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While the lessons on this site are progressive and structured to only introduce a few new words at a time, you will also have access to side material at a more advanced level. The recent lesson on Chinese New Year traditions is an example of this. Use the transcripts or recordings to see which words sound familiar. Perhaps there are other words you may have heard elsewhere. In English, most of our language acquisition came from reading, however it’s not as easy to do so in Chinese since most Chinese reading materials out there are in Chinese characters. Take advantage of this as well as the music currently available on the site to supplement your learning.

It may seem like you’ll need years to become fluent in Chinese. The truth is that the Chinese follows the 80/20 principle in that 80% of conversation uses only 20% of the vocabulary in the language. This means that you only have to master that 20% to get to 80% fluency! The trouble with many other language systems is that they spend too much time trying to teach vocabulary from the remaining 80% when they should be focusing on the more important 20%. You may have noticed that in this course there are no vocabulary lists provided for you to memorize. Instead we focus on providing dialogues that utilize language and vocabulary from the important 20% which will enable you to remember and recall vocabulary by seeing these same words being used over and over.