[0:00]I would like you to close your eyes if you can, if it's safe to do so, and imagine that you are standing outside your home. Have a look around and try and remember, recall as many details as you possibly can. Maybe even touch the wall or the floor or a car, anything that's nearby you to try and interact a little bit with the environment. Now, I want you to imagine that Neo from the Matrix is standing next to you. And next to Neo is famous actor Gary Oldman. Don't worry, there's a reason for all this. Gary Oldman pulls out a giant syringe. In fact, this syringe is so big, it's about the same size as him. And the syringe is filled with this bright green liquid. Mr. Oldman then takes the syringe and shoves it into the ground. So it stands up all by itself. So from your perspective, you have Neo on the left, Gary Oldman in the middle and the syringe on the right. Then suddenly, you see Neo get a look of determination in his face, and he jumps in the air, lands on Gary Oldman, jumps off Gary Oldman's head and lands on the syringe, injecting this green liquid into the ground. When the green liquid goes into the ground, you feel the whole ground begin to shake and rumble. And then you look down and you realize that the Earth is changing into desert. So what was asphalt, road, dirt, whatever it was before, is now become sand. And you see cacti popping up everywhere. Then you look over at Neo and Gary Oldman, and they look very thirsty and hot, and they drop to their knees, grabbing their throats, gasping for a glass of water. So you just learned how to read, write, and pronounce with the correct tone a Chinese character, believe it or not. And I'll explain how as we get further into this video. If you want to become fluent in Chinese, the best way to do that is to get lots and lots of comprehensible input. Now, the best way to make input comprehensible in Chinese is to learn Chinese characters. Now, to reach a very high level of Chinese, you will need around 3,000 characters. And the big problem for Chinese learners is that the methods out there for learning characters are either really boring, really ineffective, or both. But in this video, I'm going to teach you an amazing technique using memory palaces that will allow you to learn any Chinese character in under 60 seconds. Many of the members of our course, the Mandarin Blueprint Method are using this technique to learn 30, 40, 50, even 100 characters every single day. And the best part is, literally anyone can do this method. I know some of you might have heard the words memory palaces and got a little bit intimidated. Don't worry. You don't need to be super imaginative or creative. You just need to follow the instruction I'm going to lay out for you in just a moment. So first, some backstory on this. I was struggling big time with Chinese like most people do, right? For my first year, I made almost zero progress despite investing at least a thousand hours into all sorts of traditional methods. But I finally at one point woke up to the idea that I need to get comprehensible input. I knew I needed to learn how to read first, because that's the most comprehensible form of input, it's a bit easier than listening. So I decided to learn 3,000 characters as quickly as possible. Google told me that the most effective method was something called Remembering the Simplified Hanzi 1 by Heisig and Richardson. Now, the Heisig method, as it's known in the Chinese learning community, is pretty cool. Like there's some good parts about the method, but there's also some pretty massive flaws that I noticed after learning about 50 or so characters. So the method is powered by visualization, mnemonic visualization. So imagining things in your head that represent elements of the character to help you remember the character. So components or primitives as Heisig calls it, are represented by objects or people/animals that have a connection to that object based on the appearance or the meaning. Then the method gives you a story for each character that involved these objects and you have to imagine them in different scenarios that represent the keyword in some way. It works. Don't get me wrong. It's the second best method out there. But one of the big flaws is, first of all, it doesn't teach you pronunciation at all, it just teaches you how to remember the look of the character. Pronunciation is a huge part of the language and connecting reading with listening is absolutely vital for like efficient comprehension. So if you just learn the characters and not the pronunciation, you have to just go back at the beginning and fill in the blanks somehow, and Heisig doesn't really help with that. Another gripe I have with this method is that it only gives you one story and doesn't really teach you that well how to create your own stories. So you're kind of a lot of the time stuck with Heisig and Richardson's stories, their suggestions, which aren't that great sometimes. And if one story doesn't gel with you, well, you're just kind of out of luck. But the genius part about this method is the order of the characters. He groups the characters by component. So you'll learn a component or a primitive and you'll think of an object to represent that, then you'll learn a bunch of characters that are relatively common that will use that particular component. The idea is absolutely brilliant and we actually