How to maintain your Mandarin Chinese language skills when you are not in China?
How to maintain your Mandarin Chinese language skills when you are not in China? This is a question & challenge for many online Chinese language learners. Here we list some advice for you to keep up (or improve) your Chinese language skills.
Because you do lose some language if you don’t use it.
Absorb Chinese language materials online
So we don’t really need to explain this in much detail. We have tons of resources for you available:
- Podcasts for learning Chinese
- Best YouTube channels for learning Chinese
- Chinese movies or Netflix series
Talk to people online in Chinese
You can join our online events (sign-up for the email reminder here), or find Mandarin speakers on apps or websites such as WeChat, Weibo, Hello Talk, HiNative, Tandem, Bilibili. You can also try Reddit’s r/LanguagExchange or Discord.
And if you are from a Chinese family and now living abroad, call your family and insist on speaking in Chinese.
Find Chinese-speaking people in your own town
Chinese is spoken in every country around the world. Of course to various degrees, but we have examples of Canada, the US, Chile, and even a tiny village in the Netherlands where you can speak Mandarin (inside a Chinese restaurant.
Obviously, this depends on the city where you live, but we’re just rambling some ideas here. You could go to a Chinese supermarket and put up a notice that you want to speak Chinese, or you can see if there is a Chinese film festival being held there. You could even try to find some retired Chinese people in retirement homes because they’ll be super glad to talk to you! And you can use meetup websites such as Meetup, Reddit (your city’s own subreddit), or Facebook groups. Either there is already a Chinese language meetup, or you can start one.
Some of these things seem kinda awkward and you’ll need to get out of your comfort zone to maintain your Mandarin skills. But your surroundings are a big part of language learning, so you’ll need to create it yourself more actively than you would if you were living in China. Of course, you can also learn Chinese online with GoEast Mandarin!
