What Really Are The Best Ways To Learn Chinese?
Tip 1 – Make Friends with Chinese People
This is a brilliant way to expand your horizons, not just regarding the Chinese language, but the culture as well.
You’ll be learning without even realising and it’s actually great fun.
Sharing dinner, going to a bar or just a casual Sunday afternoon stroll discovering China.
You cannot go wrong when making friends with locals. Our homestay option is a great way of doing this where you can live with a Chinese family and build life long friendships.
Tip 2 – Get a Chinese Boyfriend/Girlfriend
Take things one step further and get yourself in a relationship with a Chinese partner!
Preferably your partner will speak little English.
The less they speak, the more you’ll learn.
Clearly you probably won’t likely pick your partner based on this criteria but it’ll benefit your Chinese skills hugely, and we can guarantee that! If things go well between you, even better!
Tip 3 – Study on the Move
Let’s face it, we are in a day and age where anything and everything is accessible right at our fingertips.
The joys of the smartphone allow us to study Chinese like never before.
Take advantage of your metro journey or spend some time with your feet up taking in information, the freedom of studying on your phone is invaluable and should be taken advantage of.
Tip 4 – Master the Tones
As you’ll see below, learning the tones in Chinese is essential and should not be neglected.
It’s a different concept to what most are used to but it isn’t as tough as you may think.
Although it isn’t an exact tip on the best way to learn Chinese per-say, it is something you have to overcome.
Tip 5 – Immerse Yourself
In our opinion, this is the best way to learn Chinese and something we always talk about!
If you are on a tight schedule, let’s say in need of a certain level of Chinese for a new job, then immersion in China is the single most important thing to achieve.
Getting caught in the “foreign bubble” in China is an easy thing to do in the bigger cities like Shanghai and Shenzhen, so immersion is far easier to achieve visiting somewhere like Chengde.
This is where the most standard Mandarin is spoken throughout the whole of China and Taiwan and you will not find an Irish Pub or Burger King here.