used it as inspiration to create our own order of characters for the Mandarin Blueprint Method. So after my disappointment with the Heisig method, I decided to do a bit more research and see if I could think of a way to enhance the method myself by adding elements that would also allow me to memorize the pronunciation of the characters as well as the characters themselves. And in my search, I stumbled upon this TED Talk by a guy called Joshua Foer. I think that's how you pronounce it. He's a journalist who investigated memory athletes, those guys that can memorize thousands of digits of pi or decks and decks of cards in like seconds. And then regurgitate them perfectly. Joshua decided to learn the technique himself, which he did, and in the space of one year, Joshua mastered these techniques and actually won a memory championship. Pretty amazing, right? It's very inspiring to know that it's just a technique that anyone can learn. And no matter what they're learning these memory champions, whether it's digits of pi, decks of cards, lines from a sonnet or a speech, they all have the same thing in common, all these different techniques, which is people, objects, places, and actions. So they'll map out different elements of what they want to learn to these people, objects, places, and actions. So, for example, for playing cards, the Queen of Diamonds might be your auntie who represents a Queen, and then the Diamond might be represented by a location that you know well at your local store. So if one of these memory athletes wanted to memorize the Queen of Diamonds, for example, very, very quickly, they just quickly imagine their auntie in their local store, and then they go onto the next card. At this point, I started getting very excited. I was considering creating my own method from scratch that would use the Heisig method and enhance it and map it out to the Pinyin chart. So I could learn the pronunciation of these cards as well and the tone. As I was about to get started on this, I realized that someone had already beat me to it way back in 2012. A guy called Serge Gorodish, who created a blog post about something called the Marilyn method. And what he had done is mapped out people and places to the Pinyin chart to represent the Pinyin initials and finals. And he'd used locations within those places that he knew to represent the tones. And I actually used this method, the Marilyn method, to learn 3,000 characters in six months and remember everything easily with just about 30 or 45 minutes a day. And that includes reviewing time. In fact, Mandarin Blueprint co-founder Phil Crimmins and myself, both got to 3,000 characters at around the same time, learned to read and started getting lots of comprehensible input. And we both went from really struggling and not really making any progress and being essentially beginners to passing the HSK6 in around six months. So this method for learning characters combined with all the other cool stuff we've been learning about, teaching people what we knew, and at the same time developing our own curriculum for mastering Chinese faster. We further enhanced the Marilyn method and added some different techniques and different aspects, as well as lots of memory athletic techniques based on our research to it, to make it even more efficient and effective. And we ended up creating a new version of the Marilyn method that we call the Hanzi movie method. So without further ado, let's get into it. So the first thing you need to know about this method is what is mapped to what, right? There's lots of things we need to know about a Chinese character to fully master it. We need to know the Pinyin initial, the Pinyin final, the tone, and we need to know the components within the character. But not only that, we need to know and memorize the position of the components within the character, and of course, we also need to know the meaning of the character. Now, many characters have multiple meanings, but don't worry, we just choose the most common meaning and learn that first, and you can build upon the other pronunciations and meanings by guessing comprehensible input later on. So remember, we've got four different things, people, objects, places, and actions, that we're going to associate with different elements of Chinese characters. Let's start with people. We like to call them actors. Remember the movie method. We're making movies here in our mind, that's how we like to see it. So the people that we choose are actors. So people are going to be representing the Pinyin initials within the Pinyin chart. Objects in this method are going to represent the character components. We like to call them props. Then the third category of places are going to be buildings from your life. Could be your home, could be your workplace, could be your local library or gym. Literally any building you like, those are going to represent Pinyin finals, and we like to call those sets. Actors, props, sets. And then finally, we have actions, which is where it all comes together. You're going to have your actor interact with props within your set, and that's going to represent the keyword or the definition of the character. Now, the creator of the Marilyn method did something very smart with the Pinyin chart in order for this method to work really, really well. Now, in the standard Pinyin chart, there are only 21 