Sources and technology key to balanced language education

Thanks to advancements in technology, learning Chinese is perhaps easier than ever.

Don't get me wrong, it's still an extremely challenging language for a native English speaker to grasp. But unlike when I was studying Spanish 10 years ago, improvements in videoconferencing and especially cellphone apps have made learning at all hours of the day more possible.

Before I took my first one-on-one Chinese lesson in May, I was learning basic vocabulary with the app HelloChinese. The app, which is free (!), uses mostly pinyin and features an enjoyable array of pictures, speaking activities and Chinese-character-writing exercises. My favorite part of the app is when a video recording of what appears to be a random Chinese person selected in public by the HelloChinese developers appears on the screen to utter a vocabulary word or phrase from the lesson.

The people range in age from children younger than 10 to elderly folks, but most appear to be late-teens and early-20s university students with their schools pictured in the background. The looks on the natives' faces make the app-learning experience more human: some are serious and engaged as they fire off vocabulary words like kuaizi (chopsticks) and phrases like jintian xiayu (it rains today). Others look downright confused, while a handful smile and laugh in amusement. It sure beats the monotonous and expensive Rosetta Stone program, which a decade ago at $300 was considered the most innovative course for learning language. This year, HelloChinese offers a more accessible and interactive program for free.

Beyond that, I try to take two one-on-one Chinese lessons per week with different teachers. One teacher is from a Mandarin instruction school in Beijing, and the other meets me via Skype in my Beijing apartment from her office in Wuxi, Jiangsu province. Videoconferencing wasn't as common eight years ago as it is today, and it wouldn't be a stretch to say many language teachers using platforms like Skype and WeChat video in 2019 were not doing so in 2009.

Having the Wuxi professor gives me access to a different teaching style than the one I'm learning from my instructor in Beijing, and I've also learned a handful of different colloquialisms, like buyao, buyaode (extremely) and chihuo (food-lover).

Having one-on-one lessons from two separate teachers and a software program costs a grand total of 200 yuan ($28) per week. Not bad considering the amount of learning that's going on.

Thanks to the app, I show up to my one-on-one lessons with some basic vocabulary. I've found my Chinese teachers to be pleasantly surprised upon hearing my new vocabulary and mostly correct tone pronunciation before they've taught the words to me.

A teacher's trust and interest in his or her student means they'll usually also be more engaged, and we can move through lessons together faster.

Pinyin and tone practice is key, but so is knowing a few characters. A ton of words that sound and are written in pinyin exactly the same actually have different meanings and characters.

Jiu can mean the number nine or liquor, depending on its Chinese character, and jia can mean family or home.

I just started studying characters, and so far I can only write the character for ren (people), zhong (middle) and zi (child) from memory. Within a few months, I hope to have at least three or four dozen characters memorized. The idea of learning so much Chinese in such a short time would have been unthinkable, or at least excruciatingly tedious, just years ago.