The Key Predictors of Mandarin Success

Hello, I'm Misha and this is the I'm Learning Mandarin podcast. I've been studying Chinese whilst working full-time in the UK for about four years now. I'm currently at a solid intermediate level and can comfortably hold conversations with native speakers. I recently started a blog documenting my efforts of striving towards fluency and also to help other learners who are at the beginning of their studies. As an independent learner based in the UK, the first two years of my studies were spent figuring out what I should be doing. So the goal of this podcast and of this blog is to help you speed up that process. Each episode I'll be interviewing insightful guests who have expertise in learning Mandarin and discuss insights and tips based on my experience. If you like this podcast then please leave a review and subscribe on ImLearningMandarin.com. So on today's episode, I discuss learning Mandarin with a man who's not only learned the language for himself, he's also observed the trajectories of hundreds of other learners over the years. Max Hobbs is marketing director at the leading Chinese language school LTL Mandarin. He first came into contact with Chinese whilst backpacking in 2014 and has since continued to study Mandarin while working at LTL. His position at the school has given him a real bird's eye view, observing and documenting the stories of numerous students that the school he works for. I found it really insightful to talk to him about his learning experiences and in particular his observations of which attitudes and traits are the strongest predictors of a successful Mandarin learner. So Max, welcome to the podcast. I'm Easha, thanks very much for having us. So I'm interested first of all in exploring more about your Gapier in 2014 and this was when you first came into contact with the Chinese language, I believe. So how did that Gapier come about, why did you choose to go to China and what was that experience like for you? Yeah, it was an interesting one that kind of came out of the blue really, so I graduated from university in 2010, which seemed like a lifetime ago now. And then I picked up a job in digital marketing, which is what I actually do now, so it was kind of something I gained a passion in over my time at university, but I kind of reached the peak of where I could get to my job, there wasn't really much more room to grow. And I thought being kind of in my mid-twenties, it was the perfect time, so I never really had that traditional Gapier that people normally have before they go to uni at 18. So I thought it would be a good time to try it, and I kind of just have a look at ways to fund it really, because I didn't have a huge amount of money in the background and teaching English was something that came up quite often on my research. And with the rate of pay in China for teaching English, which is quite good and the cost of living, which was much cheaper than somewhere like Japan or Singapore or Korea, it seemed quite a good fit. So I did some research, contacted a few agents and whatnot, and I was placed in a city called Shenyang, which is in the north-east of China, so the freezing cold area in the winters, which is a bit of a culture shock. But that was my first experience and how it came about, so I didn't actually go there with much kind of language history at all. In fact, at school, I'd studied French and German, and like 95% of the people in the class no one cared, which is really bad, and I look back at it now and wish we'd looked differently at it. But it was kind of the lesson where people would, let's say, toss around and not really do much work. So I never really had a passion for language before, but it was going to China where I realised how fascinating it was when you drive down the streets in the taxi or you'd be on a bike and you'd look at all the characters. And it was almost for me like a code to decrypt. My background was a web designer at university, and that was kind of very much kind of coding and creating solutions from scratch. And I think maybe that part of me kind of liked it because it wasn't a language at the start, it was more a code that I needed to decrypt. And the more you learn and the more you discover, the more addictive I found it became. So although I didn't make a huge amount of progress in spoken Chinese in that year because I spent most of my time speaking English, it was the Chinese characters that really got my passion going for the language. So that was kind of where it came about really in my first year. I think it's interesting because a lot of people who do gap years in China or who go to China to teach English, they often go with vague idea in their mind that they will at some point try and learn Chinese. But in the majority of cases it's probably fair to say most people who live in China for a period of time probably don't actually end up picking up that much Chinese. A lot of expats live in China without really knowing any Chinese at all. Was that kind of your experience of the people that were surrounding you and what was kind of different in your case that made you actually make a concerted effort to begin learning Chinese? Yes, it's a really good point and it's spot on as well, actually. So I mean from my experience in Shenyang where the population there is 8 million, it's about the same as London, but the expat community is very, very small and everyone gets to know everyone. And although that's great on a social side and socially had a fantastic year out there, it was so much fun. But the problem is as a learner you are always sucked into a foreign bubble of speaking English. So you have to make a concerted effort to put yourself out of those bubbles and into more Chinese ones and obviously that's quite difficult especially when you're a beginner because when you go to somewhere so what is at the time quite strange to what you're used to, it's you want familiarity, so you want to talk about the things back home, you want to talk about where you can get a rose dinner, where you can go to the pub, where you can watch football and normally you do that with foreigners or you might do it with Chinese people but they are the ones who speak really good English. So if I look back at the people I met, a vast majority of them spoke like you said very beginner Chinese, it would be the can I have a beer, how many people at a table, Jager which is the famous phrase that all foreigners learnt at the start which is this one and that's as far as