initials, so 21 people that we'd have to imagine, but 38 finals. It's much easier to imagine people from your life than it is to imagine actual places. What this guy did, though, was tweak the Pinyin chart so there are less finals and more initials. So this is the changes that have been made to the Pinyin chart. Check this out. If you look at the very top of the Pinyin chart, you'll see that we actually have 38 finals in total. But if you look closer, you'll see that we actually really only have 13, and they are the finals associated with A, E, and O. And then for I, U, and U, essentially these 13 finals are just duplicated but with the I or the U or the U in front of them. So, for example, we have ao as a final, but then we just have ao. It's just E with ao next to it, right? We also have A, but then we have just a. That that whole final is just A but with a U in front of it. As a final example, we have the E final, but we also have. That's just A, that's just the E final but with a U in front of it. So what this guy did, though, was tweak the Pinyin chart so there are less finals and more initials.
[11:06]So what we're left with is 13 finals and four different categories of initial. Now what this did was it took away the final for all of these new initials, so they have nowhere to be. But for this method to work, for this people, objects, places, actions technique to work, you must have a person and a place. Now, this guy called it the null final. What is null? Well, it's just the symbol that you see in the Pinyin chart that represents nothing. So we just created this extra null final set or location or building. So all these new initials have a place to act out their movie scenes when you're learning a character with their pronunciation. So this section of the Pinyin chart here is the biggest, and it involves those original 13 finals. Now, you'll also notice that R over here has a null final, too. And the reason why R has a null final is because it's just kind of a wild card anyway, even in normal Pinyin. So you don't want to have to basically imagine an entirely new set or building from your life, or create an entire memory palace just for this one relatively rare pronunciation. So we've also given that the null final, too. If this at all is starting to sound convoluted or confusing right now, do not worry. You will completely get this method after between 5 and 10 characters. Once you see some examples, it will all be very clear. So before we get into those examples, let me just go through the four different categories of actor that we've now got. So in this section, all of the initials you see here on the left are going to be represented by male people, right? That could be real or fictional. So an F would be some male connected to the letter F. So this could be Frank Sinatra, could be Henry Ford, or even could be Phil Collins, right? So yeah, it's not the same spelling but it sounds like, right? Just anything connected with that is fine, just helps you remember it. And if you were learning a character with the pronunciation FANG, F. A. N. G, well, you would imagine say, Phil Collins in your A. N. G. location. Whatever building from your life, you decided to attach to A. N. G. and we'll get into how to do that very shortly. One quick thing about this group of male actors, though, is you'll you'll notice at the very top left, you'll see the null symbol again. If you look at the finals on this line, technically, in Pinyin, they all of these finals do not have an initial. So A, I, O, any character with this pronunciation technically doesn't have an initial. And these are the only 13 pronunciations in the entire language without an initial. But we need to have people and places and objects and actions for this system to work. So we've also given this a null actor. Now, this could be anyone, but we like to suggest someone incredibly famous, very well known to you. So, for me, I like Bruce Lee, or Jackie Chan, like just because they're like globally famous and also I know them very, very well. But you go ahead and choose whoever it really doesn't matter. This second category are females. E, B, P, me, etc. These are all female actors. These could, of course, be real or fictional again. And this third category here, the or, etc., they will all be animated. So you can attach any animated character and imagine them in your mind's eye. So when you want to learn a character, for example, for, you might imagine Bugs Bunny. If you want to learn a character with the pronunciation SHU, then you would imagine Shrek or someone else connected to SH and they would, of course, be in the null set. And finally, we have this fourth category here, and the original creator gave this the category of gods. Just to make sure that they were distinct from the other three categories. And we started off doing that too, but over hundreds of hours of teaching this to people, we got so many cool ideas for people that couldn't imagine gods very easily. Because there's not that many, right? And you might not know much about Greek mythology or Roman mythology, and to be honest, I'm not really an expert on that either, and I always found that quite difficult, even though there's only six people to imagine. So, over the years, we've had so many people come back with with ideas for like, oh, I want to imagine rock bands. Or people in this category are