The 5 Stages of Learning Chinese (Most Quit at Stage 2)

[0:00]There are five stages that every Chinese learner seems to go through, and most people quit at stage two. Not because Chinese is impossible, of course, not because they're not smart enough, but because they don't know how to get through it. And as a result, they stay stuck jumping from resource to resource, going around in circles, thinking they are failing or that they're uniquely bad at this. And of course, they're not. They just lack the knowledge and experience they need to break through. And after learning Chinese myself and helping thousands of others do the same, I'm going to walk you through exactly what to expect at each stage. So that when you hit the hard parts, you'll know exactly what to do and when the breakthroughs do come, you'll be ready to ride the wave and push through to the next stage. This is the video I wish someone had shown me before I started. So, let's get started with stage one, the one that feels the best and sets the trap for everything that comes after. This is the fun part. Everything is new. You're learning your first characters, your first words. Tones feel tricky, but you know, you're hopeful, it's it's going to be manageable, and you're making visible progress every single day. It genuinely feels easier than you expected. Maybe you think Chinese isn't as hard as everyone says it is. This is the honeymoon stage. You learn a word or a phrase in the morning, and by the evening you still remember it. You can count to 10, you can introduce yourself, and through lots and lots of repetition, you're picking things up. This stage feels great, and there are a few reasons why. First, this might be your first time learning a second language, right? You don't really know what you're getting into. You're blissfully ignorant, as it were. Second, Chinese itself is so exotic and different from English. And the characters, the tones, the surprisingly simple grammar, it's also mysterious, and you're just kind of happy to be there, happy to be a part of it. It's kind of mesmerizing when you first start. And third, because you know so little, every single new word you do learn or new thing you learn is a massive percentage increase from what you already knew. So doubling your knowledge of Chinese takes very little time, and you're making visible, satisfying progress constantly. And that's the danger, because during the honeymoon phase, you'll put up with anything. Any method, any app, any course, it all seems to work and in a way it does in the short term. When I first started out, I did all of Pimsleur. That's hours and hours of listening and repeating over a few months. And you know what? It worked, kind of. I could have very basic conversations. I could get around in China, my first trip to China, it felt amazing. And then I moved to China and enrolled in group classes, got tutors. I learned Tang Dynasty poems in my beginner textbook. So mesmerized by those fancy squiggles, I didn't stop to ask why a beginner would need thousand year old poetry. The next day I learned random kitchen utensils, then I was told to write characters randomly over and over again by hand. I did that for a few days before stopping, but it didn't kill my motivation. None of this did. I just jumped to the next thing. Then I found memorized.com, two to three hours a day for 8 nine months. I learned thousands of words the completely wrong way, just staring at a Chinese word or phrase and clicking the English definition and saying, yep, got that. And then the other way around as well, seeing an English word and saying the Chinese. No context, no real character learning, no production. My honeymoon phase was especially long as well. It lasted an entire year. Most people's honeymoon phase maybe last days or weeks. Mine went on and on because I've been obsessed with Chinese and Chinese cultures since my teenage years. I was finally living in China, not just visiting. I was using what I'd learned every day, making friends and having adventures. I was young, I was in my early twenties with loads of energy and time to spare as well, so I had that advantage too. Plus I had a pretty relaxed job as well to boot. So all these advantages actually hurt me in the end, because I had such a long honeymoon phase as a result. I didn't realize how bad my learning actually was until a year in, a thousand hours of my life with very little to show for it in terms of language learning gains. And that's the trap. Bad methods don't feel bad at the beginning. They only reveal themselves later when you realize, huh, I've put in hundreds of hours, I've got a 647 day streak on this app and I can't actually understand Chinese or use what I've learned in any conversation confidently. The honeymoon phase masks bad methodology. You're so excited to be learning anything that you don't notice that you're just building on sand. So after a period of time that varies from person to person, something will shift. You'll wake up one morning to do your study routine and something just feels different. And that's when the crushing realization hits. So, you're still learning, you're still putting in the time, but that feeling of progress has lessened significantly. Words that you learned last week are slipping away. Characters start blurring together. You look at how much there is still to learn and feel overwhelmed to say the least. And really, the novelty has worn off at this point. You've been studying for months maybe. You finished that listen and repeat course. You got sick of that app, and now you don't know what to do. To take this to the next level to make some actual real progress, and it feels a bit scary, a bit lonely. You start thinking, oh, maybe I'm just not cut out for this. This is stage two, The Valley of Disappointment, and this is where most people quit, in my experience. This is the stage where your approach really starts to matter. So if you're following a structured system, learning the most common characters and words first, ideally using memory techniques like mnemonics, memory palaces to do it quickly and effectively. If you're getting tons of