it goes really, there were exceptions so I did meet a couple of them who spoke much better Chinese but otherwise it wasn't very good. So after a year then you returned to the UK so that would have been in 2015 and then you're in the UK for another two years, within that period then did you maintain any of the conversational Chinese that you picked up during your time there, your first int in China? Very little to be honest but I made an effort to, so I was regularly in touch with people on WeChat which is the Chinese WhatsApp, let's say for people who aren't aware of WeChat. So I would be in regular touch, I actually went back to Shenyang a year later for 3 weeks. Again this is mainly a social exercise to see friends, I had some time off to use and thought it would be great to go back there again so I was very much drawn to my time there but again there wasn't a lot of Chinese going on, it was just generally conversational on WeChat and the journey I made with Chinese I found is quite interesting compared to others because many foreigners who go to university and study Chinese read and write it very well but when it comes to speaking they generally stumble and have a hard time of it whereas mine ended up being quite the opposite because I managed to absorb the language before even really learning it so I was much more confident when it come to spoken Chinese so when I would send messages to friends it wouldn't be typed, it would be voice messages which is again something that is very common in China and I've noticed now I'm back in the UK, it's not so common for people to send voice messages and when I do send them I generally get raised eyebrows like well you send me a voice message for me, it was something a technique I used to help my spoken Chinese but it was very basic stuff it was just keeping up with the basics and I hadn't actually planned to go back to China it wasn't until this chance job opening came in you know a meeting, a few Zoom meetings with this Mandarin school in China where it all came about and they offered me a position two years later in 2017 and the fit was perfect I had no ties in England again my next job I was kind of coming to a brick wall with it really and I just jumped at the chance to go back there and give it another shot and I think the fact that it was a Mandarin school as well it made me think that I can go there and not only you know enjoy it and have a good time but I can really make some progress here and I had no excuse on my second time and yeah really from there that my first two weeks on my second stint was intensive Mandarin and that was the moment where I really felt things turned so you say the first two weeks this was in your second stint were extremely intensive so could you describe that a bit more in terms of what was what was intense about it yeah so I mean really it was the hours that I was studying I mean if I give you a day in the life of for my first kind of two weeks so the company I work for LCL Mandarin school kindly put me up in a homestay for my first month so this allowed me time to find a place and homestays are a big part of what LCL do it's about taking what you learn in the classroom and taking it home and utilising it with a family so I lived with a Chinese family lovely mum and a dad and they had two children for memory and so I would wake up each day I would have breakfast with them my Chinese is a very limited then but it allowed me to improve a bit and then at school I was doing four hours of small group class so this was ten to twelve and then one till three and then I would do two further hours of one-on-one slash homework study which was three thirty-five thirty and then I would go back home and I would have dinner with my homestay family and it's essentially then becoming a you know you're awake for I don't know sixteen eighteen hours a day I was using Chinese nearly all of those hours bar the odd you know meeting other students and getting to know the students in that time but it's very much a community where people also don't really want to go there and speak English they want to go there and speak Chinese so even with foreigners you generally hear Chinese being spoken a lot to varying levels which is really great and it was such fun to be a part of that sort of community for my first two weeks so that was kind of how the first two weeks worked really and then unfortunately I had to stop doing those classes that they kindly gave me and that start working so at that point then would you say that your conversational Chinese was still stronger than your reading and and at what point did you really start focusing more on characters and reading yeah so it in answer to the first question yes I was definitely more confident with spoken still I remember being in the class and my small group class was four people really great group of people as well a lot of them with them and I remember seeing characters being drawn on the board and they were rattling them off with no problem and I was thinking I think they've put me in the wrong class it but then when it came to speaking I felt very you know quite it easy with it a lot of the time really and I felt that if I saw another student struggling for a word in my head I was like I know that word so it's the thing with Chinese isn't it there's lots of different levels you have speaking you have reading you have writing and it's very rare that you have students increase all of them at the same level at the same time so I decided really to focus on reading because those two weeks allowed me to pin down what I was you know good at and what I really needed to improve at and I just started self-studying really but it also helped that I was in an office slash school where there's characters all over the place so what I really liked about the school is that they have flashcards everywhere for you know toilet kitchen cup stapler pen computer so every day every moment I was absorbing these words and then as you know with Chinese when you learn characters like the end for electric it then opens the door up for TV the ensure and computer the end now and then it just starts to repeat and repeat and I had so much fun with it because it's quite motivating when you you know you can read 100 characters you think well let's get to 200 and then continue and continue and and it's an endless thing that you know you will never know all the characters Chinese so it's always one of those things that you can just keep on going to your heart's content and it