only actors or characters from Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, right? And another student who imagined communist leaders for this particular one. So he imagined like Stalin, Mao, you know. So what we've now labeled this as is a wild card. So go ahead and choose gods, or rock stars, or Harry Potter characters, whatever you want for this particular one. It's only six people you have to imagine anyway. So, one question you might have is, why are we imagining four different groups of people? Well, it's simply for ease of access to the method. Because you can now look at a pronunciation and listen to how it sounds. If it sounds like this, it's going to be a female doing something. If it sounds like this, it's going to be an animated character, like a, for example, it's like do plus A, which is going to be a fictional actor. If it sounds like, it's got that sound in it, it's going to be that fourth wild card category. And by the way, if you want to swap the men and the women around, please go ahead and do that. I just personally stuck with the men first, then the women because generally, I find men easier to imagine. But you might have more females that you can imagine easier, so go ahead and switch those around, it really doesn't matter. So the idea is you choose all of these 55 actors and then you move on and choose all the sets. Now, as for sets, what you can do is just write down all the buildings from your life that you know well. So you need at least 13, right? But you can write down as many as you can. Now, these buildings, you don't have to know every single brick. You don't have to know the color of the curtains. You just have to know roughly what it looks like inside. And the best sets are sets that you have a lot of episodic memory inside of. So your childhood home, for example, is your, for most people, the most powerful set, because that has the most episodic memory. Episodic memory is just basically memory from different episodes of your life, and it's packed with emotion, and emotion is the key that makes this method work really, really well. But it doesn't have to be super emotional. Just imagine like if you if you know a store that you go into like every every week or a couple of times a week, just you can just pick that. All these different houses you've lived in, friends' houses, family's houses, workplaces that you've stayed in, maybe not workplaces because you'll be spending a lot of time in them, maybe you spend enough time in them as it is. But you could also imagine your your local gym. Just write out a bunch of buildings that you know. And then you can just attach the spellings to them. So, oh, I've just decided my gym is my A place. And because there's only 13 places, you can pretty much memorize this by rote. But in our course, we like to go the extra mile, so what we've done is laid out some mnemonics you can use to actually connect to your sets quicker. So, for example, there's a bunch of words with A in them. So you just go through this list of A words, and as soon as you have a connection with any of the locations that you wrote down, that is now your A place. And just do that with all the 13 sets. What this does, it just gets the memory of that place, that spelling connected with the location cemented in your brain faster. What this does, it just gets the memory of that place, that spelling connected with the location cemented in your brain faster. What this does, it just gets the memory of that place, that spelling connected with the location cemented in your brain faster. What this does, it just gets the memory of that place, that spelling connected with the location cemented in your brain faster.
[18:27]We've found over the years of doing this that half of our members prefer choosing their actors and sets first before starting, and the other half tend to choose as they go. So, whichever you fancy. Now, as for the objects and the actions, well, you've already had a taste of that with my example movie scene towards the beginning of this video. So we had Neo with Gary Oldman outside the front of your home, and they were doing something with a syringe, right? Do you remember what happened? I'm guessing you remember quite a bit of that scene, if not everything about that scene. The character you learned during that movie scene was GAN, which means dry in Chinese. Maybe that gives you a clue as to why we imagined a desert, right? Now, this character could be split up in a couple of different ways, but we split it up like this. E at the top, that means number one in Chinese, this horizontal line, and this cross, which represents number 10 in Chinese. So Neo represented number one, because he is the one, right? And the syringe was representing the number 10 there, the cross shape. As you can see, you can represent props by either the meaning or appearance of the component. As you can see, when you're choosing props, you can do it based on the components' appearance or the meaning, it's completely up to you. So for this E, for example, you could have imagined a cigar, or you could have imagined something connected to the number 10. So, for example, a bowling pin, you know, 10 pin bowling, or you might have imagined Maradona or Pele, some sort of famous athlete with number 10 on their jersey. Or you might have imagined Prime Minister of England because number 10 Downing