How to improve my Chinese accent?

China is one of the world’s most linguistically rich nations. Standard Chinese is the most widely spoken language in China.  In China, more than 70 million people from 55 distinct national minorities live, and although each minority has its own spoken language, many minority groups lack a distinguishable written medium for their languages. Until the mid-twentieth century, the majority of Chinese in southern China did not speak Mandarin. Since the 17th century, several efforts and attempts have been made to make pronunciation adhere to the Beijing style.

Identify your learning style. Every individual has a unique learning style that empowers them to speed up their learning. Some people are more comfortable with visual learning while others are more comfortable with a structured lesson to lesson learning.

Look for a conversation partner to improve your Chinese speaking skills and seek instant feedback.

Set realistic, measurable short and long term tangible goals. Think about the level you’re currently at, and identify the key things you’d like to improve on initially.

Readout loud. If you’re listening to a lesson and reading along, read out loud. Try your best to pronounce the words correctly, but don’t obsess about it. Repeat reading to get reasonable speaking speed. 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.

Indulge in advance preparation. Prepare what you need to say ahead of time, so that you are not at loss for words in conversations. This will help you not only to learn how to say the words, but how to say them in the right context. 

Use Shadowing (repeat the dialogues as you hear them in movies, in audios, podcasts, etc). Shadowing is an extremely useful tool for increasing fluency as well as improving your accent and ability to be understood. Shadowing helps create all the neural connections in your brain to produce those words and sentences quickly and accurately without having to think about it. Shadowing helps develop the muscle memory in all the physical parts responsible for the production of those sounds. 

Practise. Review. Correct. This is the key to perfection! Most learners don’t review! If you review and repeat lines again and again, you’ll be speaking better, faster and with more confidence.

Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. You’d be surprised by how many people try to avoid talking! The more you speak, the faster you learn – and that is why you’re learning Chinese. Practice speaking every chance you get: whether it’s ordering coffee, shopping or asking for directions.

Be consistent. You won’t improve unless you’re reviewing and repeating things to yourself on a regular basis. Record yourself, hear yourself, improve yourself and repeat the entire process until you get it right!

Every bit of practice counts. Aim to speak in Chinese at least once a day. You can start with a few minutes of speaking to yourself first, then build up to longer periods of time talking both to yourself and others around you.

Ask for feedback. Don’t be afraid to ask others to give you their opinion or advice. Whether you’re talking to a language tutor or a native speaking friend, knowing your strengths and weaknesses will help you reflect on what you need to work on.

Most linguists refer to all of the varieties of spoken Chinese that form the Sinitic branch as the Sino-Tibetan language family (spoken by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in Greater China) and say that there was an original language, Proto-Sino-Tibetan, from which the Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages descended, similar to Proto-Indo-European. The relationship between Chinese and the other Sino-Tibetan languages is still unclear and being researched, as is the attempt to recreate Proto-Sino-Tibetan.

There’s an amazing new way to learn Mandarin! Want to see what everyone’s talking about! Click here.