Is this the WORST Chinese Learning Advice on YouTube?

You should forget about the tones completely. You should forget about the first tone, ma, the second tone, ma. So, a few videos from this guy, Yuanyuan, I'm not sure how, what tones, you know, his name is pronounced in, but that's not important. You're going to see why in a moment. But a few videos from this guy have been popping up on my feed. These videos, they don't have huge views, but they're getting a medium amount of views, 16,000, 18,000. It's actually a lot of views for a small and very new channel. But the thing is, these videos, and this is why I guess they're getting views, because they are stirring up a lot of controversy in the Chinese learning community because of the guy's unorthodox suggestions for learning Chinese. Some people have already done reactions to some of these videos, like this guy. The title of his video is The Worst Chinese Learning Advice You Will See Today. But I want to be fair to our friend, Mr. Wan, and do a review of a couple of his videos myself. And, you know, he has some good ideas and some things that are a bit wacky, and you're going to see what I mean when you start watching. So in this video, we will ask the question, is this the worst Chinese learning advice on YouTube? So I've got the video here, and I'm just going to go ahead and react to what he's saying. Let's check it out. Hello, everybody. Today, I'm going to show to you why Chinese is one of the easiest language you could learn. Oh, okay. One of the easiest languages you could learn because it's so easy. It's just so ridiculously easy. You could learn it in your sleep. And, well, let's see where he's going with this. Grandma of Mandarin is ridiculously easy. There's no gender. There's no article. There's no case. There's no plural. Well, I mean, yeah, I guess he has made some good points, right? There's no case. There's no genders. There's no gendered words like le and la, you know, male and female. There are plurals. I don't get why people say Chinese doesn't have plurals because there are actually, you know, you have to have ways of saying that it's more than one of something. It's just that it's a bit more flexible than in English. But there are other things in Chinese that make it harder. Like you've got to remember characters. You've got, well, just looking at the grammar, you know, you've got measure words, which are a concept that we don't really have in English, not in the same way in Chinese. So you've got to memorize all of those. And, you know, there's definitely a few things in Chinese that English doesn't have, but it is true that the grammar is pretty simple compared to some languages. However, there are two major difficulties people use to prove that Chinese is actually very hard to learn. People would say, well, your grammar is easy, but you have characters. Okay. Yeah. You have characters. That's, you know, an indispensable part of Chinese, in my opinion. And that's just one of the factors of learning Chinese. You have to remember the characters. You've got to memorize a lot of characters and it's just the way the language works. Such characters, it's a bit useless because there's no association between the way it is written and the way it is pronounced. That's partly true. It's not actually a hundred percent true because, you know, even the character that he had up there, ma meaning mother, not the radical, but the part on the right-hand side means ma, horse, right? It's M-A, ma, right? It actually indicates the pronunciation, but it's not like a hard and fast rule. So some characters will have things in them that are like a clue as to what the pronunciation might be. And some characters just have no, you have no idea how to pronounce it. So yes, this is true. If you're reading a book and you see a new character, you don't know how to pronounce it. It's really mostly impossible. You might be able to have an informed guess, but you really won't be sure of the pronunciation unless you look it up in a dictionary. And this brings me to the second major difficulty people use to say that Chinese is very hard to Oh, okay. So his, his second, so his first point was there are characters and they're hard to remember. His second point is that Chinese pronunciation is hard. Let's see where he's going with this. For example, this one is pronounced ma and people would tell you that if you pronounce it slightly incorrectly, not ma, but ma, then you actually landed in a different character, a different word. So this means mom. This means horse, right? So if you're at home and you just call for your mom and you say, uh, you say it in the third tone ma by accident, instead of ma, a horse will probably turn up like, okay. Uh, no, obviously that's not going to happen. Um, but let, let's keep going. Let's get the full point of what he's saying with this. These two aspects, the characters and the pronunciations are the source of almost all the pain the Chinese learners encounter in their journey. Okay. I would agree with that. Yeah. I would say that that's actually fair. So memorizing characters, it is hard because you've got to memorize a lot of characters