Learn Chinese

Contents:
1. How to Use This Course
2. The Guarantee
3. About Standard Chinese
4. Chinese Characters: Simplified and Traditional
5. Sound Quality of Videos 1-10
6. The Campbell Method
7. Effective vs Non-Effective Language Learning
8. Knowledge vs Skill
9. Critical Improvements to Effective Methods
10. Q&A

How to Use This Course

Here is what I recommend:

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.

Guarantee For You and Other Issues

If you read how my methodology works and you follow it carefully, you’ll find your progress coming along very fast. This is rare among language training programs, but I’ve built this course to do all the work for you. We’ve spent countless hours writing, revising, practicing, filming, and recording all the various review steps required for you to acquire this language. This is as close as you’ll get to osmosis.

What this course helps eliminate for you:

Outrageous budget on language classes

Unnecessary hours of learning that you won’t fit in your schedule anyway

Homework.

Bad errors you might pick up from classmates

High drop-out rate. Why drop out when you can just back up a step and keep going?

What this course does for you:

More efficient learning than language classes

On-the-go learning, both audio and video anywhere you want

Gives a community of support

Builds fluency for every lesson

High retention rate

A year or two of college Chinese in a matter of months

Chinese is spoken over a large area and in different countries. We are based out of Taiwan. The Taiwanese speech patterns are advantageous for a number of reasons:

Everybody in Taiwan speaks standard Chinese as mother language with the standard Putonghua accent. Mainland China however is a hodgepodge of different accents, and one’s personal accent is often different than the so-called standard accent. Oftentimes you’ll meet people you don’t understand at all even though they claim to speak standard Putonghua–the problem is their regional accent–but they’ll understand you just fine.

Taiwanese accent has prestige and sounds “good” almost everywhere in China because of Taiwanese businessmen, TV shows, famous singers and actors, etc.

Where vocabulary differs, we teach both ways but stick to our own word choice from there on.

We teach correct pronunciation, not lazy Taiwanese speech where ‘zh’ and ‘z’ almost sound the same.

Over half a million Taiwanese live in China, mainly Shenzhen (Guangdong) and Shanghai, and most are in management positions.

Learning to speak like people in Taiwan gives you an advantage in business and opens many opportunities to work with management.

The course is clean of politics. We don’t go there. We suggest you don’t either.

Taiwan is an island located near the coast of China. Travel between China and the island is restricted through Hong Kong and Macau. Taiwan’s population is a mix of people from almost every province in China. The original native languages of Taiwan are unrelated to Chinese and rarely spoken.

Chinese Characters:
This course focuses on getting you to fluency in all aspects of Chinese through the fastest and most efficient route possible. Learning characters from the outset is not recommended. It will SLOW you down significantly.
The beginning module of this course focuses on speaking and listening. We will introduce characters and reading ability later through separate modules dedicated to that purpose. Meanwhile, all characters are provided in the Traditional form which I will address in a moment.
Chinese characters are hard to learn, but with dedication coupled with speaking ability it’s possible for an adult to learn them in just a couple years. Recognizing them is a lot easier than writing them, and if you forget a character, you can always access it through a handheld device like a cellphone by typing its pronunciation.
This is a complete language course and assumes the more dedicated learner will one day want to be proficient in both simplified and traditional characters. Simplified characters are used in Mainland China, Singapore and Malaysia; Traditional characters in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and elsewhere by the diaspora. Learning traditional characters first provides several advantages:

Traditional characters use the original radicals and phonetic compounds which get garbled and can even distort meanings and etymologies in simplified characters.

You can significantly boost your character recognition with traditional characters, much more efficiently than with simplified characters.

When you know traditional characters, learning to read and recognize simplified characters is a no-brainer. A few simple steps and you’re done. The opposite is impossible to do: learning traditional characters after learning simplified could actually triple the time required.

Traditional characters are more beautiful and have a sense of completeness, in the words of Chinese people themselves.

Videos:

The sound is compromised with some buzz in the first 10 lessons of Module 1 before an upgrade to a better microphone was made. We’re still unsure whether we will re-record those lessons or not.

About the Campbell Method

When you buy a product, like a washing machine, you expect a guarantee that it’s going to clean your clothes. But what has bothered me for so long is why people spend so much money on education without any clear idea (or care) of what they’re getting out of it. I’m in the education business and I’ve made it my job not just to deliver a guarantee on people’s learning, but a return on investment as well.

