commitment are crucial to how challenging or enjoyable the language learning journey is. The speaker shares their personal transformation, where they improved in building and maintaining good habits, developed a balance between various life areas, set aside time to immerse in Chinese media, and stopped taking themselves too seriously about making mistakes in speaking Chinese. They stress the importance of being persistent, patient, humble, and curious in the language learning journey. In closing, they encourage viewers to look at the difficulty of learning a language as a combination of the language's complexity, the effectiveness of the learning approach, and the learner's personal characteristics. They advise people to remain consistent, have a positive mindset, maintain good health, trust the language acquisition process, continue discovering new resources, live in the moment, and to laugh at their mistakes. They end by promoting their Mandarin Blueprint courses and encourage viewers to check out their video on integrating Chinese learning into their lifestyle through habit-building. The speaker discusses the difficulty of learning Chinese and highlights three main factors contributing to the ease or difficulty of language acquisition. 1. The Methods: They recount how they used a biased approach and various video resources to learn Chinese and found these to be the best strategies for quick and effective learning. They suggest that different learners might find other methods more useful, but these worked best for them. 2. Life Circumstances: They share how they started a business, Mandarin Blueprint, and how life circumstances (like getting married, starting a family, and managing a business) affected their language learning journey. As their responsibilities increased, their dedication to learning Chinese dwindled. They discuss their struggle with motivation, bad habits, and a lack of physical health, which affected their enthusiasm for self-improvement and learning Chinese. 3. The Individual Learner: Ultimately, the speaker points out that the learner is the most significant factor in the language learning process. Their personal situation, motivation, discipline, mindset, and commitment are crucial to how challenging or enjoyable the language learning journey is. The speaker shares their personal transformation, where they improved in building and maintaining good habits, developed a balance between various life areas, set aside time to immerse in Chinese media, and stopped taking themselves too seriously about making mistakes in speaking Chinese. They stress the importance of being persistent, patient, humble, and curious in the language learning journey. In closing, they encourage viewers to look at the difficulty of learning a language as a combination of the language's complexity, the effectiveness of the learning approach, and the learner's personal characteristics. They advise people to remain consistent, have a positive mindset, maintain good health, trust the language acquisition process, continue discovering new resources, live in the moment, and to laugh at their mistakes. They end by promoting their Mandarin Blueprint courses and encourage viewers to check out their video on integrating Chinese learning into their lifestyle through habit-building.

9:45 the method of language learning you are recommending is essentially acquiring language through naturalisation, which I always heard was one of the slowest ways to acquire the necessary vocabulary, and grammar skills. Since we learned this way when we were children when we were most receptive to learning languages. However using this method as an adult is considerably harder. As I understand

Learning Chinese maybe in the future. But the method you described is awesome and can be applied to learning in general. Cheers and 谢谢你

I recommend using skritter for learning 汉字

thanks a lot for this, really gives a motivation sparkle and makes you understand just how incredibly effective it is to simply enjoy learning something in general, no matter what it is

Aprendo ingles mirando tus videos y tambien mandarin, genial

I'm just starting out to learn chinese because I am meeting a friend from China next month and wanted to impress her a little 😁 altho 1 month is way too short to learn anything I think.

My dumbass thought "Red" and "Read" don't sound the same... then I realised it was past tense.

Chinese kids don't learn tones.They acquire them naturally. Great tips!

As the characters are pronounced in mandarin and dialects differently, they share the same meanings for them. In fact it doesn't matter how the characters are pronounced. People will understand you when you show them the characters.

Hey Mandarin Blueprint Coach, I did Heisig method for a year and learned the core definition and how to write the 3k most common hanzi. Then I spent a year and half learning the core pinyin and tone for those 3k. What should I do next? I can identify and say the 3k correctly with around 93-95% accuracy depending on sleep, lol. Just grab some college textbooks and go forward?

5:16 一匹布

How do I join your class really I find my self confused and lost 😞

Question: did you learn Chinese while living in China? Learning a language while in the country has a huge advantage that is almost impossible to replicate outside of it.

