Making Chinese a Part of Your Life

Mandarin has a reputation as being too difficult to learn. Learning any new language will present challenges, but with the right study habits these can be overcome. 

There should be two parts to your study plan, focused study and reinforcement through your environment. Focused study is the part that you are probably already familiar with. You attend class or meet with your private teacher, go over some new words and dialogues, dissect a couple grammatical points, and practice applying all of these things independent of the textbook. Focused study with a teacher and textbook is a fundamental part of learning any new language, but in order to retain these things, you must make them a part of your life.

Here are some ways to bring Mandarin Chinese into your daily life:

1. Make Chinese flash cards. Digital flash cards can be great, but don’t underestimate the usefulness of having physical reminders of Chinese in your daily environment.

2. Use flashcards to label all of the items in your apartment, dorm room, or house. Label your front door with mén (门) and your bathroom with xǐshǒujiān (洗手间literally: wash hands room). This is especially helpful if you can label all of the foods in your kitchen. Within a few weeks, you should have no problem remembering the names of household items.

3. Even if you don’t use Google Chrome as your default browser, the new Language Immersion extension for Chrome is great for automatically including Chinese into your normal web browsing. Simply turn on the extension, select the level of immersion that you want, and the Chinese translation of certain words will automatically replace the original text. This is helpful because you will automatically have more Chinese in your life without changing your normal web browsing.

1. On the other hand, if you are a bit more advanced and frequently find yourself on Chinese websites, definitely check out the Perapera Chinese Popup Dictionary add-on for Firefox. Just mouse over the Chinese character and a translation will automatically appear. These are the kind of pop-ups that the internet could use more of.

There are many other ways that you can incorporate Chinese into your life. The most important part is to use Chinese as often as possible and in different ways. Using a language comfortably, in many different situations is the definition of fluency, so get started today!

How do you use Chinese in your everyday life? Join the conversation on Facebook and share your tips with the Mandarin House community!