How This Guy Learned Fluent Chinese by Age 21 | Method Breakdown @xiaomanyc

⬇️ GET MY FREE STORYLEARNING® KIT:

📖 LEARN CHINESE THROUGH THE POWER OF STORY:
Want to get fluent in Mandarin Chinese like Xiaoma? Stories are the best way I have found to learn ANY language, even tricky ones like Chinese. Forget the boring textbooks and time-wasting apps and learn Mandarin the natural, effective way with my beginner Chinese Uncovered course.

📺 WATCH NEXT:
To learn the 8 secrets that polyglots use to learn languages fast, check out this video next:

⏱ TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 How white guy learned fluent Chinese
02:10 Mindset to learn Chinese fast
04:03 Learn fluent Chinese by speaking
05:00 How to learn vocabulary
05:37 How to practise speaking
07:10 Learning Chinese characters
08:30 Taking control of your learning
09:30 What’s your reason for learning a language?

The star of today's video, Ari, is better known as @xiaomanyc , and he makes YouTube videos seen by millions.

Check out his channel here:

My name is Olly Richards, and on this channel I show you how to learn a new language with stories.

To see some of my previous experiments, why not try...

👉 Learn Italian in 3 months:

👉 Learn Thai in 14 Days:

👉 Daily Study Routines and Schedules

Or...

🔈 To ask me language questions, submit a question on my podcast:

...or search "I Will Teach You A Language" wherever you get your podcasts! (iTunes, Spotify, etc)

[paulwalther]

Yeah the irrational passion to learn languages. I say this to language teachers sometimes and they don't get it. They think everyone needs a good logical reason to learn a language such as for their job or to talk to their girlfriend/wife. Quite frankly I will put my money on the irrational person to excel over the rational person.

[mercywalschek]

I love that all these people collaborate on language learning. It's not a competition.

[santoor_naad]

I used to watch 小马's videos when I was first starting out in Chinese, and they were a great source of motivation! But the main thing that I have come to understand is that everyone has their own definition of fluency. For some, it is the ability to have simple conversations with people, or it is the ability to appreciate a text in the original language, or it is to culturally understand the people of that language. All you need to do is find your 'why' of language learning and stick to the essence of that 'why.' There is a lot of comments here that 小马 is starting to overstate his work, but I feel that if there is one thing that he sells, it is that language learning should be fearless and open-hearted. And that is such an important lesson that we can learn from him. He has clearly found his definition of fluency and has been faithful to it.

[TheRockstarFreak]

In my experience it has helped alot to use a little time, like 10-15 minutes on Anki a day, but using the rest of the time for immersing. It makes learning new vocabulary really effective.

[tashinoyukshin]

I studied Chinese in High School for 3 hours a day, Monday through Thursday. It was good, but what really helped me become fluent was complete immersion. I had a friend who had moved here from China who stayed with my family for about 6 months, & at the time she didn't know very much English. So I was translating between her & my family, & of course conversating with her each day. When I eventually moved to China, I was set. I was even dreaming in Chinese when I lived there! :) Immersion is where it's at.

[DaveDisci]

Great video, thanks for including this awesome person in your video.

[fafainchina]

Leaning Chinese is such a useful skill and its super rewarding. it would give you a special experience. I encourage everyone have a try.🧡

[ernestoaranda]

Love your video. I am a Peruvian living in the US fully fluent in English. I also speak french and portuguese. I also play de violin every week and .... I am a doctor. The key to do all I do is by taking advantage of every single minute of the day. I literally go to bed every night with my brain hurting... but happy!

[jemand]

"how babies learn is not by vocab lists"
well, true, but then babies have about 10 years or even 12 of 100% full immersion all day until you can really have a meaninful conversation with them!
It's not efficient.

[vinzetti]

Great vid. The whole comprehensible input route has been the best way to go for me. I took 4 years of portuguese in high school and it wasn't very practical. I've been learning french for 4 months with comprehensible input and I've learned and understand more french than I do in portuguese. Your French short stories book has been a big help.