6:50 7:36

I am studying chinese now and have a hard time finding native speakers to chat with.

Can I join and use in China? Pay In China?

你好厉害，完全听不出是歪果仁😅

Wait... Passed HSK 6 less than for one year? 😮 Sir, I worship you... I'm Russian, I speak English, struggling with German and my Chinese is already "putrefied" by now (after learning by diving completely into that for several months but I barely remember HSK1-2 words😅🥲)... I go here for getting motivation, thank you!

Mind over matter 2023

I’m going to be honest, I didn’t make it past 4 minutes in this video because it was some of the dumbest crap I’d ever heard. You have to learn 3,000 individual characters before you can even start learning the language? That’s stupid. Like, genuinely idiotic, if for no other reason than the characters ARE the language and they don’t - shouldn’t - and probably can’t - be learned in isolation. You literally cannot learn a character without learning it’s meaning and/or how it is pronounced. Sure, I guess you can learn to recognize them as abstract shapes or images without knowing anything else about them - but that’s not learning the characters. So, again, you literally cannot learn them in isolation. I have been studying Chinese for just over 3 years. I have been learning the characters, pinyin/pronunciation, grammar, etc. alongside each other from the start. For every new character, word, or word phrase I learn, I have learned how to recognize and write the character, how to pronounce it, and how to use it. It isn’t difficult - you just have to stop looking at the language as being composed of separate parts that you can learn in isolation of one another. I just can’t get over how dumb the first few minutes of this video are. And no, I won’t be watching the rest. Just…oof.

Chinese is crazy ridiculous 😂 these times bro. I gotta break my jaw. Loll I’d rather learn 4 other Latin based languages at once rather that mandarin 😂

To waste Life on smth so idiotic, some symbols, tones. I use English. I will use it. I used it. Why not simplify it? Those willing to waste time can study 100s of languages.

Learning Chinese is hard. Using slave labor and harvesting your organs is super easy. Barely an inconvenience.

You are going wrong way. People only want to learn so they can understand what people speak in TV drama. Why go to writing system. you just messed up the video

I am an Arabic native speaker.. I have been studying Mandarin for less than a year and I am still facing issues with my tones😢... but thanks to you I know now that I have to find my "voice" to give the right tones as all I did was mimicking other voices and always end up tired

I had a similar journey learning German. My parents had always strived to send me abroad to Germany for my degree(from a lower middle income Southeast Asian household). I learned it since I was 8, up until graduating high school. The usual pitfalls of rote memorisation, learning grammar rules and memorising vocab. In those nearly eight years my German was conversational at best and I still struggled to follow native speakers. After moving to Germany I realised my current method wasn't going to last. So I started just immersing myself in German everywhere. Read German books, listened to German audiobooks, playing my games in German, conversations with my German uni mates. Now I barely remember anything from the German I learnt in school but I'm mostly fluent and about to finish my bachelor's thesis in German! Looking for a new language to challenge myself with and improve my CV and Chinese seems like the ultimate challenge, glad I found this channel. Keep up the great work.

Tones don't always cause more troubles than grammar when trying to get yourself understood, I would personally use a lot of sentence arrangement practices with my students to improve their sense of Mandarin grammar. With vocabularies collected around a certain theme, sentence practices can be easily created and most students liked it.

The tones are actually the very first thing that I started out with learning. Then, during the first couple of weeks after being exposed to writing down the characters and pinyin together, I accidentally came across a picture online that describes what direction each stroke is done as and what the name of the stroke is. Understanding the strokes made it a little easier to understand what I was looking at even if I could not understand what character I was looking at. A level of understanding just needs a foothold to build your foundation from. I also highly recommend going through a online dictionary that will can translate between mandarin, pinyin and english, with the bonus of an example of how to properly pronounce the character and the bonus of multiple sentences that show the character in use.

