![]() The best nouns and verbs you can learn are these words. It’s to focus on words that are what you personally use in everyday life. 对 ( duì) – “correct”, or “that’s right”Īs a Fluent in 3 Months reader (or if you listen to the Language Hacking Podcast, you may be familiar with the methods Benny Lewis uses to speak from day one.了 ( le) – a marker used to denote change.It’s a mixed collection of words, but they’re all high-frequency Chinese words and incredibly useful to know. Here is a selection of general words that are important to know in Chinese. 太太 ( tàitai) – “madame”, note that this is used outside of business situations only.There are loads of different titles in Chinese, but here are some of the most common. Instead, you use the person’s last name and title in very formal situations, and their first name and title in slightly less formal situations. To be more polite, you don’t use “you” in Chinese. Still, you should learn them! This is because they’re important to use for emphasis and to make things clear. Much like in Japanese and Korean, Chinese is considered a “pro-drop” language, which means it frequently omits pronouns. It’s important to learn to read and write in Chinese, but it’s not the focus of this article. I’m writing the words in this list in both Chinese characters and pinyin, that way you can focus your attention on the vocabulary itself and not the writing system, for now. You can use it in a wide range of cases, and even if you don’t know the “correct” measure word, you can use 个 and people will understand what you mean. For now, I just recommend learning 个 ( gè). They’re important and high frequency, but they can easily take up too much of this post. Please note that I’m not including Chinese measure words in this post. Of course, later on, you want to get to that 10,000 words, but it just means you want to pick the right 1,000 first! It’s better to focus on that first important 1,000. ![]() When you do the math, only 20% better fluency with 10x the vocabulary? Meh. When you get to around 10,000 words, you only add another 20% - reaching about 90% fluency. Everything after that first 1,000 words has a little less impact. Pretty incredible, right?īut here’s where things start to change. Your first 1,000 words help you reach about 70%. In general, your first 100 words in Chinese get you to about 50% fluency. I also recommend that you continue this method past the 100 most common Chinese words to the 1000 most common Chinese words, curating the list to include the words that are most relevant to you personally. And if you put this list together with these basic Chinese phrases and Chinese numbers, you might surprise yourself with just how much progress you make. No classroom vocab here! Instead, you’re going to learn the Chinese words you’ll use on a day-to-day basis. This list isn’t an introduction to Chinese, so you’re not going to get the kinds of Chinese word lists you’d see in the first chapter of a coursebook. Once you build your core vocabulary, you’ll see a huge improvement in your communication, and you’ll see it quickly. But once you focus on figuring this out, you start being able to create music with your instrument, fast. You have to learn where to put your fingers to play the notes before you can put those notes together to create music. It’s like learning to play an instrument. It’s proven to help us not only boost our listening comprehension but level up our speaking abilities, too! That’s why we’ve put together posts using this method for core Japanese words, basic Spanish words, key Italian words, important Korean words and useful French words. Here at Fluent in 3 Months, we love this approach to learning new vocabulary in our languages. It’s all about spending time on the most important Chinese words first. ![]() Sound too good to be true? Don’t worry, these 121 basic Chinese words make an appearance so often that they make up the majority of what you’ll hear in Chinese. Want to understand significantly more Mandarin Chinese? With these 121 core Chinese words, you can improve your listening comprehension and speaking skills. Full disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |