The Continuous Process of Learning Chinese: Seven years later! By Serene Zawaydeh. August 30, 2026
I started learning Chinese 7 years ago, in September 2019. I thought I'd share another blog about the continuous process of learning Chinese.
You can start learning Chinese at any age. The Chinese proficiency test, HSK, provides a path for learning the language. HSK stands for Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi, 汉语水平考试。
You basically need to learn each character. If you don't know what the character means, look it up, and learn the meaning. You can use Pleco dictionary to find the meaning of the character by writing on your mobile's screen, without knowing the pinyin.
You need to be able to recognize each character in each HSK level when you come across it. You need to know what the character means, and be able to type it down. If you can type it down correctly, it means that you know what the character sounds like, and you can select the right character from a list of characters that sound similar. When you look up the meaning of the word, you will know what the pinyin, and how to pronounce it.
In the first two levels, it is not enough to only look at the pinyin, without studying the characters. You need to start practicing writing characters right from the start. This means writing the character with the right Stroke Order. You can use Yabla to see the correct stroke order in static form.
Although the pinyin will not be shown after the first two levels, the pinyin does not go away as you go to higher levels. You will need to keep learning the pinyin for the new characters. Lessons typically would have the list of new words, with the meaning of the character and the pinyin. In some advanced books, the meaning of the word will also be explained in Chinese. So to understand the meaning, you also need to understand the words that are given in the meaning!
You need to pronounce the characters correctly when you see the pinyin written on top of the word, then you need to know how to say it correctly without having the pinyin shown on the word when reading the text.
Practice writing the words, sentences, and whole lessons. Write the text while listening to the audio of the lesson. You also need to solve a lot of past questions.
The most important thing if you start learning Chinese, is that you neeed to start writing down Characters, starting from HSK1. Don't just look at the pinyin if you are in HSK1 and HSK2. If you do that, it will be too late to start writing the Characters at HSK3. You also need to keep studying on a daily basis.
You don't need to wait to go to China to start learning Chinese. Instead, you can use what you learnt when you get the chance to visit China. There is so much to do and see in China. It is indeed a very beautiful country.
Learning Chinse takes years, and requires consistency. It is not a language that you can learn in one or two years. You need to take lessons, in addition to using available software products. Learrning the language requires doing exercises on each word and sentence. Repeating sentences is a good way to improve pronounciation.
In addition to learning Chinese, you can also learn about China, and you can find books that are translated into other languages. For example, there are a lot of translated books from Chinese into Arabic, from Egypt's Bayt Al Hekma. There are some books that have Chinese along with the Arabic translation.
If you speak other languages, you need to find out if there is a specific publishing house that has translated books into your own language. There are annual book exhibitions that are held in different countries. Check out if there is an annual book exhibition in your country. There might be section for Chinese. If a publisher is visiting an annual book exhibition in another country, they might not participate every year.
In 2026, the new HSK 3.0 word lists went into effect. This will make learning Chinese more difficult for new students, starting from level HSK1. For example, the new HSK1 book has the tongue twisters, which would indeed be very difficult for new students. If the student finds that the information in the new HSK books is very difficult, I think it would be good to study with the old HSK books, and then study the new HSK books. The words have been shuffled between different levels. Eventually, the student should know all the words, and cannot keep track of the word lists.
In addition to the HSK curriculum, there are other book series that you can use to learn and practice. For example, Developing Chinese 发展汉语，Easy Steps to Chinese 轻松学汉语，New Practical Chinese 新使用汉语。New Practical Chinese has videos that accompany the first few books. Chinese Zero to Hero has lessons for HSK1 up to HSK 7-9.
For existing students who started studying several years ago, and already studied HSK5 content, the word lists don't really matter any more. This is because the past questions include words outside of HSK5, and could be HSK6 or non HSK6. The student should know all the words from the previous levels and also words from the next level.
When not sure of the meaning of a specific sentence, need to look up the meaning. In addition to idioms, there are combinations of words that have a specific meaning.
cchatty.com website provides a space for sharing questionns and getting answers. If you do so, you can get points for your participation, which can be used for downloading pdf files for Chinese language teaching books. It has a big library with many book series for different levels.
Literature Works
One of the questions in HSK5 include information about reading, and how to choose what to read, since there are a lot of books that are published every year.
There are classic works that retained top ranking over time.
This website has a section for Chinese literature https://gj.zdic.net/, and includes The Four Great Classical Novels 四大名著:
- Journey to the West 西游记
- Dream of the Red Chambers 红楼梦
- Romance of the Three Kingdoms 三国演义
- Water Margin 水浒传 (水滸傳 , name in Traditional Chinese)
Each of these novels has been made into a movie series, and can be accessed on Youtube. You can use the Chinese characters to search for information.
The website also has the English translation of Confucian Analects 论语 （英文本） , one of the Thirteen Classics （十三經 ), which is written as 十三 经 in Simplified Chinese.
Learning Chinese is indeed an interesting process. Chinese language can be learnt, one character at a time.
As for reaching the stage of reading the whole novels, that would take a lot more time. One could read the translation, to know more of the content over a shorter period of time, then read Chinese text for selected sections. Sometimes there are sections of these classic works in the text books or in the past questions, as is the case with 西游记。One of the lessons in New Practical Chinese Book 5, was about 西游记。It is interesting to watch the video to see what is described in the novel.
In 2025, I went with my brother to 张家界 Zhang Jia Jie, which is worth visiting indeed. Avatar's first movie was filmed in Zhang Jia Jie mountains. It was very exciting to see a sign that says 西游记 Journey to the West, as it was filmed in that location. Visiting China after learning Chinese turns into a very exciting experience.
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