and pronunciation, you know, he's, he's basically saying the tones, the actual pronunciation of words in Mandarin Chinese is quite easy because they don't have that many words. There's a lot of homophones. There's only like a certain number of sounds way, way less than in English. Right. Um, but actually, uh, the number, you know, each word, like the word for example, could be right. It could be pronounced in four different ways. Um, but, uh, so he's, he's really saying like the tones, the tones, uh, the difficult part. And I think that's fair because English and European languages, they don't have tones. So my thesis is that you should forget about the tones completely. You should forget about the first tone, ma, the second tone, ma, ma, ma, ma. Okay. Whoa. Uh, you should just forget about, you should not do the tones, right? Not do the tones. Um, I think this is why it's staring up a bit of controversy and people saying this is the worst Chinese learning advice, uh, you could get possibly get. Um, yeah, I really don't agree with him on this. I think, uh, that works maybe for very, very simple sentences, right? Ni hao, right? Okay. Yeah. It's supposed to be ni hao, but ni hao, if I just say ni hao, you, you, you're going to know what I'm saying, right? Wo shi ben. Maybe I could get that. I am Ben, right? Wo shi ben, right? But wo shi ben without the tones. Yeah, I guess someone would get that. But once you get into more complex things, um, you know, talking about, um, I don't know, just much more complicated things where words that are way more obscure that you don't know that you don't hear often and you say them in the wrong terms, like literally Chinese people will not understand you. All these four tones, you should forget about it and act as if they don't exist. You should pronounce, you should pronounce every character freestyle without the tones. Freestyle. Yeah. Okay. So he's not even, he's just saying, just don't do the tones. Just forget about the tones. Um, I, I think that doesn't really work. Um, but I, let's keep going. Cause he listened to sort of to the point that he's really making here. Beginning, you might sound ridiculous, but gradually through time, it will get better. You might sound ridiculous, but why would it get better? Why would it get better over time? Because you will start doing the tones. So why not just start doing the tone, trying to do the tones from the start? Right? I think it's really what I would want to ask him because, you know, if you just don't do the tones at first, but then you practice speaking and you sound ridiculous, but you hear a lot of Chinese people speaking and they correct you and stuff. You're going to start just mimicking them and doing the tone. So at the start, you're going to be like, Ni Hao, right? And then the person and be like, Oh, it kind of goes down and up. And then you're going to just start, you might not, and this is how children learn, right? When they just hear the language, they might not even realize they're doing tones, but they're just sort of copying the accent. It definitely works with a little kid. You send like a five-year-old to like a Chinese daycare and they're going to be speaking Chinese within six months, right? Like actually really speaking Chinese with correct tones and everything. Cause their brain is like a sponge, right? But if you have like a, an 18 year old or a 20 year old trying to do the same thing, I don't think it really works for like a fully grown adult learning it as a second language. But let's keep going. Our ears, the ears of Chinese people, we are trained in the difference between the local way of pronouncing it, the way in our village, in our city or in our province and the TV way. Okay. So I see where he's going with this. I see the reason he's saying this is that, you know, China has a lot of different dialects and everyone in China speaks their own, you know, hometown dialect and they speak Mandarin. And so that's why he was talking about the TV way. Cause most of what's in TV on TV is Mandarin, right? Standard Mandarin. So they're used to hearing it pronounced in different dialects and they're used to hearing it pronounced in Mandarin. So you will definitely hear, you know, if you live in China and you speak Chinese and a dialect, you're definitely going to hear stuff pronounced in different tones or different ways. And you can actually, through the context, figure out what people are saying. Okay. That that's definitely true. Um, but it's, it's more true with simple vocabulary, like, you know, just stuff that someone who just started learning would, um, would know. If you're talking to a Chinese people with more than two brain cells, we will understand. Are you talking about the mom or are you talking about a horse? Yeah, of course. In that example, cause that's a super simple example, right? Ma, like Ma, Ma, Ma, Ma, Ma, Ma, Ma, Ma. That's literally the word they very often use to demonstrate the four tones. Okay. So I think with a simple example like that, um, you definitely could, uh, talk about, but let's say you're talking to someone and about like a way different concept, like, um, something