was a steady progression from there really absolutely so you then remained in China for a further three years until the pandemic in 2020 so what was your progress like during that period and what was your kind of learning routine like over that period of time? Yes I think the first year so 2017-18 was the year I really felt progress you know I was by no pinch fluent but I felt like I could do what I needed to do when I wanted to do it bar you know maybe some of the more difficult things I felt I could go and register at the police station which is something you have to do every time you come back into China that was quite scary at first but it became easier one of the fun tasks that foreigners generally always have to do is go to a bank in China and that is typically a very odd experience when you're new to it because they no matter how many foreigners go into the bank they it requires five or six staff to investigate your passport very closely for a long amount of time before they allow you to do what you want to do and that obviously is quite scary at the start because you know they're asking questions at nature speak a level with masks on and understanding them is difficult at first but I think the first year it's also easy to see your progress when you're at the beginning stage as well because you can see your progress faster I think when you get to intermediate and advanced it's harder to monitor and judge as much but that first year essentially what it was it was I would have one or two classes every week at LTL in between my work which was part of my contract which is great or the foreigners at LTL get lessons each week and I would just make sure I spoke with the teachers quite often I think this was quite a good thing because yes you can use your lessons but also any moment you can take you know go into the kitchen and get in the coffee turned into a to a lesson when there was Chinese staff and they would learn a new word or you would make a mistake and say the wrong word and or your sentence structure would be wrong and you could go back to the desk you know with a new lesson in your back pocket so I think a lot of it was being really social put myself out there a lot of self-study at home so I've got pads and pads here where you know I was kind of writing sentences and trying to cram stuff in so there was a lot of self-study time I remember particularly in January 2018 so after six months it was freezing cold and horribly polluted outside and I spent a lot of that month at home watching YouTube videos listening to podcasts you know about learning Chinese absorbing as much as possible and then I did the second and third years were continual study improvements but obviously there was times where I took some time off and I needed a break or my motivation was low there were definitely times where I thought I was stagnating a bit but again this is part of a language learning journey it's it's never a straight up woods curve is with anything in life you have to accept that there will be times where it slows down or you demotivated or whatnot but when you like it enough and when you love it enough it generally always comes back I've found so at some point then after that you were forced to return to the UK and that was in 2020 and you now work from the UK so what was that like and what was the process of continuing your studies and maintaining the language back in the UK like for you? Yeah so it was it was new really wasn't it because it's something that we all had to get used to unexpectedly I actually went to Hong Kong first but again there's little to no mandra in there so it didn't really help the only thing it helped with was characters and then I actually went to Italy which is where my wife is from we lived there for a bit so my Chinese stagnated quite well quite a bit during that time because I started to take up Italian and that became my focus but coming back to the UK I've been very conscious and wary about losing where I got to so I made a concert stuff to take on online classes every week so I've got a few teachers that I use depending on their schedules obviously our time is a bit different and we generally just talk there are sometimes where we would focus on a PDF or a certain lesson or something like that but generally it does a lot of free talking in their current affairs or that kind of stuff the stuff that you would normally talk about in an office just trying to replicate that sort of atmosphere it's different and it did take time to get used to and I still always prefer the face-to-face option but I think I'm saying that because I spend most of my hours every day Monday, Friday, behind the computer so I work on a computer and then I study on a computer and it's a long time but can you learn as much online as you could offline I think you really can you just have to be a bit more motivated and driven to do it. One of the things I'm interested in discussing with you is when you're talking about sort of studying Mandarin and your opinions about that you're not just drawing on sort of your personal experience but you also have the vantage point of having observed many different students come and go from the school that you work for so I'm wondering when you observe that and when you reflect on that what are some of the trends that you see in terms of predictors of success what the kinds of attitudes and mentalities and preparation going into learning Chinese that tend to lead to the best outcomes in the students that you've observed over the years. It's a really good question actually I must admit I think it sounds quite funny this but hear me out I think the ones who are the least social in the foreign bubbles tend to do the best it's very easy at school isn't it to you know I love to meet my friends meet people it's really great for your share your experiences but the problem is always the same you all end up speaking English and the ones actually I remember a particular Russian student called Vera she was really young when she came she was only 17 and she couldn't speak any English all Chinese and it was a really brave move you know this young girl come into China and yeah she took it in a study she was in a class with our member German and the Canadian and the Canadian girl Alana and Vera who couldn't communicate in any language ended up becoming very close friends and communicating through broken Chinese and Vera's progress has been great in fact we we follow her on Instagram she follows us on Instagram and I see her