Street. It really doesn't matter, and the amazing thing about this method is that you're going to be choosing your own associations, which makes it so much more powerful. Now you can also just go with mine, that's absolutely fine, and a lot of beginners of our method like to do that. Now as for the location and the people, you might have already kind of guessed that Gary Oldman was related to the pronunciation. This character is pronounced GAN, so that's G, so that's Gary Oldman. That's just someone that I find very memorable, he's just one of my favorite actors. So I chose him. That place, that building that you imagined is now your AN set. But the cool information here is where you were in that building and what that means. You see, there's a reason why I asked you to imagine yourself outside the entrance of your home specifically, not in the living room, not in the bathroom, outside the entrance. So in the driveway or something like that, it's because GAN is a first tone. And tones in this method are represented by where you are within the set. So first tone is represented by outside the entrance, second tone is represented by the hallway or the kitchen. Third tone is represented by living room or one of the bedrooms. And the fourth tone is represented by a backyard or one of the toilets. Now, when it comes to imagining like a gym or a library, you might not have a living room to imagine, right? But just choose something that's equivalent in your opinion. You decide on where your boundaries are for your different tones within your sets. Now, finally, the most important part of this whole thing, actions, the script as we like to call it. Bringing it all together, making your actor interact with the props in that specific location to represent the keyword meaning or the definition of the character. This is often where beginners stumble or get intimidated because it involves creativity to some degree. But it's super simple if you allow it to be. The key thing to remember here is just think of the definition, that is where you're trying to get to as quickly as possible, whilst you are interacting with all of the different elements in this scene at some point. So, for example, I had Neo and the syringe, and I had Gary Oldman, and I had to think of a way of combining these things together to represent dry. And the easiest way to do this is to just draw off of your own knowledge and experience about how the world works, and then apply a bit of logic to it. So, for example, what does a syringe do? A syringe injects stuff. Now, I didn't really want to inject people, right? I didn't feel like doing that. But I just decided to inject it into the ground, and I don't know why I gave it green liquid, to be honest. Just because like, I guess it stands out a bit. Things are like bright and shiny, they sort of stand out. What does Neo do? Well, he can beat people up a lot, and he can fly, and he can jump. And I've seen all the Matrix movies, so I'm just like, okay, well, he's going to jump on Gary Oldman. What does Gary Oldman doing? Not much, really. I mean, he's just there. As long as he's interacting with something or being interacted with at some point, then he's going to be memorable to me. So I just had him pick up the syringe, put it in the ground, and then I had Neo jump on him. And this was all leading to the finale, which was make it into a desert. Make what I'm seeing here into a desert. And that represented dry to me. And just to hammer it home, I had Neo with Gary Oldman both sort of clutching their throats, like, give me a drink of water. And that represents dry even more, right? Just to make sure it's absolutely clear. So the way I like to imagine this is, imagine that you're doing this for the cheap seats way back in the cinema. You have to make everything you're doing really obvious and clear to yourself. Like you can make certain things stand out, like the green liquid inside the syringe. You can add very clear sound effects. That's like another layer of memory you can add to the scene. Or even theme music. You can have certain songs playing that represent aspects of what you're trying to learn. You can even add explosions and do that extra violent stuff if you want. Like I said, you really don't have to, but if you find it helps you, you can go ahead and do that too.
[24:06]So, if you follow the key principles about this method that I've laid out for you, and you add in a few of those special effects from time to time, you'll be able to make super memorable scenes, no matter what props or actors you have, or where wherever you are, what your sets are, you'll be able to make memorable movie scenes every single time in literally seconds. It takes about 60 seconds at first, maybe 2 minutes, but once you get used to this, it can literally take 10, 5 seconds to get this whole thing done in your mind, and you can move on to the next character. So speaking of which, we'll do some extra characters in just a second, but what about if for that last one, we didn't have Neo, we had a cigar. What about if we didn't have Hellboy, we had, I don't know, a deer with antlers, right? Well, even with those completely different props, instantly, I can just imagine what those things would do to represent half very quickly and easily, based on the properties I know those have. So I know what a deer does, I'm very familiar with deer, my