Free Checklist:
HOW TO SPEAK FLUENT MANDARIN
All the Techniques, Tools, and Resources You Need
to Reach ANY Level of Chinese You Want
你好！We are Luke and Phil, the co-founders of Mandarin Blueprint. We have a combined 20+ years of experience learning and teaching Chinese, and we've reached advanced Mandarin fluency using the same exact techniques and tools you'll find in this checklist.
This checklist provides you with a list of all of the activities you'll need to perform and tools you'll need to use each day to achieve a high level of Chinese quickly and easily, while avoiding the stress, boredom, and frustration of conventional language learning methods.
We divided the content up into four major categories:
1. STUDY: Build a foundation of pronunciation and reading, so you can easily begin immersing in Chinese.
2. IMMERSION: Read, watch, and listen to comprehensible (and preferably enjoyable) Chinese content in various forms to acquire the language.
3. OUTPUT: Practice speaking and writing to
activate the vocabulary you learned in the study and immersion stages and develop spoken fluency.
4. HABIT & MINDSET: Mental and physical processes to help you weave the various language acquisition activities into your life and make learning Chinese a consistent, automatic, and even addictive daily habit that you love doing.
The checklist comes in two versions: Full and Condensed. The condensed version (found on the next page) is perfect as a quick guide and reminder of what you need to do to make consistent progress with Chinese daily. You might want to print it out and put it somewhere you can see it.
You'll find the full version of the checklist in the rest of this document, which provides further explanation, along with videos and links you'll to gain a clearer understanding of what to do.
Ready to find out exactly how to speak fluent Mandarin? Let's get into it!
Before consuming or producing the language fluently, you must first build a foundational understanding of Chinese by doing the following:
Excellent pronunciation will grant you a massive boost to your speaking, listening, and general speed of acquisition, so your first step is to learn to pronounce and accurately identify every Mandarin sound and pinyin spelling.
We have a 56-minute guide you can watch right here.
For a more in-depth guide to pronunciation, check out our course Pronunciation Mastery.
The most effective method for developing native-like pronunciation and tones is first to learn the theory of how to pronounce each sound (from the above resources), then listen and repeat a lot. While immersing in Chinese audio (graded podcasts, TV shows, talk shows, audiobooks, etc.), try repeating the audio as you hear it, imitating it as closely as possible. We call this technique "shadowing." More on shadowing in the
OUTPUT" section of this checklist.
Bonus tip: Our character learning technique, "The Hanzi Movie Method," maps out characters' tones to rooms within buildings in your imagination. Doing this works wonders for your tones! More on this technique in the next tip...
3,000 is the average native number of characters and will get you to 99.4% of the language by coverage. Even just a few hundred common characters will allow you to read any graded material easily, so don't feel like you can do nothing until you get to 3,000.
The Mandarin Blueprint Method can get you to 3,050 characters in just 150-200 hours using the Hanzi Movie Method memory palace technique. This method is (in our opinion) the most efficient and effective way of learning and retaining all the characters you need. Check out this video for the complete guide:
You could use this method with your own character order found online or the highly intuitive character order provided by The MB Method course and get everything you need for near-native comprehension of Chinese.
As you learn the 3,050 characters in the MB Method curriculum, you'll unlock almost 12000 common words and 15000 comprehensible example sentences for early reading
and listening practice. You'll also unlock over 100 pieces of long-form graded content and digital SRS flashcards for everything you learn.
If you decide to go it alone, review the characters using flashcard software (Anki or Traverse) and see the characters in the context of words and sentences to gain a more well-rounded understanding of the multiple meanings of various characters.
Before you can begin to get comprehensible input, it helps to build a "base vocabulary" of the most common 1000-1500 Chinese words so you can easily understand simple sentences. Make sure you know the characters of the words you are learning and use our mnemonic technique, "living links," to memorize 100+ words daily. Watch the complete guide right here.
Immersion is where the magic (i.e., acquisition) happens. The more time you spend immersing in Chinese content, the better you will become at Chinese.
Watch, read, and listen to content you can (at least kind of) understand. It is of utmost importance that you find this content entertaining, educational, compelling, or a combination of all three.
Listen passively whenever you can while doing other tasks. Over time this will amount to lots of extra input.
Start with Graded content comics and Cartoons. As the number of characters you know and listening comprehension increases, move on to TV shows for adults, movies, and podcasts. Watch this video for a more detailed guide on immersion, including which resources to use for each type of media.
We also have an entire video course that goes into more detail and provides a vast, highly organized resource list, which you can access right here.
While consuming content, make flashcards for words/phrases you want to learn using Migaku & Anki. This setup will allow you to make sentence flashcards almost instantly with a screenshot and real audio from the show you're watching. Super memorable!
Suppose you are using The Mandarin Blueprint Method. In that case, you won't need to focus on 'sentence mining" that much until you finish the course, as you'll unlock 15000 comprehensible sentences with high-quality audio for the 3,050 characters and 11000+ words in the curriculum.
Once you have built a foundation (study) and started building comprehension through daily comprehensible input (immersion), you can begin to practice producing the language. Below are all the steps you'll need to take in this stage.