input with those words as well in context of sentences, like real Chinese sentences, lots of listening and reading practice every day. If you're doing retrieval practice, you know, actually speaking Chinese regularly, trying to produce what you've been learning, then this stage is temporary. But even with the right methodology, link in the description, you might feel like you're underwater at times during this stage. The words and characters that you are learning gradually become less common, less impactful on your overall coverage of the language, but the connections are falling. You just haven't reached that critical mess yet. But on the other hand, if you're like most people, kind of winging it, not using a very effective methodology, you're just using like random apps to learn Chinese or watching incomprehensible input videos on YouTube without building any real foundation or you aren't consistently following a structure that makes sense. You can stay stuck in stage two for years. So here's how to survive the valley. Number one, as I mentioned, make sure you're using the right approach, or approach that is actually proven scientifically to work like the one I just described to you, and make sure that you're doing the work consistently every single day, you're showing up and you're applying yourself. The second way to survive is to understand that this is supposed to happen, right? Everyone goes through it. You're not uniquely struggling. The valley is part of the process. Push through it, stay consistent. The third thing is to focus on the daily activities, not the distant goal. You want to have a long term goal, I think, you know, it's good, like something specific and challenging, like, I am at B2 level fluency by this date. It's a good goal to have and to review it regularly, but day-to-day, just focus on putting in the time on a balanced regimen. Every day you're learning characters, you're building that vocabulary, consuming sentences, you're repeating things out loud. You're doing some shadowing, some retrieval practice, some speaking practice. Just do something every day, even if it's just a small amount of something on a busy day. And this fourth piece of advice will make that consistency way easier. Design your environment, okay? So to quote James Clear from Atomic Habits, The more disciplined your environment is, the less disciplined you need to be. So remove friction from your daily home and work environment wherever you can. Keep your study materials ready, keep your learning space clean and organized, set notifications. Buy a pair of earbuds like these, so that whenever you have a gap in your day, you can just put the earbud in your ear and listen to Chinese. Just make showing up easy because motivation alone won't always carry you through. You can also try time-boxing where you set a timer anywhere from two to 25 minutes to work on a specific activity. Set a specific time each day for Chinese, no matter what. No zero days, even just five minutes counts. The climb out of this valley is stage three, and it's closer than you think. Now throughout stage two, there are lots of clicks and little wins. You know, your first character that stuck using memory techniques. Your first sentence you could actually read. The moment you realize that you were pronouncing things pretty well. The first time you shadowed a phrase or an entire sentence comfortably. And then there's a critical mass moment. You open your mouth and have a conversation in Chinese, a real one. You turn on a TV show and you can realize you understand a lot of what people are saying. You pick up a graded reader and you just smash your way through it effortlessly. This is stage three, The Breakthrough. You're no longer piecing the language together bit by bit. For the first time, there are moments where you actually feel genuinely comfortable. You're starting to understand and use instinctively grammar points that used to trip you up, like and guo. Not because you just memorized a rules, but because you've done so much sentence practice that you have a sense for it now. This stage feels like a relief, it feels like validation. You're really coming out of the valley now. You no longer feel disappointed with your progress, and you know that your time wasn't wasted. But here's the trap. At this stage, it's easy to coast. Think of it like a graph with green peaks and red troughs. Right now, you're on a green peak at the very top, which makes you comfortable, and comfort is dangerous. Because you're not fluent in Chinese yet. You're not where you want to be up here, but you've made so much progress through your hard work that you feel good about yourself, and you feel proud, and pride makes you want to relax. And if you want to break through from this first major breakthrough to actual fluency, you need to keep reminding yourself, you are not there yet. You're not good enough yet. Keep up with your studies. You've got to move onto stage four, so comfort doesn't kill your momentum. This next stage might be a bit like stage two in many ways. You're still kind of grinding. Overall progress can feel slower than it was before, but the difference is your perception. As long as you stay consistent and keep using the right methodology, you'll feel steady gains at this stage, not dramatic ones, but steady. And here's the game-changing difference, you can access more interesting materials now. This is stage four, the depth phase. You've built a solid foundation. You can comfortably watch some TV shows with maybe with subtitles. You can listen to an easier podcast with the help of a transcript. You can quickly master new words and phrases because of that amazing foundation you've already built of characters. But the percentage gains overall are going to shrink massively. Going from five to 10% comprehension felt dramatic. Going from 60 to 70%, you'll barely notice it. Right? So learners often refer to this as the intermediate wasteland. But here's how to break through to stage five. One, use variety to help you stay consistent. Think of your daily routine like a balanced diet. You need your vegetables, learning new words