China

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    How Long Does it Take to Learn Mandarin?  

    ByChris Lonsdale

    If you’re wondering how long it would take to learn Mandarin Chinese, the answer of course has to be: “it depends”.  If you make a decision to use your brain and your time in the correct way, and put in adequate time, then you could be communicating competently at a basic level within a few months.  You Can Learn To Speak Mandarin in Six Months For me personally, from a completely zero base (i.e. complete beginner) I was very competent at Mandarin speaking within six months and reading and writing within a year.  In my case I was able to do this because I moved to Beijing and although I was doing classes at the Beijing Institute of Foreign Languages (as it was called at the time), I actually…

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    5 Principles of Accelerated Language Acquisition

    ByChris Lonsdale

    Most language courses start with a textbook, a vocabulary list, and a grammar table. They’re built around what’s easy to teach, not around how the brain actually learns. After more than forty years of working at the intersection of psychology, linguistics, and learning design — and after learning Mandarin Chinese myself in six months — I’ve identified five principles that underlie rapid language acquisition. These aren’t tips or tricks. They’re the foundations. Get these right, and everything else accelerates. Get them wrong, and no amount of study hours will save you. I laid these out in my TEDx talk, “How to Learn Any Language in 6 Months.” Here, I’ll go deeper into each one, and explain why they matter whether you’re learning Mandarin, Japanese, Spanish,…

  • How I Learned Mandarin Chinese in 6 Months

    ByChris Lonsdale

    Imagine you hold a question in your mind so long that it becomes part of how you think. That was my question for many years: how can you speed up learning? If you could learn faster, you could spend less time in school — or even bypass traditional schooling altogether. That question has shaped nearly everything I’ve done professionally for over four decades. Based on that question, and the work I’ve done over those decades to answer it, I can say this with confidence: you can learn Chinese — or any language, for that matter — far more quickly and more enjoyably than most people have been led to believe. I know that sounds like marketing. I used to roll my eyes at claims like…