Effective vs. Non-Effective Language Learning

Back in the 1960s, the U.S. government researched and developed foreign language courses in about 60 languages based on effective language acquisition methods, built specifically for government employees dispatched around the world who had to learn a language in a hurry. Languages most similar to English, for example Germanic and Romance languages, could be taught much quicker than others. Those languages with the largest difference to English, non Indo-European, especially East Asian languages, of course require the most amount of training.

Using the U.S. government’s effective method of studying these 60 languages, the amount of time required in traditional methods, such as typical classrooms, could be greatly reduced and are categorized as follows:

Category 1 (most similar languages): ~600 hours of classroom study

Category 2 (more complex Indo-European languages or genetically distant languages): ~1100 hours

Category 3 (most difficult and distant languages): ~2200 hours

Source: http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/november/learningExpectations.html

Students can undergo the government’s language training at the Defense Language Institute located in Monterey, California.

44 Years to Learn Chinese?!

What is the point of this to us average language learners?

Most language learners who attend classes, whether in or outside of school, do not have teachers who underwent some of the more efficient training methods for learning languages. Many of these teachers probably learned languages similarly to their students: going through a lot of hard work, laborious homework, written tests, etc. According to statistics, using inefficient classroom study with the disruptions of students and the teacher’s classroom management, the amount of time required more than doubles in comparison with more efficient methods. With English and Chinese belonging to Category 3, you’re looking at at least 4,400 hours of classroom study before you reach an ACTFL level 3 (not fluent, but proficient) in the target language. And if you only do 2 hours of study a week, it’ll take you 44 years!!! No wonder it takes some people a lifetime of study.

If you were to continue using traditional methods of study, you’d find yourself investing huge amounts of time and money just to get the job done, and there would be no guarantee as to how long it would take you to achieve results.

People who are busy with their jobs, who have children, and all the hassles of daily life have little more than 2 hours a week they can really get alone to spend on studying a foreign language. Based on my experience I’ve also seen a lot of people actually stop going to class because they either can’t keep up, or their life has become too busy to keep the language study in their regular schedule. It’s a shame the amount of money wasted on such programs with little or no results. The casual language learner really has a dream just like anybody else to someday speak this language, maybe just to impress the people they know, but more importantly to open up new opportunities for themselves and for that self-achievement that we all desire.

Knowledge vs Skill: Language is a Skill

Based on the way the brain works, there are two ways to learn a language: broaden your knowledge (good for paper tests) which means you can read, fill in grammar exercises, etc. The other is to train your listening and speaking, which is an ability completely different than “knowledge”. The point here is that babies are born without knowledge and learn how to speak their mother languages long before attending school and having any knowledge. Babies don’t need knowledge to speak. Neither do we. It’s just like any other skill like dancing, playing music or sports, or riding a bicycle: you don’t learn it out of a book doing exercises on paper; you learn it by doing.

2 Hours a Week a Different Way

Based on brain research in areas of long-term and working memory, any language program that meets once a week, or practiced once a week, is ineffective. Language has to be learned intensively so that the new memories in the brain are getting stimulated frequently enough to take root. But by intensive I don’t mean you need to spend 10 hours a day. We can take your typical 2-hour a week class and stretch that out over several days so that you’re spending less time in each sitting but practicing more and learning more in the long run. By spreading things out and teaching one lesson slowly over several classes, you’re stimulating your memories more frequently, practing your muscles more frequently (the tongue), and slowly building to conversational levels by reviewing the same material over several sessions.

Eliminating the Drop-Out Rate

The drop-out rate of students in language programs is so high, and most of the reasons point to an inability to comprehend or a lack of practice of previous material. My methodology has taken these reasons into account. As you learn new material, you don’t want to have to be searching in a dictionary for the words, you’d like to be told what they are, and how to use them right then and there. We do that for you. In fact, I assume that you haven’t done any homework between videos, nor do you have the time, and that’s the reason why I go out of my way to give you English cues even for review lessons because I know there’s no way you’d have remembered what we learned from last lesson anyway. Through this constant cueing, reviewing, drilling and practice, coupled with engaging and interesting mini conversations, we build your ability up little by little through each session. And, if you really do have trouble with today’s lesson, you have a complete video recording of the last lesson, so just go back and watch it again before moving on.

The Campbell Method

Here’s how my method was developed. Based on recent discoveries in neurobiology, we have a better understanding of the brain’s functions, especially in areas of memory, skills, and language acquisition. But unlike other skills, language acquisition is natural for humans so theoretically easier to learn than many other kinds of skills. My methodology makes the following assumptions:

1. Since everybody speaks at least one language, anybody can learn another language.

2. There is no “smart” or “stupid” in language learning and teachers who claim so have failed to efficiently train the student. However, I’ve noticed that smart students who think too much about what they’re doing tend to make slower progress. Saying “stupid” things in another language can be fun because we can learn to laugh at ourselves. It also helps make the learning process more memorable. I help act out some students’ “stupid” mistakes in the videos, why? Because I know they’re happening to you, and I was once in your shoes learning this language too!

