Truth be told, I’ve been trying to learn Mandarin for years. To cut a long story short, I started learning to get on the good side of a former Chinese colleague. That worked. We became good friends over 喝茶了 (”tea time” or “drink tea”) when he would teach me new phrases as we took a break. I struggled to repeat new words as we walked to the tea station together. After all these years I realize the strained, hushed tones of my voice probably sounded like a dying rabbit for everyone else. But this arrangement worked for us.
When I decided to get serious and really learn, I bought the Rosetta Stone for myself. I used that program on and off for five years with some success. My biggest downfall is I relied completely in Rosetta Stone to make me fluent. It’s a great cornerstone to learning a language but not the entire bridge between beginner and fluent. Well now my Rosetta Stone is so outdated it can’t upgrade anymore.
So I need to find a new program. Again, the solution must be free and must be able to do it on my own time. DuoLingo checked those boxes for me. I started with DuoLingo about a month or so ago. Like Rosetta Stone, DuoLingo attempts language immersion to get a person up to speed. What’s different is DuoLingo gamified the process of learning a language with ‘streaks’ and ‘lingots.’ Streaks are, by far, the biggest motivator to keep up with learning a new language (or doing anything). No one easily gives up a 20 day streak. That keeps users going back to the site everyday. The user can buy different interactive tools with the site’s digital currency, lingots, such as a bet on maintaining a streak for a week or ‘streak freezes’ in the shop. As far as doing it, and staying with it, DuoLingo is perfect.
The downfall with this platform is it is obviously built for Latin or Germanic based languages. Mandarin is a tonal language. Speaking Mandarin with the correct tone is the difference between saying “my mom is very cute” and “my horse is loved.” Pretty much the same sounds but with different tones. Mandarin also utilities dramatically different grammar rules and sentence structure from European languages. Like First off, the whole language is based on syllables, not distinct words. It woul d be like writ ing all sen ten ces as space d out syl la bles like this one. This is where DuoLingo starts to fall apart. To learn Mandarin I need very straight forward vocabulary because syllables can be reused to form different words (e.g. in English re/form and form/er are the same syllables that form completely different words). I am not going to understand a new word highlighted in a sentence when I only learned the syllable in the last exercise. The function of “the” is replaced with the count of an object (e.g. “the horse” becomes 匹马, “one horse”). I really struggled with that concept in DuoLingo.
I googled additional resources and came across Chinese Skill. I’ve used Chinese Skill for a week now. Like DuoLingo, Chinese Skill has a game-like appearance with Chinese panda cartoons. What I like in contrast to DuoLingo is putting together radicals to form characters in every lesson. It is the first platform I’ve come across that allows that for free. I also like that there’s more straight forward vocabulary. It’s still not enough, but the additional match the picture and character to the syllable and tone exercises help drive the rest of the lesson home.
With that being said I haven’t given up on DuoLingo because I can organize a group in my area to speak Chinese (爱 <3). If I’ve learned anything over the years, nothing beats speaking the language one is trying to learn to make it all sink in. I am really excited to try either HelloTalk or Hi Native as well. I’ll update once I try either one of those!