I want to be honest with you guys, first time when I clicked on a video on this channel about a week ago my impression was twofold. A guy from my screen was looking right to my soul with his bald eyes and his voice was so confident that in combo I couldn't move and was pretty sure that he is trying to make me sell my house and send all the money to him - everything looked too good to be true without a trick. But I decided to give it a chance (to watch it further, not to sell my house), I watched more videos, relaxed and openminded, and I understood that it was not a trick, it was pure truth which is so alien on RU-vid that I couldn't believe it. Such sacred bundle of priceless techniques and simple answers to hardest questions were alike to a strike of a hummer on top of my head. I closed RU-vid sat and thought. Nah it's still too good, so I sent some of these videos with pronunciations to my Chinese friends, and of course they said that he talks just like a native and they wouldn't be able to say if he is native or not if they were watching videos with eyes closed. Well. Then I believed. How happy I am that my Chinese language journey has started just two months ago, and without a guide to this mad world of Chinese complexity and overall amount of aspects, JUST IMAGINE, I randomly decided to study PRONUNCIATION and RADICALS first, what a lucky shot, and now thanks to this channel I can gently correct my future path and have such a nice and fun jorney without suffer and pain. I love Chinese language. Wholeheartedly, thanks.

"I've discovered there are three main factors that affect the difficulty." Me too: vocabulary, vocabulary, and vocabulary. Everything else is rounding error. It's amazing how many words are in supposed "children's material" or "comprehensible input". Little kids know a huge swath of words and it takes forever to catch them

I learned to speak fluent Chinese after living one year in Taiwan. The reason why is I spoke with local people only went to school for a couple hours a day and did self study. Living in the target language community is a key to success

YO ! That's crazy ! I know this means nothing to you but I wanted to share my story. I decided to start learning Chinese this year and as someone with a problem-solver mindset, I decided to study Chinese so efficiently that I'll just learn exponentially faster than anyone. I thought really hard on my own how to accomplish that, learned about the nature of the language and judged what I needed to do first, and set out a plan regardless of the classes I had in school. I've come to have an approach that is exactly like yours with my own tools. I decided to ignore the teacher's advice on what to do in what order (but still used her courses to get better and practice). I'm only at the beginning of this journey, but I'm already leaping ahead of everyone in my class now, and that's without counting the exponential growth that I'm expecting with the hidden first part the grind of learning many characters

I speak Polish so the Chinese is easy to pronounce.

I'm Chinese. I still fail Chinese. :)

I started with mandarin classes in january, following the HSK books, the traditional way with a chinese teacher, repeating, writing, repeating wrtiting.. no explaining. so things dont stick to much, just the stuff you are doing at the moment. i bumped into mandarin blueprint little over a week ago and gave it a try. i did it comletely from the beginning (the pronunciation course). I flew through the course and i must say its quite well done. wat suprised me is that even if you are working on pronunciation, it covers quite a lot of stuff from the HSK 1. so even though you are "just getting to know the pronunciation", in the background you are learning HSK 1 as well.

I've watched 7k hrs of japanese animes and unfortunately wasn't studying them while watching so I only learned a few terms every now and then. If only it was that easy.

I would love to book your course - but 997,- $ is just not possible for me… I guess I’ll wait and hope to get some BF coupon in November 🤷‍♂️

you English speakers have the most difficulties to learn ANY other language than ANYONE else have in this world! just saying .... "what do you call a person that speak three languages? Trilingual .... what do you call a person that speak two languages? - Bilingual... what do you call a person that only speak one language? - AMERICAN!!! "

But if you become good in chinese already you can still consider Chinese easy when you are not practing chinese a lot

Muy buena la data ( información ) de tu video. Y sobre todo hay que disfrutar lo Disfrutar el aprendizaje y progresar con el error. I enjoy learning Chinesse day by day. 多谢

I am Moroccan and I love learning languages. I am now learning Russian and Korean together and I recently started learning Chinese

Motivation is a huge one.

There are tones in English too. Ex: "to" and "two" and "too". Next time you're in an elevator, try saying "I'm going to two too". Try to say that without using different tones. You can't.

