Immersion Chinese: Lesson A-1

If you paid $25 dollars per week to sit in an Oral Chinese classroom Monday through Friday, you would get a content and structure similar to each lesson of our Immersion Chinese program. Unlike a classroom, however, Immersion lets you repeat the class as many times as you like, whenever you like.

Every lesson of Immersion contains voice recordings of over 200 complete sentences being spoken by a native speaker. There are no stops and clicks from sentences clipped together from multiple recordings, every sentence is spoken and recorded as a complete sentence. Immersion builds a random training session for you every time you load up the "Drill" section.

Each lesson contains a variety of recordings categorized and ranging from absolute beginner to advanced. Push as far as you can through this lesson and when it gets too hard, move on to the next lesson. After a while come back to this lesson and see if you can beat your old scores!

This is the first "week" and first lesson of our program. You are expected to spend about 30 minutes on this lesson a total of 5-8 times over the course of a week then move on to a different lesson. Don't expect 100% comprehension.

Immersion is structured after my experience being dropped in a country with a language I couldn't speak, and draws upon my experience running a classroom teaching language as well as my own progress learning their language. I've spent hundreds of dollars on CDs and classes and made thousands of flash cards, and none of it worked. I finally became fluent in Chinese after 2 years of Immersion. Being able to understand and speak comes through being put in uncomfortable situations and forced to puzzle your way out using the few words you know, while hopefully picking up a couple words you don't, and that's the feeling I'm trying to capture with Immersion Chinese.

I'm writing Chinese learning software as someone who became fluent in Chinese in his 30s after having failed with a number of very expensive programs and classes, with the help of my wife who is a teacher and native Chinese speaker from Mainland China. We are not doing 15 different languages, we are not a big company. We both teach classes in Mainland China (she teaches Chinese to Westerners, and I teach English to Chinese students), and we are using our classroom experience as a backbone for this program.

To use this software, start with the "Learn" or "Games" section until you become familiar with the key vocabulary words (there's 8 animals), then jump into Drill->Vocabulary. Listen for keywords, make guesses, try to get familiar with the sounds but don't try to memorize or even understand all the words. What's important is that you get a feel for the sound of the language and start building the skill of filtering for keywords. This is how people become fluent through Immersion, not by memorizing the dictionary.

This approach is far more effective than memorizing words one by one from flashcards, because it teaches you how to handle a situation where you only understand about 10% of what the speaker is saying, and in doing so begin to understand more and more. Look at it this way: if memorizing flash cards was actually effective, then anyone carrying a Chinese-English dictionary should be able to answer any spoken question given enough time to look up the words. The reality is that memorizing nouns off flash cards is a completely ineffective way of learning, or everyone would already speak 10 languages.

The accent used for this program is a generic Mainland Mandarin accent, which is a "neutral" accent of the most common dialect of Chinese, and will be accepted and understood virtually anywhere in China, Taiwan, and many other Chinese speaking locations, and is the most commonly understood "version" of Chinese used by Chinese speakers living abroad in the USA, Canada, England, or wherever else.

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