You know you’re progressing in Mandarin when…

By Confused Laowai | Date: May 31st, 2010 | Category: General
Maybe this is just me, but I’ve noticed my Mandarin progress take form in some strange ways…
  • You answer you friends with short Mandarin sentences such as “我不知道”, “没有” or anything that you’ve recently learned. They then turn at you thought you were mumbling and then you answer them in the appropriate language.
  • You decide to watch Chinese series in Chinese with Chinese subtitles even though you don’t understand most of it.
  • Every Asian person you meet you listen intently hoping to catch some gossip or surprise them with Chinese.
  • You collect Chinese books, hoping that one day you will manage to read them.
  • Your go to phrase when some asks you to say something in Mandarin goes from “你好” to “我会说一点中文”.
  • Your birthday wishes to friends, in a bid to be unique, is given in Chinese “祝你生日快乐”.
  • You start having internal monologues with yourself in Chinese.
  • You start dreaming in Chinese, baffling yourself in the morning that you understood everything.
  • At night you repeat your favourite Chinese phrase over and over just because it sounds good.
  • You start saying “Good sound” or “Good taste” as a direct influence from “好听” and “好吃” etc.
  • You have set up QQ and started talking strangers in Chinese.
  • You RSS feeder is almost taken over by Chinese Interest and/or Mandarin blogs.
  • You have visited Baidu to search for a interesting Chinese music

These all happened to me, do you have some more?

Related posts:

Blogs and Dictionaries
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On Learning Chinese in 3 Months

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  • http://www.mandmx.com Magnus

    Hilarious. “You collect Chinese books, hoping that one day you will manage to read them” is mine! That's so me!

  • http://twindie.net NielDLR

    Haha, totally. I've got a bunch of children's books stacked here next to me. I might just have the time this holiday to try some of them.

  • Brian

    You start thinking “What are the the tones?” about words in other languages

  • http://twindie.net NielDLR

    Haha, yeah totally. Or, I start wondering “Where are the characters? This roman alphabet is boring.”

  • http://twindie.net NielDLR

    Haha, yeah totally. Or, I start wondering where are the characters? This
    alphabet is boring.

  • Pingback: Chinese learning – Around the Web, 6th of June 2010

  • http://MandarinSegments.blogspot.com Greg

    And … when you speak English, you realise you're using the Chinese word-order rules, and not what flows naturally in English.

    (Hope this observation for you very has interest :-)

  • http://docs.google.com/View?docID=0AUoyjDAX6N9oZGhwMzd6dHhfMjMwY3g1cTZya3E&revision=_latest&hgd=1 Martin

    … when you look at new vocabulary and realise you know some of the characters already from other character-pairs.

  • http://twindie.net NielDLR

    Yes! That to me is really satisfying.

  • Celso Pinheiro

    When you can see a text in japanese (which you are not studying) and understand the general meaning of most kanji…