son watches Bambi at least twice a week on his TV days, on weekends, he watches Bambi constantly and Paddington, too. So I have a lot of personal experience with deer, and also cigars, I know what they do. I'll imagine a big cigar that's burning and smoking, just so it's doing something fun and interesting. So I would imagine, for example, my actor taking a big puff of this cigar, it's a giant cigar, and it's burning very hot with lots of smoke, and then the deer jumps on top of the syringe, and he's actually, because he's, he's a deer, what is a deer like? Well, deer are very timid and scared and very careful. So I would imagine that the deer is kind of like, he wants to stay up there because he's hiding from my actor, he doesn't want to come down. So the actor wants him to come down, and he burns the syringe in half, causing it to fall kind of like a tree, and then the the deer sort of falls off and runs away. Right? So I just imagined that up the top of my head, and I'm sure you at home would have probably thought of a different way, maybe even a more memorable, better way of interacting with those particular props in that particular scene, right? That's what makes this great. Again, it's all personal to you. You make your own associations based on the principles that I've just taught you, and that's what makes these scenes extra, super memorable because you're drawing off your life experience. Maybe a maybe a deer to you isn't so timid because you haven't seen Bambi. Maybe a deer for you is more you live in the rural countryside, and they're more like attacking your cars and stuff, something you have to be careful of when you're driving around. So you would have maybe a different scene than I would. Do you see what I mean? So by this point, you're probably on your way to mastering this technique already. So I'm going to go through a couple more characters quickfire, and let's see what you can come up with yourself. Maybe you can pause the video if you want, or you can do it with me real time. This next character we're going to learn is Jen. It's yet another male actor. Sorry, ladies. Uh, connected to the letter R with E. N. And we're going to have to think of a new set that's connected to the spelling E. N. For now, don't worry about the whole making mnemonics to remember that aspect of it. Just choose another random place. Go ahead and choose another house that you're familiar with. I would recommend you leave your childhood home to the null final because that's going to be the most common final you're going to use. So just choose a separate thing like one of your family's homes or your friend's home or maybe a workplace or a gym. Just go ahead and choose that now. Don't overthink it. And imagine that you're standing in the kitchen of that place or the equivalent. Just decide on what the equivalent is. If it's a gym, for example, imagine that you're standing inside the entrance when you first walk in, or the equivalent of the lobby, right? For this one, we've got two brand new props. This stroke on the left is going to be represented by a samurai sword, or a samurai warrior. And if you want to take that further, you could even have specifically Tom Cruise's character from The Last Samurai if you want, right? I'm just going to go with the samurai sword to keep it simple. And on the right, this stroke is going to be represented by a banana. Now, we need to represent the idea of person. That's what this word means, it means person. And you might think, what? How do I how am I supposed to do this? Well, what represents person to you? I immediately think of Adam and Eve, but you could imagine say a mannequin, like one of those mannequins that artists use to draw, it represents a person. Whatever your representation is, that's where we're going. So I'm just going to go with the naked man and woman with the leaf covering everything that in my mind represents Adam and Eve to my brain, right? And that's where I'm going to get to. So, okay, we've got a samurai sword and a banana. How are we going to get to Adam and Eve or one of those mannequins or whatever else you'd imagine? Hmm, well, easy. You imagine what a samurai sword does and what a banana does. What a samurai sword cuts stuff and a banana opens and it's got stuff inside, banana stuff.
[29:49]So, I would imagine my R actor, which for me has always been Robert Downey Jr. or one of his characters, like him as Iron Man or whatever, it doesn't matter. So I would imagine Robert Downey Jr. on the left, and then I would imagine on my right, a banana, just standing there, huge banana. Always make them big, by the way, so just easier to remember and to to see in your mind's eye. And then I would imagine him slicing the banana sort of down the middle and out pops Adam and Eve. There you go. That's the end of my scene. It's perfect. And then finally, I would just spice it up just a little bit, make it more memorable before I continue, by making sure that Robert Downey Jr. is reacting to what's going on in a very strong way. Reactions are very powerful. So then I would imagine as the sort of samurai sword is stuck in the banana, and then Adam and Eve come out, and then Robert Downey Jr. leaves the sword in the banana and just sort of sits back on the floor, like, in shock. Like, what the heck's going on? Shock is just a really good one to use. The reason why I kept the