How to start learning Chinese

About the Author

I learnt French in 2018 during a study abroad year at the Sorbonne, before completing a degree in History at the University of Leeds with First Class Honours in the summer of the following year. During my final year, I taught myself Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Catalan, as part of dissertation research into fascism in Europe during the 1930s. Although I say ‘learnt’ and ‘taught myself’ in the past tense, one of the joys of learning a language is that there’s always more to learn.

More recently, I’ve been teaching myself German, Mandarin Chinese, and Russian. Since moving to Vietnam to teach English in 2022, I’ve been enjoying learning Vietnamese. In less than one and a half years learning Vietnamese, I was able to achieve Level 5 (the highest being Level 6) of the official Vietnamese proficiency exam of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities at the National University, Hanoi (Trường Đại học Khoa học Xã hội và Nhân văn - Đại học Quốc gia Hà Nội).