scientific or something like, oh, someone says to you, oh, Xin Cheng Dai Xie, right? The metabolism. So let's say, you know, someone says it wrong and they say it like Xin Cheng Dai Xie, you know, no one's going to know what that means. All right. I mean, at first, okay. And then maybe they, they hear the context and you're talking about the human body and you're talking about, and they're like, oh, that's, that's what you mean. Xin Cheng Dai, Xin Cheng Dai Xie. But it's going to be very uncomfortable and it's going to, you know, it's just, it just works better if you learn the tones. Damn it. I would argue that you should try to learn the Chinese language completely without the characters. You should act as if the Chinese characters does not exist. So, okay. He's, he's talking about the characters again now. So learning Chinese without the characters. Um, I definitely wouldn't recommend this. Um, but I would say, uh, I wouldn't completely recommend it. You should try to learn some characters cause you're in the end of the day, you're going to actually want to write stuff down. Um, but I would agree with him in saying that, yeah, you could concentrate much more on speaking and listening, uh, than on writing. Well, this is a very radical statement, so I need to unpack it a little bit. It's very radical. Yeah. He's got to unpack it. Yeah, definitely. My grandma or my grandpa or most of the grandparents of China in their brain, in their mind, they don't have such things because they are illiterate. Okay. It's a good point, right? They, they didn't have the characters in their mind cause they're illiterate. So they didn't need to write stuff down cause they didn't, they didn't do writing in their daily life. They were like farming or doing whatever they did manual labor right there. Their life didn't include reading or writing, but for the average Chinese learner who learns Chinese, uh, they're not really in the same situation as those grandparents because your life does include reading and writing, right? Like you might want to text someone in Chinese or you might be going through a airport or train station or something in China and you might be, you know, trying to look for the sign to tell you which train line you're supposed to be on unless you're planning on going to China and, you know, becoming a farmer. Um, probably you're going to need to read and write. All right. So I would say, I don't agree with him on this. I think in this day and age, I learned reading and writing from the start. Um, and uh, you know, if you're practicing Chinese and making sentences, right? Think about making practice sentences. You're going to have to just say the sentences in your brain. Uh, you wouldn't be able to write them down and then show them to a teacher. So my, my thesis is that you should use pinyin all the time. Long L O N G use the Latin characters instead of using the Chinese characters if you're trying to learn the Chinese language. Yeah. Uh, no, I don't agree with him on that at all. Uh, pinyin, you know, pinyin is just a tool to tell people how the characters are pronounced and pinyin. They originally in mainland China, they originally wanted to replace everything with pinyin. Um, but the problem is there are so many homophones, especially in Mandarin, like just take the word shi, for example, shi means is, but shi could also mean the world, uh, could also mean, um, that someone's died. So just to have pinyin, I mean, when you look at a page of pinyin, it's, it's actually quite difficult on the eye compared to characters, characters, even though they're complex and they're pictographs. Actually, if I look at a page of characters, I find that way more friendly to my eye and to my actually understanding the Chinese than looking at a page of pinyin because pinyin, I've got to deal with multiple homophones and let's just, just trust me on this. All right. Trust me. Why? Because this is the character for the dragon. This means the dragon long. However, this character, we do not write dragon this way for a thousand years. For the longest time in Chinese history, we write the dragon in this totally unrelated way. That looks completely different from the current way we write it. Okay. I don't, I don't really know what kind of point he's trying to make there. I thought it was funny how, how he pronounces long without the tones on purpose. So this is the dragon long. It's supposed to be long. He's, he's kind of saying we wrote it this way for a thousand years and now we've simplified it to this. Basically, I guess, making the point that characters are just a construct made up by human beings anyway. Um, so it doesn't matter if you don't use them. I mean, everything's made up by human beings, right? That was that YouTube video with this girl's like the days of the week, totally made up, uh, mind blown. Right. Um, so yeah, I don't think he really, I don't think that's really a point. This is the way we wrote the character for dragon. You see that there is nothing to do with each other. So when did the change happen? Why do we no longer use this way anymore? Because the communists, the government, they decided that illiteracy