This method works!

why am i here, i am a native Chinese speaker😅,不过老师讲课很吸引人，就当练英语听力了😂😂

Yo, what’s the cartoon at 16:19 brother?

I don't understand why I constantly hear that Chinese is the most difficult language to learn. American English is my only language. I love learning hànzì and having that pictorial to distinguish words. I honestly feel like hànzì is the key to learning Chinese more easily. In addition to apps and children's books. Probably my favorite part of learning Chinese is getting into the nitty-gritty breakdowns of the hànzì radicals. It's like a puzzle!

Tones and characters, and the vocabulary are the hardest things Tones get easy by just listening... Characters should be learned when you become fluent, start with pinyin.... Vocabulary gets easy with space repetition... That's it, super easy, you guys complicate yourselves too much by learning characters and try to pronounce everything perfectly from the beginning

Sorry your videos has too much English try to build in more Chinese words and sentences.

Love your videos. I'm currently on that road, driving the crappy car that is current learning methods. I can relate to everything you mentioned in your video. I am not afraid to throw down some of what I've learned to a native Chinese speaker. I've always been interested in language. I'm probably going to sign in to the Mandarin Blueprint in the coming months. Thanks 👍

homonyms - same meaning (not same writing)- homophone = same sound (not necessarily same writing) homograph = same writing (with different meaning) - Chinese has not only homophones, but also homographs.

You have to have fun learning any language.

I'm actually learning Japanese in the moment, and this thing about how learning the ideographic characters actually makes the whole thing much easier is actually really counterintuitive. I remember before doing it I actually thought the opposite would be true.

I think another reason is how it is taught. Instead of translating it in Chinese order everyone puts it in English order.

such great advice but i have to say that i always expect to see a course of some sort being promoted in these sorts of videos lol, makes me doubt everything tbh

Awesome video. I need this for learning Hindi. Including pictures of tongue position for the four T and four D sounds in Hindi.

had I been at home without stress I would excel at Chinese or or German Russian -if I took them

By contract, the Chinese language is surely weird.

When you said “our data shows” it triggered some Chinese that I’ve heard over and over again I don’t have keyboard on my phone but zi’liao xian’shi

"100 characters a day easily" I give up.

Hahahaha. You said that spanish is easy to learn? Trata de conjugar el verbo "tener" en este espacio y te cuento cómo de bien lo hiciste.

saying "oh shî" has never been more funny

I am polyglot - I speak 5 languages: one of Moroccan berber language, Classical Arabic, French, Spanish, English). Few years ago, I started learning Turkish from their drama/music - i understand 60% of the conversation- I still have a lot to learn but I stopped putting effort into it about 2 months ago because I accidentally discovered kdrama and surprisingly I liked it- I found myself trying to learn Korean without a second though hhhh- I started watching videos like these but they make me frustrated- my ultimate goal (was an old desire) is to learn Chinese, but finding myself getting drawn to learn Korean is making me worry. I don’t know if learning Korean will help me eventually learn chinese better or make it easier yo learn. Some people say, learning Japanese is more helpful to learn first before learning Chinese, but I have no desire putting time and effort into it (Japanese). I am wondering if learning Korean will have any advantage as far as learning chinese? Any idea? Thank you in advance

totally wonderful

Can you please say I love you at normal speed? I am having difficulties finding it said naturally. It is always slowed down for us stupid Americans 😂

Very high quality commentary.

about chinese media - my chinese teacher back in high school used to play us an episode of a chinese drama every week and it was so useful :D we had to get out a notebook and write down any words we recognized while watching. there are sooo many of them and all the teenage girls loved the romance dramas, it really helped

Jesus gotta be tired of my western ass calling his name every 10 secs when I'm learning Chinese

I am on 6:00 of this video and before I continue to watch I have to say your pronunciation is excellent.