speaking to superb Chinese all from the fact that she was forced to do that because she had no other way to communicate with people there's a couple of other examples of people I know who came and they were actually very sociable people but they made sure they didn't get stuck in the foreign bubbles too much so while they would perhaps go for a beer or hot pot with foreigners they would also make sure that they went out and made Chinese friends or they would spend a bit of time with their extra time with their teacher or they would speak with the staff at our school who are the Chinese staff or they would you know look for contacts for clubs so football clubs is a popular one or a Tai Chi club or yoga club or go to the park and strike up a random conversation with people about Chinese chess which takes a lot of guts to do that but you get students that do it and it's really fascinating seeing the different routes people take and I think like you said it it's actually a big advantage and quite a privilege to be able to do that because I can see first hand how people do it and the majority do come and fall into the foreign bubble I was one of them got no shame in saying that but I made sure after a certain amount of time that okay I've got this foreign bubble and I can use it but I also need to put time to the other side where I just use Chinese whether that be on my own whether I'm talking to myself or meeting a friend who only speaks Chinese and you need to dedicate that sort of time if you want to make quicker progress so I think that was that that's an interesting way to put it be less social with the foreigners and more social with the Chinese. I'm thinking in the ear of the global pandemic specifically I guess things have changed a little bit in that sense in that many people are learning Chinese online mostly and often outside of China so I guess the temptation to sort of hang around in an expat bubble might not be as present under those conditions I'm wondering under the current condition do you see any kind of similar trends in terms of what kind of mentalities and attitudes tend to do the best when they're studying from a computer remotely abroad. Yeah it is difficult I think and the main thing about that is motivation I think when you're when you're in China especially the the tier two three four cities you have no choice but you have to face it even when you're not in the mood for it even when you can't be bothered or you're too tired you have to face it and that is a big part again of what we do or what we encourage people to do is that what defines the successes is those difficult situations where you just want to tell your hair out or you just you sick of it and you don't know what to do but you find a way because you have to and when obviously you're abroad and you're studying online you can't do that it's very easy then to switch the computer off and you know go back into English or your native language straight away and forget it so I think a key part is keeping motivation but also maybe making a few tweaks that maybe you wouldn't think to do normally and one that really helped me that Andreas who's actually my boss told me to do was switching my phone to Chinese which I laughed at him when he first told me this because I said there's no chance I'm ever going to do that but he he told me that this is a very very good technique so I thought when I got my Chinese to a good enough level I would try it and I've never had my phone in English since so it's actually an Italian at the moment because I'm trying to plug that forward but the fact is we use our phones too much we use them all the time so why face yourself with English or whatever the native languages when you can put when you can put Chinese in there and the same goes for computers the same goes for TV shows the music you listen to all these kinds of things you can embed it into your life but it depends how much you want to do it and I think when you're doing it online you have to push yourself more than what you would have to online where you've got no choice you have to face it so it's difficult and it is different but it's just tweaking and changing little habits that you don't think will make a difference but they actually do so I think that's one thing it's just having that mental power to do so and I think Instagram has proved quite useful I think for a lot of people because that I see nowadays lots of study ground accounts they're very popular Chinese study ground accounts and people map out their progress and I've seen this huge study ground community you know explode with so many people from all around the world and they help each other they push each other on they set challenges they do online meetups they do lives together I think this is a really really cool way for people to learn from behind the screen and you get to know friends from all around the world we try to partake and communicate with a lot of these study grammars and there's some really lovely people on there with great tips and tricks and resources so I think that would be something that I would also recommend a mention but there's no doubt the the challenge is harder but I think the resources are so much stronger than they've ever been we have access to so much stuff you go about 20 years you know there was we had the internet and what not we had dial up we didn't have anything like YouTube videos or even podcasts or streaming but now we've got we've got no excuses we've got everything we need it's just all in our minds that I think looking forward then one thing I'm interested in is that most people studying Chinese hoping that at some point in the future and hopefully in the not too distant future there will be opportunities to go back to China to go to China to study and in my own case that's something that I would very much like to do in the future when I first started studying Chinese there was I would tell people about my interest in Chinese and a lot of people would say from the beginning you should just go to China straight away I always felt in my own case that it made more sense to get to a level of Chinese where I was able to converse and handle myself from outside of China before then immersing myself when it felt like I was more ready to do that I'm wondering what would your advice be around that if you're advising new people studying Chinese would it be in the future to go straight away and dive in in the deep end from from day one or would it be to take advantage of all the online resources