Learn Chinese

Module 1 (Beginning Mandarin) Lessons 1-10 have already been posted to the site.

If you’re new to this site, you may be wondering where the lessons are.

All lessons appear right here in this spot in the blog. There is free content for members, and the full-length course in video format for paying subscribers. Free content includes text of the lessons (講義 jiang3 yi4) with MP3s and some sample videos. In order to see this free content, simply log in to your account and all of it will show up on the home page of the site. If you don’t have an account yet, just subscribe, check your email for your password then come back and log in. You can then change your password.

If you’re looking for an easy-to-follow list of the lessons, go to http://chinese.glossika.com/learn-chinese/

2008/4/10 Update: This upgrade is finished.

Our servers are undergoing an upgrade at the moment which means that a couple lessons may be delayed a couple days. This upgrade means better use of server resources and an increase in speed to provide faster access to the media files. This upgrade should not disturb the functionality of the site. If you find that a link is not working for some reason, please notify me and I will give it priority.

Here is the recommended method for this course:

1. Come back to the site to get your new video and material regularly. I recommend do not wait more than 2 days between lessons. The reason for this is that each lesson reinforces the memories built in the last lesson. If you wait more than 2 days, the working memories trained in the last video may have already disappeared. You should not watch more than 1 video per day, as the method is optimized to take advantage of a full night’s sleep as an interval between videos. This is for greatest efficacy.

2. After you login, the home page will show you a list of lessons you have access to. For free members, you only have access to lesson plans, a short sample video and a short MP3 recording of the lesson material. For gold members, you will see in addition the full video courses. On each of these you can download the format you want to use and take with you.

3. First find the lesson you’re going to study today, for example, Module 1 Lesson 15. Go to the lesson plan and play the MP3 while you read the lesson plan. I recommend doing this while at the computer. It is not important to remember all the contents: practice seeing it and reading it is enough at this point. If you want more practice with the MP3 while away from the computer, download it.

4. Next, go to the video lesson, for example Module 1 Lesson 15 Video. Do not look at the lesson plan while watching the video, and repeat everything after the Chinese speaker at the same time when Mike repeats it. He sometimes intentionally makes errors to compensate for learners’ appropriate levels. The video will start with a review of Lesson 11 conversation with no English cues, then the same for Lesson 12, lesson 13 will review the vocabulary, sentence structures and conversation with English cues, the same for lesson 14. Finally an introduction to the vocabulary and sentences of Lesson 15, but no conversation introduced until the review in the next video.
The video is streaming and optimized for playback on the Internet, however, if your bandwidth experiences any lagging, then download it first. The online player is in Windows Media Player format. Windows users should download WMV files. Apple users should download MP4 / iPod formats. There is also a Pocket PC Windows Mobile format for your cellphone or PDA.
Whether you watch or just listen to the video is irrelevant. The most important thing is that your tongue is moving in repetition. This is the only way you will gain your progress in learning this language. You may not be able to repeat everything on the first day, but since each video reviews up to a maximum of 5 days, you’ll get better at it by the 2nd or 3rd day. Don’t beat yourself up or feel like a failure if you can’t do it on the first day of practice. THIS IS NORMAL.

Again, here are the four steps:

1. Do a new video lesson, no more than 2 days apart, and no more than 1 video per day.
2. Login to access lessons.
3. Listen to the MP3 that goes with the text.
4. Watch the full-length video which will review the previous 4 lessons.

Since the videos are inter-linked with each other by review lessons, it’s important to watch them in order so you get full review practice. If you skip one, you’ll miss an important review session.

All lessons posted on this site require users to be logged in to access course materials. Once logged in, the newest free materials and paid-for materials will appear on the homepage.

This site offers you several levels of learning convenience:

1. The experienced language learner

You can probably go through all our lessons posted for free on the site and will probably be able to learn on your own with little extra assistance. Why do we offer this for free? Because you have to do all the work!

Even if you’re an experienced language learner, like myself (Mike), you probably don’t want to have to deal with the hassle of doing homework and all that extra studying. I’ve been working on dozens of languages and still am, so if this system existed for all languages, this is the first system I’d choose to master a language. I cut wasted time out of your schedule and wasted expense on buying more courses by the hour or semester.

2. Just-trying-it-out language learner

Not sure yet whether Chinese is something you could ever learn or not? Once you get over some pronunciation differences that you’re used to in European languages, it’s not as hard as European languages to learn. Give it a try and you won’t be disappointed.

Again, I recommend the tried-and-true method built into this site. Our English training site already has hundreds of experienced believers in this system. Built by a language learner and linguist made for the average joe, you can’t go wrong.

