Each step on the Chinese acquisition road MUST come from a place of previous understanding, but that previous understanding is broader than you think. So how do you learn Chinese by yourself?

Have you ever considered that your dad’s chair in the living room might help you learn Chinese? Why shouldn’t it? “It’s just a chair,” you say, “What does that have to do with Chinese?” The chair exists as a pattern of neural connections that shoot electricity around between them when you bring it to mind. Some concepts swirl around it, like the general concept of a “chair” as such. Guess what? When you learn Chinese, you’re going to need to learn how they say chair. Do you think this memory won’t help you?

It is far more profound than the chair, though. Can you remember your dad sitting on the chair? When you were little, did you ever sit on his lap? What did you do? What emotion does it bring to mind? Was there laughter? Scolding? Joy? Sadness? Love? It’s NOT “just a chair.” It’s a relic of an epoch of your life you can include in your memoirs one day.

The Mandarin Blueprint Method is designed to cue you towards these lived experiences so that each element of the language is linked back to you. Each character component has meaning, or it looks like something. You can EASILY get good at finding what that definition means to you or how it appears visually to you. A Chinese character is often PACKED with meaning. What does it mean to you?

Now, while it is true that your past experiences are instrumental in helping you acquire the language (especially at the beginning stages), you also must have a logical path surrounding “which character component/character/word/grammar point do I learn next?” That’s where our patent-pending method comes in.
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You see, it’s the ORDER that motivated us to apply for a patent. Each step builds upon the previous, from Pinyin to Tones to Characters to Vocabulary to Grammar. Such an approach allows for you never to leave your realm of competence. If you are in that realm where you can understand what you are seeing, then you can handle stepping a bit out of that zone and learning something closely related. Now, your realm of competence just got a bit bigger.

Don’t know anything about Chinese? How about we start with “一” in the first lesson? A horizontal line is something you can handle, right? Oh, would you look at that! There are three characters you can make with just that horizontal line! 一 二 三！Excited yet? No? Ok, get ready for this, we’re going to add in a *gasp* vertical line! (丨) What a terrifyingly difficult language! Wha-, wait you can make another two incredibly common characters now?! 十 干！Stop, stop, the complexity is just too much!
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Joking aside, if you take the language and articulate it down to its baby steps, there is nothing complicated about it. Nothing. Are there a lot of steps? Yeah. The steps of a baby. You can handle a lot of baby steps. Heck, you might start making some great leaps forward after a while (see what we did there?).
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