Linh self studies Chinese again - preparation, trial and error

A quiet afternoon, an urge to learn Chinese resurfaced. I feel like English isn’t enough anymore, it doesn’t grant me any advantages in my career. I love German, but I feel the job pool related to German in VN is small. And if you mean moving to work in Germany, to be honest, I am not ready to leave my family with such huge distance. I asked for advice from ChatGPT and my friend, the conclusion is Chinese suits me. And ChatGPT enlightened me about the approach, that I crave the depth of Chinese culture, not the industrial, shallow “nihao”. You know what I mean, the green owl!

I planned to write this post in Vietnamese first, but ChatGPT suggested me to write a post a week to enhance my English writing skill, so here we are.

Methodology

Because my energy level is low, and I spent most of them at work, so the friction is too much I can’t bear. I want it to be short but still meaningful. To do that, I must have a clear methodology and schedule.

I don’t know if using the word “methodology” here is a suitable word, but let’s see, lol. First, we will list out the methods we can use to learn:

Method	Choose?	Reason
Offline courses	❎	transportation and high cost
Online courses	❎	can’t absorb video content
Self-learning apps	✔️	it’s affordable and suitable with Linh’s style
Reading	✔️	I love reading and it suits with my inspiration to learn Chinese
Speaking	⚪	I don’t figure out a good way to practice this yet

Research on Materials

Ok, let’s move on the materials I will use to study Chinese.

Apps

From the recommendations of ChatGPT and blogs on Internet or apps on Play Store. I tried various of app and here is my summarization.

App	Choose?	Reason
Duolingo	❎	The app has become villain, shallow and the premium version doesn’t worth it
Busuu	❎	I bought a year subscription to learn German, but it doesn’t built to teach Chinese, lack a lot of important parts
Memrise	✔️	I have lifetime version so I just continue using it, it’s useful to extend vocabulary
Anki	❎	I need to collect the decks… it’s just costing too much effort to start learning
HelloChinese	❎	I tried it for a few days, it’s solid but I choose SuperChinese instead
SuperChinese	✔️	I bought lifetime version of it, it teaches pinyin, strokes, grammar,… I think it has enough abilities to become the main structure to study
Todaii Chinese	✔️	main reason is I bought its lifetime version, lol. I think it provides various Chinese reading content without my effort to find

Buying SuperChinese Tip

For annual subscription, you can wait for sale, it can be lower to 500-600k. For lifetime subscription, buying on SuperChinese Vietnam website is cheapter.

Others

Serious learning always demands textbooks, I believe so. So I bought a grammar textbook, a writing guidebook and a blank notebook to practice.

Why I buy these books? First, they are affordable, they are thin and accomplish-able! Notice that I am self-studying, so reducing friction is important. But currently I rarely open my books, this is a point I need to plan and improve in the future. Will tell you the result in upcoming posts.

In-Action

The principle I will apply is: habit. I won’t dedicate a solid time block for learning but I will do it daily and try to reach minutes goal.

The core of the learning is SuperChinese app. I will try to learn on this app for about 20 minutes/day.

Then Memrise, the expectation will be a revision and a new lesson. TodaiiChinese will be used to do mock exam and learn hsk1 new word daily from an article.

At every weekend, I will do mock exam on TodaiiChinese to have a good reflection on my current level.

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Hopefully in next post, I will tell you about reaching HSK1 with mock exam.

P/S: I tried to ask ChatGPT to help me fix the grammar errors in this post but I can’t complete all, tell me if you have any advice 😉.