When I was living in Beijing, I used to take private lessons with a teacher. Thanks to her help, I quickly got by in Chinese, but after a while, my teacher alone was not enough to progress, because I was not getting the best out of classes.

In this article I’ll explain how you can use immersion and homework to improve the efficiency of your lessons.

A lesson with a qualified teacher is the best value you can add to your language learning. Don’t waste that precious time with low value questions! E.g. after a few weeks, I kept asking my teacher for vocabulary. I could have searched all that in a dictionary, and use all that time to get some chengyu explained (idiomatic proverbs). My advice is: don’t ask you teacher for anything you can get by any other means, just ask him about complex points that need a live explanation. If what you need is a dictionary, no need to hire a teacher!

You don’t learn Chinese to speak with your teacher. You learn it because you need to speak Chinese with other people.

Talking to other people will teach you more than your classes. And seriously, that’s the fun part of learning a language. Ideally, your teacher should just help you with problems you noticed during the week, talking with other people. If you want to learn for real, immerse yourself. A friend of mine began dating his Chinese girlfriend one year ago, and hanging out with her Chinese friends, and now they live together. He has been exposed to the chinese language 24/7 for one year. Now he’s fluent. End of story. I’m not telling you to get a girlfriend, or to do all chinese all the time, but to experience Chinese under real conditions. A little chit chat every morning with your Chinese colleagues is enough to get started.

Especially in Chinese, there are some steps in the language learning where no teacher can help you. What you learn in a class is one thing, what you remember is another. In Chinese, memorizing the characters, their meaning and their pronunciation is even more important than in other languages. Review characters at home. Do your homework. Write characters lines or used a spaced repetition software to memorize them. Play memory games with your friends. If you don’t do the memorization homework by yourself, no one will do it for you, and it’s going to slow your learning.

William develops B-Speak, a tool to help students to memorize chinese characters.