From research, we found some common mistakes made by many Chinese learners. We have listed some we consider serious one below. If you any happen to you, you’d better recover it.
Think knowledge as skill
Let’s take swimming as an analogy. Suppose you read a book on swimming to learn how to swim. Even after you have gone through the book and had professional knowledge on swimming, you are not able to swim. Why? Because swimming is not a kind of knowledge; instead, it is a kind of skill as well as Chinese language. Practice is not only the core of skill learning, but also the efficient way to turn the knowledge into application. You should learn how to use what you have learned through practice.
Believe in instant learning
I have no faith in some advertisements with slogan ‘learn Chinese in ten days’. Lots of learners fall into their traps, wasting time and money. Every serious learner should realize that no pain, no gain. There is no short-cut to learn Chinese, only existence of good way or poor way. For example, it is not good to recite a Chinese word by the way of dictating it as it only trains your eyes and hand. The good way is to keep your eyes on the word, write the words down and read it loudly as to improve your speaking and listening skills.
Use pinyin as character
I have read an article saying pinyin will soon take the place of Chinese characters in China. How ridiculous it is! There are only about 1700 syllables in Chinese and every character is single-syllable. There are more than 80,000 Chinese characters. What does that mean? It means that same pinyin leads to many different characters. So I strongly recommended that serious learner do not rely on pinyin too much, it is only used to indicate Standard Mandarin pronunciation. As an intermediate learner, you’d better read some books with no pinyin. If you encounter any Chinese symbol without knowing its pronunciation, consult this character in dictionary by radical and stroke method.
Lack of systematic learning
There are too many learning materials on the market. It is good as you will have more choices, but it will cause some problem. Some learners switch from one set of textbook to another frequently. The best way is to concentrate on a suitable set of text-book and have some other reading, listening materials as supplements.
Have not made any of above mistakes? congratulations! Go ahead. But keep in mind, always try to avoid them.
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