is a huge problem that the population cannot recognize the characters. And this is a lot simpler than this one. So they just artificially through political force decided that this should be the new dragon because it's simpler. That's interesting. I like, I like his, his attitude there. I think he's a, he's kind of a little negative towards the CCP simplifying the characters. So I think that's, you know, that's aligned with my opinion too. I think that the simplified characters, I don't think they really contributed to literacy. The real reason that literacy improved with China because of the government forced everyone to go to school. That's basically it, right? You force people to go to school. They're going to learn stuff. Wow. Mind blown. Um, and also you can see it with literacy, like Taiwan, the literacy rates in Taiwan are similar to China, actually a little bit higher. And, um, they use traditional characters. Dongxi means thin. So Dong separately means East. Xi means West. And some people might come up with theories to explain why East plus West together means thin to a Chinese brand. Dongxi, he was saying that people used to pronounce a word for things as that. And then they just put the characters together, uh, East and West to basically go off of the pronunciation and the characters don't mean anything. This is a bit of a weird one though, because there is actually a story, um, that, you know, behind that. And this comes from the design of Chang'an, the capital of the Tang dynasty. So the Eastern market and the Western market, but then the North and South were more like the government, right? So in the North of the city was the Imperial palace. That's not where you would go to buy things. You would go to the East and West to buy things, right? I guess he's saying that that's all made up, right? Which I don't know. Maybe, maybe that's true. Maybe that's not. I mean, the story I've always heard, literally the story that at the university of London, when I studied Chinese, the teachers told me East, West Dongxi things, because that's where you buy stuff in the East market and the West market. So yeah, but he, I guess he's saying that's made up and it goes by pronunciation. Uh, I don't really agree with that, but he does have a good point in saying that some characters are just done, uh, are just used because of the pronunciation that is true and that they don't have any deeper meaning, but more often that's for foreign names. Actually, you know, when you, you say, um, you know, names of foreign countries, for example, like a Turkey, right? It doesn't really mean anything, right? It means like something, uh, earth ear and it's right. A possessive pronoun, no meaning in Chinese, but it's just to go on, on the pronunciation. So yeah, that is true for some words, but I don't really know whether that's true in this case, but you know, he, he sounds like he's doing like a master's or PhD or something. So maybe he's talking about his thesis and maybe he's a smart guy. Who knows? Well, actually the right explanation, you know, we Chinese, we are not aliens to us. There is no association between East and West and thing. The right explanation for why Dongxi means thing is that before the writing system is created, we already have a word for thing. Obviously that sounds like Dongxi and then we are trying to create a written version of everything. We created Dong for East. We created Xi for West, but then we don't bother to create separate extra characters just for thing. We repurposed Dong and Xi just for their sound. Okay. I mean, that was basically what I was saying, I just said, but he's kind of going up against quite an established story there about Dongxi and why it means thing. But I guess he's saying that we don't really know if that's actually the story or not, and maybe it was just repurposed. Okay, great. So now you focus on the pinyin. You are trying to learn the words. You tell yourself Jialu means if. You repeat after the vlogger. She says Jialu, you say it after her, Jialu, but you're worried that your pronunciation is not that good. It's technically wrong. Well, you shouldn't really worry. You repeat one or two, three times after the native speaker, and that's enough. Right. Yeah. You just repeat it one, two or three times and that's enough. Problem is not everyone is that good at hearing and then repeating exactly. I find people who are good at music, good at singing, or have musical brains are probably better at learning Chinese because it has different tones and they can really hear the distinction between a pitch. When you learn Chinese, you think having a good accent is the ultimate flex. So you would spend a lot of energy and effort just trying to pronounce the Chinese words a little bit more correctly. Well, in this video, I'd like to show you that all this effort just to have your pronunciation a little bit more correct may not be worth it. Okay. So this is his last, his most recent video on his channel. And I've included this one because I think in this video, he's kind of clearing up what he said before, where he's talking about like, you don't really need perfect pronunciation