How to improve my Chinese?

China is also the globe’s largest manufacturing and export network, and home to many major multinational companies, including the Alibaba Group, C-Trip International, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, and SAIC Motor Company. According to Forbes’ accounting of the world’s largest public companies, China lays claim to 291 Global 2000 companies, including five in the top ten. This most widely spoken language can benefit both your personal life and professional career greatly. The foreign language skill, especially the Chinese language skill can not only bring a sense of accomplishment to the learner but also make it possible to reach a multitude of new opportunities.

1. Write about topics you care about: When choosing what to write, the most important consideration is what you want to communicate to others. Writing requires concentration and effort, which is harder to muster if you feel the task is boring or meaningless. We all like different things, so it’s hard to give general advice, but topics related to your own life, your experiences and opinions are good places to start. A journal or diary is great because it provides a never-ending sequence of events to write about!
2. Read out loud: If you’re listening to a lesson and reading along, read out loud. Then re-read and speed up your tempo. Do this again and again until you can speak faster. Try your best to pronounce the words correctly, but don’t obsess about it. Read swiftly, emote and put some inflection on the sentences. Reading aloud helps to train the muscles of your mouth and diaphragm to produce unfamiliar words and sounds.
3. Every day, not every week: Organise your week so that you allocate time to practice Chinese. It’s easy to put it off and tell yourself to do double the amount of study to make up for today, but when tomorrow comes around you will probably postpone it again. It’s much more effective to do a little everyday than one big weekly session. Start with 15 minutes a day (while you’re waiting for the pasta to cook!) and slowly work yourself up to longer study sessions. You’ll retain more of what you have learnt by doing a little every day.
4. Never translate word by word; focus on the underlying meaning: For beginners, writing is often the same as translation. To a certain extent, this is hard to avoid because you will naturally know how to express something in your native language and then think about how to translate it into Chinese. This is less of a problem than translating while speaking, but if done incorrectly, your text will still read like English with Chinese words. To avoid this, never translate on the word level, but rather go down to the underlying ideas and then think about how to write about that in Chinese.

Nelson Mandela famously said, ‘if you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.” Given the adage insisting that business is about relationships and that Chinese has been hailed as “the business language of the future,” we can think of no better way to facilitate a truly international business career than by learning Chinese.