There are two primary choices here: Free or Paid. Free language exchange partners can be excellent, but they require more effort to maintain, and you won't be able to speak Chinese all the time. If you'd like to try it out, Tandem and Hellotalk are our recommended apps. Finding a paid tutor on a site like Italki is preferable overall.
When you're with your language exchange partner or tutor, just focus on having a conversation. No need for textbooks or a "study plan." One or two 45-minute sessions a week is enough at first. Ramp this up once your comprehension increases.
Listen to Chinese and imitate it as closely as possible, preferably simultaneously. Try doing this for a few minutes daily and stick to it to improve your listening, pronunciation, and spoken fluency.
Writing involves a similar mental process to speaking but has the advantage of being totally at your pace. Writing well is also vital if you plan on taking an HSK exam at some point.
Try writing a journal, blog, or daily social media posts in Chinese. Aim for zero mistakes to avoid bad habits. Achieve this by checking example sentences for words you aren't sure how to use before using them in your writing.
Here's approximately how to divide up your time between study, immersion, and output based on your Chinese level:
Beginners (<600 characters, <1000 words)
Study: 70-80%
Immersion: 15-30%
Output: 0-15%
Intermediates (<3000 characters, <5000 words)
Study: 50-75%
Immersion: 30-40%
Output: 5-20%
Advanced (3000+ characters, 10,000+ words)
Study: 0%
Immersion: 70-90%
Output: 10-30%
The most crucial factor in your success with Chinese (even more important than the methods you use) is consistently showing up each day and putting your time and energy where it needs to go. Complete the following steps to develop the proper habit and mindset to make Chinese a consistent part of your life.
The best habits are identity-based, not outcome-based. Instead of "learn Chinese," decide to "become a Chinese learner/acquirer/enthusiast/fanatic."
You will cast a vote for that new identity whenever you perform any of the activities listed above and below. Once you become that person, you will learn Chinese every day simply because it feels good to be you.
Make Chinese learning a more visible part of your life so you get lots of reminders to spend time with the language daily. Here are the best ways to achieve this:
Reduce the friction to starting Chinese learning activities to increase the likelihood of
taking action. Achieve this by doing the following:
Increase the dopamine release you get when you think about learning Chinese, so you are more likely to do it. Here are the best ways to achieve this:
Make the feeling of completing the Chinese learning activities satisfying and rewarding, so you close the habit loop and keep doing the habit every day. Here are the best ways to achieve this:
Aim to invest 1-2 hours each day into Chinese for breakthrough results. Thirty minutes is the bare minimum, and it should be every day. Find & make more time by doing the following:
Speaking fluent Mandarin is a highly valuable skill. And, while you can do it for free, a meager financial investment makes it much easier. Take a small portion of your monthly income ($10-$100 is enough) and set it aside for Chinese. This little fund can go towards paid apps, courses, books, tutoring sessions, equipment, and more.
Mandarin fluency can take 2-3000 hours of focused work with conventional methods. Using our courses, fluency can take you as little as 800 hours from scratch. But, that's still 18 months at 90 minutes a day, so whatever path your choose, it's a substantial time commitment.
However, if you show up consistently and follow the steps laid out in this checklist every day, you will see regular breakthroughs, and you will be a fluent Mandarin speaker in the end. It's simply a matter of time.
Along the way, as you take on the identity of a Chinese learner and your comprehension grows, you'll become addicted to consuming Chinese content and likely invest more time. If you're reading this as an absolute beginner, you may be literate and have smooth Chinese conversations in under a year even a few months) from now!
This final step is perhaps the most important of all.
Learning Chinese (just as with any skill) will inevitably involve doing things that aren't a blast. However, in general, you should always try to follow the cardinal rule of "have fun." Whether you're watching Chinese TV, reviewing sentence flashcards, or practicing with a tutor, you must ALWAYS find it fun, or satisfying, or rewarding in some way.
That doesn't mean Chinese can never be challenging. On the contrary, sometimes the greatest satisfaction can be found in overcoming difficulties. But Chinese should 100% never be boring.
Sick of seeing a certain sentence flashcard? Delete it.
Are you bored by a book, comic, TV show, or podcast? Find another one immediately.
Are you not "clicking" with your language exchange partner? Find someone else to help you right away.
Never become bored or frustrated by Chinese, and protect your enjoyment at all costs. Aim to always look forward to getting started.
We hope you found the insights, tips, tools, and techniques in this checklist useful! You now have all the basic steps to speak fluent Chinese, but doing everything on your own will be tough...
The Blueprint is our 9,000-lesson curriculum that guides you in easy steps to advanced Chinese 3-5 x faster than traditional methods without the need for teachers, classes, or textbooks.
You can gain instant, lifetime access to a huge chunk of the course for free by joining The MB Challenge today!
If you're already inside our free community MB Lite, you'll find the challenge in the "Classroom" tab here.
If you stay on track, you will achieve basic Chinese literacy, gain supreme confidence in your ability to learn Chinese to a high level, and jumpstart your journey to fluency. All in 30 days or less.
Whatever you do, we wish you the best of luck with Chinese, and we're always available at contact@mandarinblueprint.com if you have any questions. We always reply within 24 hours, usually in just a few hours.
Luke & Phil