because before he was so absolute. He's like, just freestyle it, right? Like this is like freestyle rap battles, like just freestyle your Chinese, no tones, just like go with the flow, whatever you're feeling. But here he's really making the point of what he actually means. I think our first president Mao Zedong, he speaks Mandarin with such a heavy Hunan accent that just by hearing, you cannot distinguish him from a literate Hunan peasant. And I'm not saying this because I imagine how he must have sounded like. There are actual footage of him speaking. You can find them here on YouTube. Yeah, that's funny. You can't distinguish him from a Hunan peasant, right? But what he's saying is true. Like, we'll, we'll play that clip actually of Mao Zedong declaring the People's Republic of China, right? So we'll play that. It sounds like really weird because he's, he's basically almost using his, or pretty much is using his Hunan dialect, not actual Mandarin. The other important paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping also speaks Mandarin with accent, this time the Sichuan accent. And that could have gone on and on and on because every single president we have had, until Xi Jinping speaks Mandarin with an accent and every single one of them speaks with a different kind of accent. That's interesting. I've never really thought about that, but it is true. Like you listen to Xi Jinping and he does speak Mandarin in a very standard way. I didn't know that no one, none of their presidents before him didn't speak standard, you know, Mandarin with a standard accent. But yeah, so if you listen to Xi Jinping or listen to his speeches, I mean, you want to get bored, listen, if you want to be bored to death, listen to Xi Jinping's speeches. But if you're just listening for language skills, then, you know, listen to his pronunciation and he is basically speaking standard Mandarin. Everyone in China over the age of 40 speaks a dialect first, and then he had to learn Mandarin as a second language for the nation, for business, for survival or for whatever reason. So you see, every single Chinese like me, we are used to hear words being pronounced differently or incorrectly. Yeah. I think that's really the key point of what he's saying and what he should have originally said in his first video, instead of saying, just don't do the tones. It's okay. Don't worry about it. But yeah, everyone's used to hearing different dialects. So they are used to hearing words pronounced differently sometimes and using the context to guess what people mean. So if a Westerner comes and speaks Chinese and they get a lot of the tones wrong, it's not that big of a deal because people can guess by the context. But I think you should still be trying to do the tones right. So that at least you maybe will get like 60, 70% of the tones correct and 30% incorrect. And then it's a lot easier for people to guess the words that you're getting incorrect. I think that's where we'll leave it because I could go on watching more clips forever. But I think, you know, it's a great little set of videos that he's done here. I think his third one or the last one, the third one I showed there, the most recent video on his channel actually gets the point across of what he really should have been saying. I think the bit in his first video about like, oh, just don't do the tones. I really think that's terrible advice. But I think in his third video where he's like, don't worry if your pronunciation isn't totally standard for this reason, because we're actually used to hearing a lot of different dialects. And some people say to me, they say, oh, your pronunciation is better than mine, even though they're Chinese. I'm like, how could that be? How could that be? And the reason is that the often Chinese people are used to their own dialect and Mandarin. And then sometimes it's their Mandarin is influenced by their local dialect. So actually, it is possible for a Westerner to have better pronunciation than someone from China, just because the Westerner learned Mandarin from the start. All right. Doesn't mean you're going to have better pronunciation than like a Chinese news anchor or something who's totally dialed in on standard Mandarin. But it does mean that you might have better pronunciation than some guy from like Sichuan or like from Guangdong province who pronounces Mandarin words with a bit of a Sichuan flavor or Guangdong Cantonese flavor. So, yeah, I think if you're a Westerner, you don't pronounce every word correctly. It totally doesn't matter for that reason, because Chinese people are used to figuring out using the context of the sentence to figure out what you're saying. Anyway, great videos. Go and check out his channel. I'll put a link to it somewhere on screen. It would be cool to have him on the show and actually interview him and ask him some questions about it. I'd totally like to do that. So, Mr. Wen or Wan, I think. If you're out there and you want to actually be interviewed, let us know. I'd love to have a chat with you. Anyway, thanks for watching, guys. Please subscribe if you're new. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.