[kierascrafts]

I vaguely remember coming across this video where the person in the video was talking about how she managed to keep Korean vocabulary in her head and practice her speaking. She tried to think out loud as much as she could. She lived in South Korea and sometimes when she was at a cafe or in a shop or whatever, occasionally she would have someone come over to her to help find the right word for something or help with her pronunciation

[WeiShiQiang]

First of all, I have nothing negative to say about Ari, his Chinese is good from what I hear from his videos and I'll take that at face value. I just find the approach interesting, I took much the same approach of trying to speak Chinese as much as possible and not dedicating as much time to memorising vocabulary, reading etc. And the approach did work well for me, by the time I came out of university I had a very good level of spoken Chinese, I went back to live in China and could navigate around freely, do everything I needed to do using the language and I was able to make basic conversation upon meeting Chinese people.

That's where it stopped however and I've been stuck at this upper intermediate B2 level for years now, making small progress here and there but I would find myself having the same conversations over and over again, and I don't mean just "Where are you from and why do you speak Chinese etc." I found that I wasn't able to have interesting conversations and therefore make meaningful friendships in Chinese (made plenty of Chinese friends, but most speak very good English) I'm now going back to flashcards, doing lots of reading, watching plenty of Youtube in Chinese (with Chinese subtitles), most importantly in things I'm interested in such as politics with channels like 攝徒日記Fun Tv and 斯坦説中文 (Polish guy with fantastic Mandarin by the way) and listening to Taiwanese indie and rock bands like 草東沒有派對 and I'm finding my level is improving rapidly.

Anywho the purpose of this rant isn't to discourage anyone from Xiaoma's approach I think it's a good way to become conversationally fluent in the language, I'm just putting this out there for anyone who finds themselves in the same position as me, you might have to change your methods once you reach a certain plateau!

[corgisrule]

I love that you pointed out that you can live in a country and not learn the language (especially if you’re a native English speaker since so much of the world is catered to that, imo). I’ve seen a couple of language learners talk about “wasted time” in Korea cause they thought “oh, I’ll just go there for a year or two and be good at it”😂 They said you STILL have to make the effort and put yourself out there to try and get better, since there’s so much English there (especially if you’re at an international school or a company that doesn’t make you have to learn the language).

[perryfrancis]

"It's by stuff like you do in your course .." well, glad to hear Xiaoma say that. Olly Richards' courses are the most sensible thing out there. "Guided" comprehensible input to get over the beginner hump. Great stuff!

[dylanschouweiler]

When those that get frustrated about not understanding or knowing grammar in a foreign language, do you know or understand all the vocabulary, grammar, or even completely understand everything in your native language? Don’t be frustrated.

[lauradeliacapozzella]

Some Chinese native speakers I've read on Reddit claim that he is not fluent, he is at an intermediate level.

[SimpleChineseYoutube]

Learning Chinese is a very rewarding experience! I urge everyone to give it a try, or at least take a look at some videos to learn more about the language! Fluency is a fairly subjective term, and I think that if you're reading this and are putting in the right amount of work, you could easily speak Chinese much better than Xiaomanyc.

[Ketutar]

Funny, that... "I spend hours with Anki memorizing words" - "you don't need to memorize words, you learn words naturally". So... how did he learn the vocabulary? He had a list of sentences and memorized them. *rolling eyes*
There's no f-ing difference there.
Also, we don't know how far he would have come if he didn't spend any time with Anki. We don't know how much memorizing words helped him further on. It was the same thing with the guy learning Japanese. He, too, spend time with Anki, and now says he shouldn't have. How would he know?
I learned the English, Swedish, and German verb conjugation through memorizing lists, and right now I have a better grip of that than some native speakers.
I have learned all my vocabulary - this, here, that I'm using right here, right now - English is my second language, and my first is Finnish, and I'm 50+, so not so much being surrounded by English when I was growing up. I would say there's nothing wrong with my English and vocabulary attained through rote memorizing.
So, please, stop disparaging flashcards and rote memorizing.

And I hate the "natural, like children" learning "method". We aren't children. It takes some 5 years for kids to learn languages, children cannot attack language learning with determination, they can't focus on learning what they need, they will have to accept to learn what they are being taught with no possibility, ability, or even knowledge to influence the subject matter. This is why kids make mistakes like "the cat eated lots of mouses". They also don't understand that languages have things like that, so it can be difficult to accept that it's not eated, it's ate. It's not mouses, it's mice. But it's not hice, it's houses. Or that it's many goats, but not many sheeps. Frankly, that's just something people have to memorize.

[punkykenickie]

So by "one year" you mean "three years"?

[MegaLoveDoctor]

ive been learning japanese for a little over a month now and reading and listening is definitely working for me.