sword in the banana is because that is the position of the two strokes. So it's kind of like the left side is on top of the right side. So I would imagine that the sort of samurai sword is sort of cutting into the banana there. So that helps me memorize the stroke order. Why am I going to that level of detail, and especially for such a simple character? Well, this is very important, actually, because there's a lot of characters that are look very similar, that learners of Chinese often find very difficult, even impossible to tell the difference between. But if you learn using this method, where you're very careful about how you position your props, you'll never have that problem. So, for example, there's another character that is essentially identical to this one, except the components are the other way around. It's called RU, which means enter in Chinese. So it's the same props, but instead of the samurai sword being on top of the banana, the banana's on top of the samurai sword. So it would be piercing the banana instead of cutting down into it. Do you see how important that is? And it only literally takes an extra millisecond or two to imagine these little details, and it makes so much difference to you later on when you go to recall the characters. So there you go, guys. That is the enhanced version of the Marilyn method or as we like to call it, the Hanzi movie method. There is a lot more to this method, but I don't want to make this video like two hours long. But if you would like to learn the method in its entirety, you can click below on one of the links and you'll be able to access our course, the Mandarin Blueprint Method, where you can actually get to 3,050 characters. Essentially native level understanding, pass the HSK9, learn like 12,000 words. That's the character method taken care of, but you still need a list of characters. And that brings me back to the order, which I mentioned a couple of times in this video, right? There was a reason why we went GAN, then BAN, then JEN, then TONG. These characters and components build upon each other in a logical way. And that's what I said earlier about the Heisig method, which I really liked, is the way they arranged the characters by component. The major downside, though, the way they did it was they did it over 3,000 characters. So they took the whole 3,000, and then they chunked them up by component instead of really focusing on frequency. That could be applied for beginners, intermediate, and advanced levels. So what I mean is, you'd have to wait until like more than 2,000 characters in to learn the character for NA, which means that in Chinese. So to combat this, Phil and I made our own order, which is the backbone of the entire Mandarin Blueprint curriculum.
[34:40]This curriculum first focuses on getting you from zero to the most common 600 characters, which unlocks 1,000 common words, and we also give you comprehensible sentences for every single usage of every single one of these words throughout, as well as a bunch of graded reading content, which you unlock as your level gets good enough. So that is the foundation course that'll get you to 600 characters. Then once you're done with that, you move on to the intermediate course, which will get you to 1500 characters, 94% of the language by coverage, and HSK6, the new one. Then once you're done with that, you move on to the upper intermediate and advanced course and get all the way to 3,050 characters and an HSK9 pass. Now, the cool thing about this, of course, is that you not only learn characters and components, you're also unlocking words as you go, and they're all based on frequency. And you'll see all these words in comprehensible context, both sentences and long form content as you go through. So you could take what you've learned today and just apply it to your own order of characters. If you're going to go that route, I highly recommend you just go and buy the Heisig book. Now, you should be able to get through those characters very quickly, applying what you've learned here. I'd say around about 150 to 200 hours worth of time, including reviews for your flash cards. You should be able to find somewhere a shared anki deck for the Heisig method. So you can go and choose your actors, choose your sets, and then go get the books, and go get that Anki deck and just get to work and get all the way to 3,000 as quickly as you possibly can. But if you would like what is, in our opinion, the absolute fastest, most efficient, most fun, and effective way, go ahead and check out the link in the description below, and you can start the Mandarin Blueprint method. Once you've got that course, you can just follow our videos and get to pretty much any level of Chinese you wish. So I want you to congratulate yourself, feel very happy right now. So if you're learning Chinese, you've just discovered that the hardest part about the entire language is now pretty much the easiest and the most fun. The next step in this process after you've learned how to learn characters is learning how to learn words, because you need a lot of words if you want to get to a high level of fluency one day. Check out this video right here where I walk you through our most effective mnemonic technique for mastering any Chinese word in just a few seconds. Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you in the next one. Bye bye.