3. The committed, serious language learner on a busy schedule and tight budget

This is the perfect system for you as we’ve cut out an incredible amount of time it takes to learn such a distant language. With very little chitchat we get right down to business in every video giving you a chance to repeat the sentences and conversations. You spend less than an hour a day (we try to get all training materials within a half hour but not always possible) and doing one video per day using this method is all you need to master the communicative abilities in this language.

By the time you’re through Module 1, you’ll be able to speak at a regular conversational level with anybody–whether you’re still translating internally or starting to grasp it naturally you’ll still be able to converse. You’ll be able to use all the verb tenses and aspects and comparisons and discuss deadlines, people, schedules etc, just as fluently as you do in English. We show you step-by-step how to build sentences up and help you drill and review them throughout the videos.

As a full-paying member, each video you get has five sections in the following order:
1. A review of 4 lessons back. We go through the conversations quickly and all in Chinese.
2. A review of 3 lessons back. We go through (sometimes sentence structures and) conversations and cue in English if necessary.
3. A review of 2 lessons back. We do a review of vocabulary cued in English (if necessary), a review of sentence structures and conversations.
4. A review of last lesson. We do a complete review of vocabulary and sentence structures with cues in English. We introduce the conversations for the first time and do extra explaining of anything we didn’t cover the first day.
5. The new lesson. We introduce new vocabulary and sentence structures and explain the differences between English and Chinese.

As you can see, the review of each lesson from video to video changes. The single video introducing new lessons just isn’t enough to learn the new material. With each review in each successive video, we continue to cue and pick up the pace putting these newly learned phrases into conversations.

Not many people understand linguistic terminology, but in the videos, Mike not only uses linguistic terminology in a professional manner to describe what’s happening in the sentences, he also waters it down so anybody can understand it. In this way, he addresses both the linguists and casual language learner. These videos are not prepared by some guy doing grammar guesswork or giving you a short list of words to cheat your way through a dinner or a meeting with foreign guests–it’s a full-immersion conversation training program based on new discoveries on how the brain learns new skills and builds memories. Mike has been through both DLI and FSI language training programs and a linguistics degree from Indiana University, one of the top linguistics and foreign language training universities not just in the United States, but in the world. A skilled polyglot and well-versed linguist, Mike has researched and worked with languages in every branch of Indo-European (except Celtic), and also languages of the Sino-Tibetan, Afroasiatic, Niger-Kordofanian, Khoisan, Caucasian, Altaic-Japanese-Korean, and Austronesian language families.

The idea for this project started back in 2002, however at the time was unsure how to deliver video content to the web. A trial run was created using MP3 files instead for a difficult-to-find language to learn, Southern Min or commonly known as Hokkien/Taiwanese. This project was launched in some of the Chinese Dialects pages of the Glossika site and is already in its 5th year.

I started looking for and began talks with film crews in 2005 in making a training platform for both Chinese and English. I raised some money, hired a few actors and actresses and we shot a few on-location skits for Chinese in 2006, however the filmmaking cost was running between 500 and a couple thousand USD per day and I could not ascertain the educational value. It would have cost much more to create something of higher entertainment value, so I decided to focus on improving the educational value. It was a good experiment and learning experience. At this time, video sites like YouTube started taking off and it was now feasible to embed video directly into webpages.

Between 2006 and the end of 2007, I spent all of my effort creating a series of training modules in English for the Chinese population, and this has been pulled off successfully including even a two-way video training window. Due to some cost disagreements, the company I collaborated with and I have since parted ways and I ended up building a plain blog-based site like this one to deliver material to my growing customer base. Actual video training started in the spring of 2007 and I still film new lessons for that site on a regular basis. The English site was officially launched January 1, 2008.

The idea for the Chinese site, still many years in the making finally started getting under way when I found a candidate to co-host the show with me: a foreign language major and part-time runway model. A little shy and softspoken at first, her personality comes out more in later lessons as we became more comfortable interacting on video. Shooting started in late November 2007 and more than 30 lessons were complete by Chinese New Year. Now with Module 1 almost to completion and another series of supplementary videos already started, I’ve put the shooting on hold until I get this site launched.

So the official launch of the Chinese site shall coincide with the first day of spring, and coincides with a phrase we teach somewhere around lesson 20: 春天即將來臨 Spring is soon upon us!

Now all the videos are in post production and as you read this, if you are still awaiting new lessons, they’re just a matter of hours until being posted.

I would like to thank the hundreds of Chinese supporters and users of my training method in English, and the few early believers and adoptees of my Chinese training method. Good luck to you all and I’m glad to be a part of making your dreams come true in speaking this magnificent language!

Mike Campbell