As somebody currently learning Japanese (and about to travel to Japan for the first time in 2 days) there's a lot of good advice here that's universal to learning any language. I myself found that it boils down to personal commitment: if you're just going through the motions and expecting some tangible outcome then yes it's going to be a long and miserable process. However if you tackle it from a perspective that works for you the process is going to feel much more worthwhile. Ultimately it boils down to how willing are you to venture outside your comfort zone and cast aside your preconceptions of how language works based on your mother tongue.

In some respect Chinese is easier than English or Spanish: 1. There's only 4 verb tenses whereas English has 12 2. Verb forms stay the same regardless of subject pronoun, not so in English. Ex: I AM, you ARE, he IS. 3. There's no gender in nouns, whereas in Spanish all nouns are feminine or masculine (totally unnecessary) 4. Nouns, adjectives, adverbs are combined. Ex: beauty (noun), beautiful (adjective), beautifully (adverb). In Chinese all that is expressed with one word: mei. 5. There's no need for plurals, unless specifically needed. English ex: I caught 3 fish (plural is understood).

谢谢老师！

I am studying chinese now and have a hard time finding native speakers to chat with.

Thank you for demystifying the process. Do you produce similar videos for native Mandarin Chinese speakers seeking help with English pronunciation?

I love memory palaces and I hope you don’t mind my mentioning it, Anthony Metivar is the magician with these. I use it for Lao but Lao is easier for me because I had already learned some Chines and love the magic and Mandarin. A felt the grammar has a logic to it and it is not that different to English really. It has amazing logic and beauty to it. I am impressed with your work as it has a natural logic to it also. I studied at University for 2 years and still could barely speak it but it has given me the skeleton to hand flesh on, so as to speak. But I learned by tackling big books that were bilingual. I learned to read it quickly. But I haven’t studied for 14 years and only now, living in Lao, I am motivated to learn again and have the advantage of having lots of Chinese visitors here now. Thanks for being inspiring. I am just about to start with it again.

8:20-8:45 for a second I thought there are some connections between the different meanings of shi - like shi4 (city) and shi4 (market) - I believe it comes from the same idea that every city in China has a marketplace. Many other words like mai3 to buy and mai4 to sell, I believe the sound mai at the beginning was something like "to trade" and later it became more specific and mai3 became to buy and mai4 to sell. But it's only my observation and never found any research study that would confirm my thesis.

My earliest run in over something Chinese was in Korea a guy in front of me in a Seoul market place called the Korean vendor, Chinese, hilarity ensued after that 😂😂😂 all I heard were shouts of “I no Chinee! YOU Chinee!👉 and lost of things breaking & someone running in the opposite direction. Fun memories 😂 but at the time, it kind of did get me to look into China because I wanted to know what that reaction was all about.

You know what is crazy, English has tones itself, many! But we are not taught etymology and English History, we are taught vocabulary and pronouncing words by repotition and by commands as it's just the way we do it, so it! But most by parroting parents accents.. wood and whould as totally different tones, even without the accent of questioning

Level 1 language. Who gave them levels, on what criteria.

I wanna ask something. When you learn chinese words, do you learn all the pinyin first then memorize the hanzi. Or do you learn both of them at the same time?🙏🏻

If it's any consolation I am chinese speak cantonese, can read & write chinese, 10 yrs & still can't master mandarin ( due to lack of practice ) !!!!

I guess horses has a specific measure word beacuse of the importance of horses in ancient china

Thank you. You give me hope to get my Chinese back on track❤️I loved learning chinese

I think it is fun to write characters over and over again until they are burned into my memory😁

It took the native Chinese speakers years to learn enough characters.

5:04 scariest moment

Tempting to start learning. I speak mandarin at home but I speak like an 8 year old whenever the topic is about work, girlfriends, psychology and complicated topics with my dad. Sometimes I just blurt out 中文不会说！ 你为什么不会英文!!!!! 😡😡😡 to my dad 😂😂😂😂! Can’t read as well, I’m using voice recognition for the above characters.

A lot goes into acquiring another language!😊