If you had to relearn Mandarin Chinese from scratch, what advice would you give yourself?

[roddy]

The single biggest thing for me is what Xuefang says - pronunciation. More generally I'd be a more conscientious learner. For years I was guilty of thinking it was good enough to be understood, with no thought of how genuine or difficult that understanding might be, or how much damage it was inflicting on innocent eardrums. 

[hedwards]

That's certainly a valid point. I'd recommend people taking that view to pay attention to the responses. If the responses are more than you can handle, it's likely that your pronunciation is good enough that you should focus elsewhere. I found that in many cases when I'd say something in Chinese that I'd get an immediate response and then some incomprehensible language that I couldn't yet handle. Followed by a puzzled expression about why I couldn't understand.

 

I took that to mean that my pronunciation and grammar in that instance were good enough.

 

But yes, you do want to be mindful about the people around you. People are going to be much more willing to help a learner out when it's less work to understand the utterances.

[Yadang]

I still am a beginner, but I'm starting to realize a few things I've done wrong (and right) already. I'd place emphasis on:

 

1. Pronunciation and tones.

 

I did do this actually, and I'm very happy I did, but I still have a lot of work I'm sure. Ever since starting to study Chinese, though, I pay more attention languages in general. When people speak English to me and they have an accent, I've started to realize that I would so much rather them have poor grammar and excellent pronunciation than the other way around. Even if someone has really good grammar and if they are fluent in their speaking, if their pronunciation is not so good, it's just so hard for me to understand them. This is in English of course, but I think it still carries over to other languages (especially ones with far fewer unique syllables than English, such as Chinese) and speaks to the importance of good pronunciation.

 

2. A good foundation for character learning. 

 

I still haven't made this, but I'm working on it, but I wish I had been taught a good foundation in character components and different ways of studying characters from the beginning.

 

3. Learn everything in context.

 

I haven't been doing this, and it's showing, and so now I'm in the transition of switching everything I learn to be learned in the context of at least a sentence. Hopefully more.

 

4. SRS.

 

I love SRS. Couldn't study Chinese without it. But I use it not for words, but for sentences, so I get context.

 

5. Ridiculous amounts of input via reading/tv/radio/etc.

 

This is something I should do a lot more of.