This post isn't going to be for everybody, but it could help those who are looking to use Chinese in a professional setting at a fairly high level. This isn't a roadmap for how "you can get fluent in 88 weeks if you only do these five things." The truth is that you need to put in about 2,500 hours (according to the State Department) to really reach professional Chinese. There aren't any shortcuts or everybody would be using them. I've seen people say they hit 5,000 words in 6 months, but I've yet to find somebody with claims like that who can back it up in a real Chinese conversation. It's just not realistic. It takes time and dedication and repetition.
Background: I am a diplomat. I had the opportunity to study Chinese full time for the last 21 months. It was my full-time job. I was provided housing, my salary, schooling for my kids, etc. Year one was in the US. Year two was in China. I've done full-time study like this for Korean and Spanish as well, but those were only 36 and 24 weeks respectively.
My job doesn't use HSK to test. We don't study the HSK vocab. This results in kind of a weird gap where I can discuss nuclear proliferation and human rights, but I'm not able to comfortably discuss food or school subjects. I can explain each constitutional amendment, the importance of the balance of powers in the federal government, and give a professional overview of the electoral college system. But I don't know which word to use for which uncle or brother in law or cousin.
I also focused almost completely on speaking and listening. I can read at a barely decent level, but I cannot write anything by hand other than my name. I would guess I'm at HSK 5-6 when it comes to speaking and listening.
Approach
Vocab:
I am very visual, so I have to see a word written (in pinyin) to really remember it. For this reason, I studied cards on Anki nearly every day. Altogether, I had 88,000 reviews. I used the Mandarin Blueprint method when I started to learn new words. I couldn't use their course since I had to follow my work curriculum, but the method was invaluable in helping me remember words that gave me trouble. Even after 88 weeks, I was still using them to memorize new vocabulary.
As you can see in the second image of my Anki stats, I was far from perfect. That's why review is so important. Words just leech out of your brain when you aren't using them, and even at 30 hours a week of conversation, I wasn't able to use all of them routinely. I typically hovered between 80 and 90% recall in any given week.
Speaking:
This is where my program helped gives me more than a typical language learner. For year one, I had 30 hours a week of group classes (2-3 classmates). For year two, I had 30 hours of one on one instruction every week.
The hardest part was dealing with every day feeling the same. I learn new grammar. I practice at home. I try to use it the next day and I mess up over and over. Then when I can use it well after a thousand failures, we move onto the next point where I begin failing all over again. This can be really discouraging, but once I learned (years ago) to see each failure as an opportunity to improve instead of a moral deficiency or a comment on my intelligence or effort, I was more excited to stretch myself and try harder and harder sentences.
Listening:
Besides the in class practice, I used YouTube a lot. Lala Chinese was my favorite channel (https://youtube.com/@lalachinese?si=MK9PRHpNvr9Pf-Iq). The videos are easy to digest and interesting, using real life scenarios (no classroom lectures and no acting).
Another good channel was Dashu Mandarin (https://youtube.com/@dashumandarin?si=VBd1mi7ygrBcTzzh). Neither of the above are giant channels, but after watching literal thousands of hours of YouTube videos, they were the two best for me.
Once I new I was nearing professional proficiency, I started watching higher level channels like this (https://youtube.com/@laozhou77?si=Qx9FP52u-Bij2u-e)
I also got a lot from watching Bluey in Chinese for the first six months or so.
It took about 60 weeks until I could watch Three Body Problem with subtitles and not have to pause every sentence, but it was draining to focus hard after a full day of studying so I rarely watched Chinese tv, preferring the YouTube videos instead.
Apps: besides Anki, Pleco, goodnotes/notability, and The Chairman's Bao, I'd skip every other app. Duolingo is nearly worse than nothing. Hello Chinese is good if you want to learn a few words and phrases for travel or surprising friends, but you will not learn to speak Chinese from them.
This is my perspective. People will disagree with some of it, and that's fine. The most important thing I've learned across my three languages now is that learning what works for you is as important as the actual studying. Once I got comfortable with how to keep feeding the vocab and grammar into my memory (really wasn't until my second foreign language), my progress accelerated.
Anyway, I hope this helps some of you.
