I am admittedly extremely new in the world of Chinese language study. A babe even. In university, I studied Japanese and Spanish as minors, and took one semester of Arabic. As you can tell, I have an interest in languages (however poorly I actually speak them), but before I graduated, none of that involved Chinese outside of one or two phrases I thought I'd learned from practicing wushu (i.e. my pronunciation really sucked! Who knew tones were important? And there's not many chances to use jia you! or mabu as one might think).

Although Chinese was on my list of languages to learn, it wasn't on the front or backburner - it wasn't even put on the stove yet - I'd just bought a few foreign-looking, though tasty spices that could sit on the shelf until I so desired to use them. It was one of those, "If I get the opportunity, I'll try for it." 

After graduating, I found an opportunity to go to China. It would start in a few month. "Perfect opportunity and excuse to plunge into a new language," I thought. So I jumped right in. I found a tutor and studied Chinese with her over Skype for about 7 weeks(only meeting once a week), went through the first 2 sections of Rosetta Stone, and listened to some Chinese learning tracks on the way to and from work every day. Even with all of that work, I could hardly say anything when I got to China about a year ago. I felt accomplished enough being able to count, say things like man, pretty, and the all-important "Where is the bathroom?"

When I first arrived in China, the cabbie congratulated me for saying, 这里很漂亮！Two days after coming to the place I live in now, a private tutor was already found for me and we started lessons. Getting right into language study was challenging, but rewarding. The fact that my tutor could not speak English was even better. I progressed much quicker than all my previous months combined, because I got personal attention and had to study each day.

More than that, I think the method really helped. We started very nontraditionally. Some friends gave me material that focused on learning more like a child. It is at first similar to Rosetta Stone in that you listen, read, and see photos, but with a tutor correcting you the whole way. This Rosetta-Stone like section is Phase 1. The first 100 hours of study included using print-outs with pictures of everyday items organized into sections. My tutor would say the words and I would point at them. For the first couple of weeks, I was not allowed to say anything, just hear, understand, point and act. During this time, an activity we did was TPR - total physical response. My tutor would say a command and then I would do it - like stand up, run, drink your water, put the cat on the table, etc. 

After the first couple of weeks, I started repeating the vocabulary after my tutor. Gradually, the lessons involved more and more talking and response. "Where is the house? Beside the lake." "How many legs does a dog have?" "Four legs." "Is the man tall or short?" "Short." All along the way, there was a lot of revision of previous vocabulary and introduction of basic grammar.

After the first section, we had a period where we finally went over every pinyin sound and tone combinations. I feel like this would have been better done before everything else, but with a couple of months of previous study in my home country, I at least had somewhat of a foundation.

The second section, a couple of months in, was looking at worldless books. I've never heard of learning language like this, but it was really helpful, because my tutor didn't have words to read either and would say the most natural one for each drawing/action. This is how it worked: We would look at each page, I would first try to describe it, then my tutor would correct me and tell all the new vocabulary from each page, and then we would go back and tell the story. This was very challenging as I had to talk a lot and take in a lot of new vocabulary, negotiating the meanings of words I didn't know, but helpful in that I heard these words multiple times in each lesson. I admit, during this time, I cheated a lot and used the dictionary for almost every word instead of trying to ask my tutor what it meant using Chinese. Now what I do is negotiate the meaning first. If we fail to communicate after a good bit, I give up and look it up in the dictionary.

After this section, we spent a couple of weeks where I tried to tell her stories from my life using only a whiteboard and my own vocabulary. She would correct me along the way, then after I told each story, tell it back to me in her own words and record it. By the way, every new vocabulary item and story is recorded and then filed onto my computer so I can listen and study in that way. This method really advanced my speaking ability in a short time, because I had to put a lot of sentences together and make the story somewhat understandable.

Earlier this year, we went into the third section, which was much more interactive. There were many different activities: my tutor reading the newspaper to me, watching cartoons together, looking at children's books, telling stories without any visual aid, etc. I had to use a lot of previous vocabulary while doing harder and harder tasks and learning new vocabulary. I also had to practice listening, speaking, and reading every week, although writing wasn't built in.

Now in Section 4 a few months down the road, I mostly come up with my own schedule. It was supposed to be mostly listening without visual aid, but I found that was too unstructured, boring, and sometimes frustrating, so now I've spiced things up a bit:

Monday - learning a song/grammar

Tuesday - reading/pronunciation

Wednesday - listening/writing

Thursday - reading/confusing words/idioms/homonyms

Friday - writing/free talk

I've (ashamedly) only started writing at this point, though my Japanese study is really helping out. Hope I can remember how to write long term, though I'm also not sure how many of the few thousand characters one is supposed to know I'll remember how to read let alone write after this experiment.

Do you think this is a good balanced week? Anything I should add/take out?

What is your story learning Chinese? 

What advice can you give to a greenhorn like myself in studying Chinese? Any pitfalls?

_______

Here are some questions one might have after looking at my post.

1. How many hours a week do you have class/study?

For the first 5 months, 20 hours a week - 4 hours a day. Since then, 15 hours a week - 3 hours a day.

I study about an hour outside of class if I'm not lazy, otherwise I also get language input from reading/watching tv/listening to the radio/talking with friends. These hours really add up, but I'm really not sure how many a week they'd be - maybe at least as much as class time.

2. Does this method of language learning work? Is it worth all the pain/humility in the first couple of sections?

I would answer that with a definite YES. After a year of learning in China, I feel like I can talk about subjects I would not touch until much later using traditional classroom-style learning. Now, my pronunciation is not perfect, and my tones get mixed up a lot(hence why I'm devoting a lot of time now to grammar, pronunciation, and review), but most people understand what I'm trying to say. 

2. Do you have any caveats?

I will say you must be very self-motivated and it helps to have a lot of time. This method is very self-directed. I tell the tutor how I want to learn and what I want to learn and she teaches me. I also have time each day to study, while that's not feasible for every person. In addition, I don't limit myself to class time. I spend time each day consciously try to read, watch tv, talk with friends in Chinese. A kind of "All Chinese All the Time" method.

3. Why does it work?

1. Although the material had English translations for words at the start, I did not speak a word of English with my tutor from day 1. Not being able to be lazy like that forced me to speak and try to understand her instructions.

2. You get acclimated to the sounds before trying to produce them. If we can't make those sounds, we are unintelligible to the native speaker. Conversely, if we can't distinguish between, say zhu and ju, we're also going to run into big issues down the road. This is why I wish I'd had started with pinyin/tones at first.

3. It's not built to a test - the test is interacting with people outside of class. Of course, if you are a very big introvert, this might stunt your language growth, though the method does have assignments where you must go out and purposefully try to speak with people.

4. Because there's no test, you're allowed to forget things while still forging on. Not that you want to forget a lot. It's called the iceberg principle. There are a lot of words you have interacted with, but they are not all at the same level. Some words you have forgotten entirely, others you recognize when spoken, others you can say after thinking a while, others quickly come off the tongue. This means that those you can't say quickly are not wasted. You are encouraged that you can recognize a lot of words even if you can't respond to it all or form it yourself. 

5. Using this method, I found the sweet spot of challenging myself while still having fun. After the first section, lot of it involves using pictures, books, comics, cartoons, drawing, as well as traditional reading, writing, speaking as study. It's not boring, so I keep going. It's not too challenging because I have less pressure, so I can have fun with it.

6. I have one-on-one attention every lesson and can't hide in the crowd. This forces me to work hard or be very frustrated and get nowhere. 

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the read. Something tells me this might be filed under TL;DR, but one can hope.