How to Master Chinese in 180 Days

To learn a language, the most important thing is mastering the vocabulary, while the grammar and parsing is second. With enough words, even you don’t know the grammar, you can understand most of them. While with grammar only, you know nothing. Especially, the Chinese language has the simplest grammar in the world; know it or not, it doesn’t matter.

Now let’s have a look of how a word is remembered? When you read a book, the first time you meet a new word, normally, you could not remember it, until you meet it few times, you can learn it. We have discussed this in ‘How Our Memory Is Built’ that repeating more remembering better. Now, we have to check how we forget something. The first time you know a word, normally, you just keep it in mind for few hours, after that its impression is paled, but if during this time you repeat it again, you may forget it in one day. Likewise, if you repeat it again within this period, you may forget it in three days. That is to say, following the number of repeating times, your impression deepened. In fact, when you reading a book, you just do the same thing, but as every word reach your eyes randomly, some of them repeat too many times that you don’t need, while others repeat not enough. So the question is how to arrange a good plan in order we meet every word in right time.

The best way is by cards, (you may using a computer program do the same thing.) that is making each of the 3,000 characters a card. Every day learn 40 of them, after three hours you try to repeat that 40 characters, if a character you still remember, you put it in a group waiting one day then repeat it. If a character you can’t remember, put it as don’t know character in tomorrow’s 40.  The next day you check the characters of yesterday that you have remembered over three hours, some of them, you can remember, you put them together waiting for three days then repeat them again, if you can’t remember, put them as don’t know characters and so on. After all of them can be remembered over one month, then you may read book, newspaper and listen other material in Chinese without any problem.