How to learn Chinese (and Russian)

For Chinese (this is the version without a language partner/tutor, with one, learning characters is less essential, but you’re still advised to do it -learning “conversational Chinese” is not enough):

1. Learn pronunciation (both Pinˉyinˉ and Zhuˋyinˉ) -this is actually the easiest part, and will take you about a few minutes solely due to the unusual pronunciation of j/q/x AKA ㄐ ㄑ ㄒ (which involve the middle of your tongue curled up and touching the ridge above your front teeth and the tip of your tongue touching the bottom of your front teeth). All the other consonants and vowels have exact or approximate English equivalents. Note that the r is often pronounced as a zh. The concept of the tones is easy for Westerners to understand, as is speaking them, recognizing them on command and remembering which words have which tone is much harder. Luckily for Westerners, tolerance for mispronunciation is relatively high in China. Most Chinese type their characters via their sounds.

2. Learn the Wubi input method (memorize the positions of all the elements on the keyboard in a week -you shouldn’t take more, but you probably will, and this will be a mistake). If you’re focused on outlying parts of China (an unusual choice), you should learn the Cangjie input method instead, as mainlanders (and Singaporeans) use Communist-picked simplified characters over versions having greater historical usage, as the Cangjie method is more appropriate for traditional characters (though nothing prevents traditional characters from being typed via Wubi). This is substantially harder than learning pronunciation, but you’ll need it anyway, unless you want to be the sort of person pecking out unknown characters using handwriting recognition (which takes about ten times slower than typing them with a shape-based keyboard method. Wubi/Cangjie codes for the vast majority of commonly used characters are available in the Yellowbridge Dictionary to get a taste of how the input method is actually used. Once you learn a character’s sound, you’ll often forget the Wubi/Cangjie code, but that’s a sign of progress. Learning characters is essential if learning Chinese alone (or is it? there are browser extensions to annotate characters with their sounds), as characters are the national script of China and online dictionaries and translation tools and subtitles to Chinese videos and comments on them are written in them. Each character stands for a syllable in the context of a word. As a classic example, 他 (Wubi code wbn), 她 (Wubi code vbn), and 它 (Wubi code px), all pronounced the same (taˉ), mean he, she, and it, respectively. Strictly speaking, the characters’ usage is clearly unnecessary for spoken speech, but they are still necessary for many usages of the Mandarin written language, which is one of the reasons why they continue to be used in place of a Pinˉyinˉ/Zhuˋyinˉ based writing system (the primary reasons are actually stubbornness and inertia).

3. Watch subtitled videos on Ixigua (if learning in simplified Chinese) or YouTube (if focused on outlying parts of China), imputing the characters in the subtitles into Google Translate and slowly listening to how they are pronounced in real life. Most Chinese videos are subtitled due to China being a rather linguistically diverse country, unlike Russia or even the Spanish-speaking world. Since Google Translate’s internal dictionary is limited, look up unknown terms using the Yellowbridge Dictionary.

4. Ask for help (if you need it, which you will for about 1 in 100 words) on the r/ChineseLanguage Discord server. If you need help on the phonetic components of the characters, purchase the Outlier Linguistics Dictionary of Chinese Characters for the Pleco app on iPhone or Android.

For learning Russian, first decide if you want to learn to speak it or simply learn to read and listen. If the former, you must get a language partner(s)/tutor; there is simply no way otherwise. And focus on pronunciation above all. One would think Russian pronunciation is fairly straightforward given the alphabet, but many pronunciation nuances are simply not reflected in the spelling, and many Americans trying to learn Russian don’t have a great idea how to get pronunciation from the spelling, either (somehow). Consider this individual. “носител”. “дорьго” “луди”. “смотра”. Simply due to the greater variety of syllables, Russian pronunciation for English-speakers is substantially more difficult than Mandarin pronunciation (and gobs more difficult than Spanish or Japanese pronunciation). There are also stupid spelling distinctions (e.g., one of either е or э is clearly redundant), which you should be aware of when trying to either read or speak the language. If you simply want to learn to read and listen, read as much Russian content as possible (Google Translate is passable for it these days, though its internal dictionary is frequently imprecise -consult an actual dictionary instead if you want to look up the meanings of words) first, then learn to listen once you’ve learned to read (which should take about a year, maybe two). This is so you know how a word is spelled before you listen to it, and because a word’s spelling typically (not always) gives a broadly accurate reflection of its sound.

As for Spanish and German (which should be the easiest to learn major languages for an English-speaker, unless perhaps one counts Italian and Portuguese as major languages), I took them in high school/college and I haven’t made any serious effort to learn them since. I rate them both as substantially easier than Russian and Mandarin. All I can tell you is that there are a lot of great resources out there on every level.