3. The most effective way to improve your foreign language ability is to focus on enhancing your working memory through actual use. I do this through stimulating the hippocampus on a regular basis (this builds listening comprehension) and turning what your hippocampus has recorded into memory into self-produced speech (building your working memory and your speaking ability).

4. Our working memories are linked with our muscles: the more we move our muscles the stronger those memories get. Our tongue is required to move during language learning or else we acquire no ability whatsoever. It is not until these movements become so natural that we will no longer have to “think” about how to say things in the foreign language–you can just follow your tongue’s natural movements.

Critical Improvements to other Effective Methods

Using this methodology, we have made improvements in 4 critical areas as compared with the original U.S. government’s effective method:

1. Time intervals: you’re given a study schedule of no more than 2 days between lessons. The fastest time interval would be one video per day. If you’re in a hurry, you could finish all of Module 1 in less than 3 months. If the interval between videos is more than 2 days, the memories built from the last video will have weakened, and in such case I recommend going back a video or two before going on. Sleep patterns are very important for this method: maintain one full night’s sleep between videos for best results.

2. From “Lesson-based” to “Session-based”: Each video is not a “lesson” but rather a “session”. In each session we do 5 lessons, four of which are review.

3. Cues: most of the recorded materials developed by DLI and FSI fail to include mother-language cues of what is about to be heard. This means that when it’s heard, the student most likely fails to understand. This produces a breakdown in the hippocampus which is required for memory encoding. When the comprehension breaks down, the hippocampus cannot do its job. The student is required to keep lesson plans and books at hand in order to understand, which again defeats the purpose of stimulating the hippocampus, because reading from the page diverts the brain’s efforts away from the hippocampus to another area of the brain required for reading skills. (Source: Alan Baddeley, Journal of Communication Disorders 36 (2003) p193).

4. Review: DLI, FSI, and other offshoot products like Barron’s and Pimsleur, make the assumption that the student has learned everything before and up to today’s lesson and do not include any review of previous vocabulary or material. In my methodology, review of vocabulary, sentence structures, and conversations is conducted in each session with full cues in English based on how many times it’s been reviewed. By the fourth review, most cues are no longer used.

To date, there is no method more effective on the market, even for more commonly studied languages such as French and Spanish. And there is no such language method currently available in as many formats: video, audio, MP3, MP4, iPod, cellphone, Pocket PC, all allowing you complete mobility and freedom of study.

So why wait? The first 100 buyers to this site get full access to all content for life at one low price: EUR 250.

Common Questions Q&A

Q. Can your videos help my pronunciation?
A. Yes. In addition to a separate pronunciation course of how to pronounce the individual sounds, we also spend a good deal of time in the videos working up fluency in pronunciation and sentences. There is a difference in all languages between the proscribed or “dictionary” pronunciation of words and how they’re actually pronounced on the surface in fast-flowing speech. As a linguist, I’m aware of these differences and bring them to your attention. A very clear example of surface-level speech is the 3rd tone becoming a 2nd tone. But many other areas of speech are not that apparent. Many things that feel tongue-twisting in Chinese are perhaps spoken by the Chinese with certain shortcuts in fast speech (like the “SH” in “先生 xiansheng”) and I show you how people actually talk at the surface. Surface-level speech means that certain sounds and tones undergo changes that you’d have no way of learning from a book or even from your Chinese friend, because most people aren’t aware of the changes they make when speaking naturally. It’s like American English teachers insist that “interview” has a “T” but yet, no American I’ve ever known has ever pronounced that “T” in normal speech. In Chinese the “T” in “他 ta” is seldom pronounced in normal speech after certain words like “把 ba” and I show you how this happens in Module 1, making a strong case when Jasmine, the Chinese teacher, lets a few slip.

Q. How long does it take to finish Module 1?
A. If you do 3 videos per week, it will take 17 weeks, or 4 months. If you do 5 videos a week (you can go at this rate once they’re all available online), then it will take 10 weeks, or under 3 months.

Q. What level can I attain when completing Module 1?
A. I will post everything that is covered in Module 1 soon, showing example sentences from those lessons so you can assess the level you’re capable of reaching. There are supplementary lessons in addition to the regular Module 1 lessons which are meant to increase and strengthen about 400 more vocabulary by practicing some 900 practice sentences.