An eye-opening experience... 开阔眼界 kāi kuò yǎn jiè...

Over the past two years, I have been studying Mandarin and in that time I have learnt so much and received so much joy from doing it. My learning journey began in p7 when I was deliberating over what languages to choose. I was quite good at Spanish, and so I chose that but I also wanted to challenge myself. For that reason and the fact that Mandarin is the most spoken language in the world. 

As stated earlier, I have received much joy from studying Mandarin. I would have to say that the part I enjoy most about learning and studying Mandarin, is how different the language is from English. I have thoroughly enjoyed learning about character rules and radicals as they are truly fascinating.

I would absolutely say that the most challenging aspect of Mandarin is how the language is written in characters and how rather than using letters to form a word, Mandarin uses characters which represent whole words. The way I found in which to overcome that challenge is to familiarise oneself with radicals as through knowledge of radicals, one can deduct meanings of characters through identifying those radicals. An example is water. The character for ‘water’ is 水， and 氵is the ‘water’ radical. I know through knowledge of the 氵 radical, that whenever the three drops of water radical appear, the character must involve water such as the character for swimming 游泳.

A strategy that I have implemented to aid my progress in Chinese, is making use of the online learning websites posted on our classes Google Classroom. Through the use of our online learning resources, I feel that I can work on my Mandarin whilst still having fun learning.

Later on, in my school years, I intend to continue my learning of Mandarin. I have already chosen to further continue my study of Mandarin to National 5 level and at the moment I intend to continue it to Higher grade. 

In conclusion, I would say that I have found my study of Mandarin to be one of the most interesting and eye-opening experiences that I have had. I have thoroughly enjoyed every second of it and am excited to further continue it. I would strongly advise all to at least ponder about taking it as I feel that one can learn so much from it.

艾思得’s Top Tips for Learning 中文 Chinese

I would say that my most successful strategy for learning Chinese is using the online learning resources as I find that I can work and improve my Chinese yet still learning in a fun and intuitive way.

I memorise characters by repeating them over in my head and using my knowledge of radicals to both help remember them and deduct the meaning of characters.

For my learning in Chinese I use Quizlet and occasionally YouTube.

I would say that one should spend at least 5-10 minutes a night on Chinese if they want to fully learn the language.

I would absolutely agree with the little and often technique for Chinese characters as this is the technique that I have implemented in order to memorise characters.

艾思得 Alasdair Mulligan, S2