To begin with, there was so much noise when starting out. Whenever I would mention learning Chinese most people would try to deter me, tell me its too difficult, it's not worth my time, and that AI will just translate everything in the future.
Needless to say this was only fuel to the fire.
Without boring you with a lengthy introduction, I will get straight into the action.
I spent my first few weeks almost entirely on pronunciation, and I would estimate that a good half of my 30 hours has gone towards it, and will continue to go towards it. Even now, as I move through new topics, pronunciation is still the thing I keep circling back to.
This is a realistic account of what the first 30 hours looks like, based on my experience.
Table of Contents
- Reading Pinyin
- Numbers: the Big Unlock
- The Hanzi I Can Actually Recognise
- Basic Vocabulary
- Questions I Can Understand
- A Couple of Grammar Concepts
- An Honest State of Play
Reading Pinyin
The first real skill was learning to read pinyin, the romanised spelling system that tells you how a character sounds. That means the initials (the consonant-like starts), the finals (the vowel endings), and the tones that sit on top.
The tricky part is the compound finals, things like -ing (nasal compound final) as in 英 yīng, and the -üan family. I am still actively revising these. At least once a week I go back to the compounds to revise them. Pinyin looks simple on paper, but getting the sounds right and chaining them together is what takes the most learning.
Numbers: the Big Unlock
Numbers turned out to be the single biggest unlock so far.
The base ten characters are:
一 (yī) 1, 二 (èr) 2, 三 (sān) 3, 四 (sì) 4, 五 (wǔ) 5, 六 (liù) 6, 七 (qī) 7, 八 (bā) 8, 九 (jiǔ) 9, 十 (shí) 10.
Once you have those, an enormous amount of everyday language opens up, because so much of it is really just numbers wearing different hats. Dates, times, days, months, prices: they all sit on top of counting. I say more about this in the calendar section below, but numbers are the reason that whole area became reachable at all.
The Hanzi I Can Actually Recognise
The characters (hanzi) I can reliably recognise on sight are, more or less, these six:
你好吗 (nǐ hǎo ma), roughly "how are you", and 我不是 (wǒ bù shì), "I am not".
Six characters after 30 hours might sound bleak, but it matches my expectation. The tonal part of the language is the initial barrier, and most difficult concept to grasp and requires continuous training of my vocal chords. The hanzi is the low hanging fruit I can memorise at a later point.
Basic Vocabulary
My vocabulary is small and fairly random, shaped by whatever topics I have passed through. A few that have stuck:
- 卧室 (wòshì), bedroom
- 客厅 (kètīng), living room
- 超市 (chāoshì), supermarket
- 西瓜 (xīguā), watermelon
Not exactly a survival kit yet, but they are mine.
Questions I Can Understand
This is the part that surprised me most. Even with a tiny vocabulary, I can now follow and answer several categories of question.
Who I am (or am not)
- 我是 (wǒ shì), "I am"
- 我不是 (wǒ bù shì), "I am not"
Where I am
- 我在 (wǒ zài), "I am at / in"
- 我不在 (wǒ bù zài), "I am not at / in"
My nationality
- 我是伦敦人 (wǒ shì Lúndūn rén), "I am a Londoner"
- 我是英国人 (wǒ shì Yīngguó rén), "I am British"
Calendar, date and time
This is where the numbers really paid off.
- 现在几点？(xiànzài jǐ diǎn?), "what time is it now?"
- 上午 (shàngwǔ) is the morning / am, 中午 (zhōngwǔ) is midday, 下午 (xiàwǔ) is the afternoon / pm, and 晚上 (wǎnshang) is the evening.
- Months are just a number plus 月 (yuè), so January is 一月 (yīyuè) and July is 七月 (qīyuè).
- Days of the week are a number plus 星期 (xīngqī), so Monday is 星期一 (xīngqīyī).
- I can also state the dates of special days: 圣诞节 (Shèngdàn jié), Christmas, 情人节 (Qíngrén jié), Valentine's Day, and 生日 (shēngrì), birthday.
A Couple of Grammar Concepts
I think I have picked up one or two actual grammar patterns, though I am holding these loosely.
The first is the 我是 (wǒ shì) pattern: subject plus 是 (shì) plus a noun, to say "I am a something".
The second is about where time goes in a sentence. In Chinese, the time expression comes before the verb, and it can sit either after the subject or right at the front:
- Subject plus time plus verb: 我明天去 (wǒ míngtiān qù), literally "I tomorrow go".
- Time plus subject plus verb: 明天我去 (míngtiān wǒ qù), "tomorrow I go".
Both are fine. What you cannot do is stick the time on the end the way English often does.
An Honest State of Play
Thirty hours has not made me conversational. What it has given me is a foundation I trust, and enough real footing to keep going. If you are at the start of this, my one piece of advice is to be patient with the sounds before you rush to collect words