and characters, finishing your flash card reviews. That's still non-negotiable every single day. But you also need variety. Listen to a podcast while you're working out. Watch a show in the evening. Mix up the content so it stays fresh. This is also the stage to really start to lean into speaking practice if you haven't already. Maybe up until now, you haven't done many tutoring sessions or conversations with natives. A lot of people avoid this for as long as possible, but this is where you face that fear. So have regular speaking sessions. Just once a week is fine, but do it consistently. Also dive into native content actively. Choose content that you're actually interested in. What topics do you enjoy? Do you enjoy history, technology, cooking? Find podcasts, articles, YouTube videos about things that you care about. But don't just passively consume them, actively try to understand every word and phrase. Review the transcript. Learn every word that comes up that you don't know. Use mnemonics to make them stick. Do this with one podcast or TV show episode or movie every single week or two, and within a few months, it'll be like night and day. Use rewards as well to keep yourself going through this stage, right? So if you finish your flashcard reviews, go ahead and watch a YouTube video on a topic that you like, even in English is fine. If you completed your shadowing or retrieval practice for the day, why don't you go for a nice walk or play with your pet or something? Small things that make the daily work feel worth it. For bigger milestones, reward yourself accordingly, maybe a trip with your family of some kind. Your local all you can eat Chinese restaurant, something that marks the achievement. Finally, remember that most people never get here to stage four. You're already in rare territory, so don't stop now. So this final stage, stage five, is where your feet finally kind of touch the ground. You can watch Chinese content and actually enjoy it, not as studying necessarily, but also as entertainment. You'll still need subtitles for a lot of stuff, and that's fine. You don't need to read them constantly anyway to understand what's going on. Conversations start to flow. Chinese just kind of comes out of you without you having to think too hard about it. And your accent is improved without you really noticing. Your sentence structures have become more natural. Native speakers treat you differently, not as a curious foreigner attempting their language, but as just another guy, another girl, someone who's actually speaking Chinese just like them. So this is what I call the fluency stage. Dāng nǐ zǒu dào zhège jiēduàn, Zhōngwén jiù bù zài zhǐshì nǐ 'xué' de dōngxi, ér shì yǐjīng chéngwéi nǐ shēnghuó de yībùfèn. So at this point, you should be maybe at 3,000 common characters or more, have a solid understanding of thousands of words, which is going to cover, you know, 99% plus of all of the language. This doesn't mean that you're done, right? There's always more to learn, but the pressure is gone, the anxiety has gone. Chinese is no longer this mountain you're climbing, it's just part of who you are now. And from here, the best way to keep improving is simple. Find more content you're interested in, you know, books, articles, podcasts, TV shows, movies. And do sentence mining, learn the vocabulary from content you actually want to consume, and continue having regular speaking sessions to activate what you've been learning. This kind of active immersion in Chinese content isn't just going to improve your Chinese, it's going to help you understand Chinese culture on a deeper level. The way people talk to each other, how people act in certain situations. You're not just learning a language anymore. You're absorbing a whole new way of thinking. So, you can get to any level of Chinese you want if you just keep working at it like this. Or you can maintain your level with a bit of daily practice and move on to other things, other languages, other skills, it's totally up to you. The point is you're in control. You're not stressed. You know that if you wanted to improve at any time, you could, and you know exactly how to do it. So that feeling of being in control, of knowing exactly what to do and trusting the process, I want you to have that right now, wherever you are on this journey, not just at stage five. And that's why I made this video. So a lot of Chinese learners are stressed out. They are stressed that they're wasting time, because we all have limited time, right? They're stressed about looking foolish because their friends or family know they've been studying, but they still haven't made enough progress to show for it yet. I get it. I've been there. And the reason we started Mandarin Blueprint is because we know how frustrating and demoralizing this journey can be when it's not done right, and there's no need for it to be that way anymore. So if you follow the advice in this video, if you follow an approach that works, stay consistent with the right activities and you will make progress, it's really not rocket science to be honest. Wherever you are right now, stage one, two, stage five, it's all good. Put in the work on the right activities consistently and you will get to wherever you want to go. It's not always going to be easy, of course, but hopefully this video remove any fears that you have that you're on the wrong path or that you're uniquely struggling or there's something wrong with you. There isn't, you just need the map and now you have it. And if you want a system designed to get you through each of these stages as efficiently as possible with the right methods, the right content and a community of literally tens of thousands of people on the same journey, that's exactly what we built Mandarin Blueprint for. So click the link in the description to join our free course and community. You get a clear path from stage one and beyond, proven methods that actually work, and the chance to connect with thousands of learners who know exactly what you're going through. The journey is long, of course, not going to pretend it's not, but you don't have to figure it all out alone.