When starting to learn Chinese as a beginner it’s often quite overwhelming. Suddenly, you’re faced with this completely new language, which has a completely new structure and completely new and weird-looking/sounding words!

Where on Earth do you start?

The answer to that question is: with something simple.

If you choose good beginner resources, then you won’t have to worry about what words to learn because it’s likely the books or courses you’ve chosen will already contain the most useful words for beginners.

Click here if you would like to view a curated list of Chinese learning resources, including books, audio courses, podcasts and video courses.

What you should be concerned about is how you learn the new words.

It’s important to not simply memorise Chinese words from a word list.

Rather, you should be looking to learn words from context.

Why?

Well, first of all, you will be able to remember the word better if you have seen it or heard it in a sentence and second of all, it’s a lot easier to gauge a word’s meaning when you have been exposed to it in context.

Chinese words can also have multiple meanings, so it’s a lot easier to understand a word’s different meanings by seeing or hearing it used in context. This is something I learned when I was studying Chinese. I’d often spend time memorising new words, but I later found myself confused as to how to use those words when speaking because I hadn’t actually heard or seen examples of how native speakers used them in conversation.

This brings me to my next point;

Learn conversational vocabulary

Most people’s goal when learning Chinese is to be able to speak the language and have fluent conversations with native speakers. If that isn’t your goal – feel free to skip this piece of advice!

When I was learning Chinese, I would bring my textbook to my Chinese tutor, who would then help me to work through the lessons and dialogs. One reason that it was so useful to have a tutor was that she would point out Chinese words that were very formal or very rarely used in conversation.

This saved me from wasting time learning Chinese words that I would probably never use and would very rarely encounter in normal conversation.

My point is, make sure the words you’re learning are practical and actually used in conversation, otherwise, what’s the point?

Sure, when you’re more advanced in Chinese and you want to understand the news or talk about politics, you can learn more formal and professional vocabulary. However, as a beginner, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

By learning words that you’re likely to hear and use in conversation, it’s likely that they will more easily stick in your long-term memory.

What about the characters?

I’m a big advocate of waiting 2-3 months before starting to learn Chinese characters. So, if you’re a beginner I would just focus on learning words through Pinyin initially.

Once you have passed that 2-3 point and want to begin learning characters, then it’s going to be easier because you will already have built up a rudimentary Chinese vocabulary and can start learning the characters for the Chinese words you already know!

How do you do this?

Well, if you’ve followed my advice about learning conversational vocabulary then once you start learning high-frequency characters, you’ll find that many of these characters will correspond to the Chinese words you already know, so there’s no extra effort required on your part.

Just make sure you choose a great resource to work from when learning characters. I for one do not recommend using Heisig, instead, see below for my favourite book on learning Chinese characters.

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To sum up, starting out learning new Chinese words is relatively simple but if you’re really looking to bolster your vocabulary with A LOT of new words you’re going to have to find these words somewhere. That where the next section comes in.