When young students participate in Chinese trial classes with us, there are common traits observed among kids who have been learning Chinese tones for a few months.
Despite having studied Chinese for several months, most of them are unable to engage in basic conversations. This is because their lessons often involve repeating words after the teacher, so they become proficient in that kind of practice.
There’s a very effective way to teach Korean to foreigners, and this method isn’t limited to Korean—it applies to other languages as well.
In this video, the two individuals have never studied Korean or Chinese. They don’t know the Korean alphabet, nor are they familiar with Chinese pinyin. However, by the end of the video, they manage to learn simple greetings and expressions. The process is straightforward and much quicker.
In many places, Chinese lessons focus on teaching tones for over a month, sometimes even six months or longer. Yet, students who follow this approach often fail to engage in basic conversations. This is because they never learned how to directly converse with others, as shown in the two videos.
When teaching Chinese, it’s better to start with greetings rather than tones.
If you wave your hand and greet someone with “Nǐhǎo,” everyone, regardless of age or gender, can understand and mimic it. That’s how students can learn greetings.
Learning how to converse and learning the phonetic symbols of a language are entirely different matters. Even if you learn English phonetic symbols, you won’t acquire proper pronunciation unless you listen to English. Similarly, the only way to master Chinese tones is through repeated listening. Studying “phonetic symbols” as written characters will not teach you tones effectively. This highlights a significant flaw in many Chinese teaching methods.
To retain what they hear properly, students need to listen to meaningful sounds. Consider a scenario where someone asks you in Chinese, “Where do you live?” (Nǐ zhù zài nǎér? 你住在哪儿?) When learners hear this sound and feel the need to respond or take action, their brains naturally focus and work to understand the meaning. This process helps them listen more attentively.
On the other hand, repeatedly hearing “Nǐ, Nǐ, Nǐ” for tones does not make for meaningful listening, which significantly reduces learners’ attention.
This difference makes tone-focused learning ineffective for listening practice. What grabs a learner’s attention is not isolated words but meaningful questions directed at them. This is why classes that prioritize tones yield very low results. The same applies to English phonics classes.
It’s better to start with expressions aimed at facilitating conversations with others. Through this, students will gradually and naturally acquire tones.
As native Chinese speakers, we don’t study tones to understand or speak Chinese. We learn tones only after we are already fluent in the language.
