I’ve written two in-depth guest posts about learning Chinese. My first instinct was to post them here, but John Pasden of Sinosplice.com and Olle Linge of HackingChinese.com were gracious enough to let me share my recent experiences with their audiences.
First, my guest post at HackingChinese.com about how I managed to pass the HSK 4 with just a little over 3 months of preparation [1]. I go into considerable detail here outlining the exact schedule, drills and time investments. I even explain some tweaks I made to Anki to make that part of my studying more efficient. I wanted to be as specific as possible, so that anyone who also wants to learn Chinese quickly can replicate my experiment.
I did a brief interview with Olle in Chinese, which you can see below. I believe it fairly demonstrates my level of Chinese at around the 3-month point:
Second, my Sinosplice.com guest post was focused on how to achieve immersion [2], even at a fairly low level of basic fluency. I found immersion to be considerably harder in China than with prior languages, both because of cultural differences and language difficulty. Once again, I outline exact steps I followed to make friends in the language, from the first few weeks, so I could make faster progress and avoid getting stuck in an English bubble.
I also did a brief interview with John Pasden.
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Once again, for anyone that missed it our mini-documentary about learning Chinese is worth a look: