What can I do every day to improve my Chinese skills?

Native speakers of Chinese tend to view the spoken varieties of Chinese as dialects of a single language. In spite of their differences, however, linguists classify them as separate languages within a family, noting that the varieties are as diverse as the Romance languages themselves. Researchers are only just beginning to look into the historical relationships between the different varieties of the Chinese language.

Chinese is a language specifically notorious for being one of the toughest languages to master not only for an English native speaker but also for most other non-Asian language speakers. This is due to the language’s complexity in grammar and pronunciation. It tends to differ quite a lot from most other languages. Most other Asian-language speakers also tend to find Chinese rather difficult to master than their own native language. With that said, improving your Chinese skills will be equally difficult or easy depending on the time and effort you can contribute. Due to it’s difficult nature it automatically requires a lot more effort and an exceptional amount of time to master it.

1. First of all, make it a daily routine to practise each and every skill related to this language without fail. You must practise all four of your skills, which are: listening skills, speaking skills, writing skills, reading skills.
2. Do not be afraid. Fear is most likely going to be the fall of you. While this language can be extremely intimidating to most students, many of these students tend to master this language quite easily. Therefore remain confident in your abilities and do not let fear take the best of you.
3. Get into the habit of holding a conversation with yourself before holding a conversation with another. Identify the areas where you believe you require improvement. Focus on these areas in specific.
4. Maintain a journal in which you note down all of the new Chinese terminologies that you come across or any new phrase, proverb or slang that you find interesting.
5. Read a variety of literature. Do not restrict yourself simply to fictional books or formal newspapers instead, read all types of literature and of all time periods and genres.
6. Keep yourself entertained as well. Watch Chinese movies with English subtitles or previously watched videos but now dubbed in Chinese. You can also listen to Chinese music while doing your daily chores or listen to a Chinese podcast on a topic that interests you.
7. Finally, remember that this language has no shortcuts. So practising daily is truly your only route to follow. Trying to utilise shortcuts is only going to end up wasting your time and when this language is concerned, time is of the essence.

A number of regional groups have been identified based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese, including Mandarin, Southern Min, and Yue. Each of these branches is incomprehensible to the others, and many of their subgroups are incomprehensible to the others within each branch. Chinese is a language being learnt and spoken by a number of people for various reasons, It is suggested that learners learn this to reap benefits from learning the languageage.  Click Here to join Multibhashi and take your learning ahead.