that you've just mentioned study from abroad build up your level to a certain degree and then when you're ready to delve into the full immersion experience yeah it's a good discussion actually because I think there's merit to both of those I think if someone comes to me and says I don't know any Chinese I don't even know how to say hello but I want to go to China should I go I would certainly never say no to that if I was given an optimum program or an optimum kind of schedule I would say that it would be to do what you've done really and I know you were kind of forced into doing that by the pandemic but still I think it might work out in your favour because like we just said there are so many great resources out there online you can absorb and listen to so many things that it will make your life infinitely easier and there's just too many good things out there to use many of them free as well by the way so a lot of them don't even cost any money especially YouTube and Spotify where you can just go on there and listen to stuff and then you know I would go let's just to pin a level on it like a HSK2 sort of level so knowing something like three to five hundred characters being able to introduce yourself what you like to do what you like to eat and maybe you know give replies to some basic questions like how is your weekend or what you plan to do that will make your life infinitely easier when you go there that would be the ultimate thing to do but I certainly wouldn't say to someone who said you know I want to go to China now I don't know anything I would never say to them why you're crazy because actually I did that and although I didn't do it for language purposes at the time I felt how different it was in all elements it's not like going to France or Germany or Italy where if you are on the road you can kind of hear similar words or read similar words you know even sometimes in Russian you can kind of roughly guess certain words Chinese you got no chance it is it is completely different you start from scratch and you've got to get used to it and you having that basis when you go there is going to make a big difference especially with reading things like menus and that kind of stuff yeah and one thing I will say is I briefly a few years ago it's a story I often tell had this brief experience of immersion in a Chinese environment at quite a low level so what happened was I went to Taiwan on a three-week trip and I did a work away for a week now that time I was probably around HSK 3 level which I'd been told was an intermediate level when I arrived at my work away and it was working in a hotel a traditional like Taiwanese tea house and the lady that ran the hotel didn't speak any English so I was kind of fully immersed and I thought I was as I say intermediate and so I thought I would handle myself but very quickly it became clear that I couldn't really handle myself and that the woman would very quickly lose patience and just get the Google translate out that translating my chores to make the bed which I wasn't able to understand the Chinese into English but I think the key thing that that comes down to is management of expectations because what I was going into that trip thinking was that I would quite quickly in an immersive environment pick up a lot of Chinese that was around me because I'd reached this phenomenally intermediate level but it wouldn't be too difficult for me to handle myself and in the end the reality you didn't match my expectation so I think that was more the issue but do you think that management of expectations then of people who are making a choice to go to China in the future is key? Yeah I think that's a really great example that many people can draw on I think actually part of this is down to the problems with the HSK really and they're actually addressing those now with HSK 3 is actually becoming a beginner level so I think part of it is due to this and I saw this many many times with students and this is one of the most common things where students would reach a HSK 5 level in their own country so HSK 5 supposedly being the second top level so supposedly advanced and they would come to China with the strong level they could read very well they'd have no problems writing but when it comes to speaking even relatively basic things they would freeze and their tones weren't quite there so this then became a problem for them where they thought that they were coming to China as advanced speakers but actually they were very beginner level speakers who could read well and it's important to know yourself where your strengths and weaknesses lie and then of course like you said that can help you manage your expectations if you can read and write fantastic you'll have no problem you know looking at signs on the streets or maybe reading the menu or seeing what shop what the shop sales what offers they have but when it comes to communicating you need to realise maybe this can be a bit more difficult so I think expectation management is is absolutely something it's difficult to know as well when you're new to the language to know exactly where you're at and the HSK should be telling us roughly so what the HSK 3 was telling you was that you should be you know roughly halfway to fluency if you look at it in that sort of the fact that there's six levels so I think that's probably a fault of the HSK in that part but it's definitely something to be aware of and it's something that I would wholeheartedly recommend to first-timers in China is that be aware of where you're at with your listening with your speaking with your reading and with your writing because they're all very different and they can help out in different scenarios but for me the the one that I really loved improving was the speaking because that is what you used to make friends and communicate with people or max it's been a pleasure talking to you today and particularly hearing your insights not just from your own personal experience but also from observing so many students come and go over the years at the school that you work for so once again thank you very much for joining us today thanks very much for having some issue it's been a pleasure so that brings us to the end of another episode of the i'm learning Mandarin podcast if you enjoyed this episode you can once again subscribe on i'mlearningmandarin.com to have new podcasts and blogs ping straight to your email you can also subscribe to this podcast on google Spotify or apple podcasts so until next time goodbye