Assessing your Chinese with a tutor

The unique challenges of a heritage speaker learning Chinese

The unique challenges of a heritage speaker learning Chinese A Chinese heritage speaker is someone who grew up speaking the language while living outside of the country where it is mainly spoken.

Chinese heritage speakers are usually born outside of Chinese-speaking countries and learn to speak it informally. Unlike a typical Chinese language student, heritage speakers possess some proficiency in speaking and listening. And others may even know how to write by hand or type with pinyin.

When I started to learn Chinese, the beginner resources were not helpful to me, yet the advanced ones were too difficult. Introductory materials were targeted at students who started from a blank canvas with almost no knowledge of Chinese. However, I was well beyond the point of learning how to pronounce characters and can already hold casual conversations. But when I watched the news, I only understood about half of it. Most of the online resources failed to engage me because they never addressed my learning challenges—so I had to work with tutors to create my own learning curriculum.

Working with a language tutor to assess your Chinese proficiency

If you’re a heritage speaker and you want to start developing fluency, my best advice to you is to work with a tutor. They can help you understand areas you’re weak in and how you could improve them. Most importantly, they can help you figure out which HSK level you’re at. HSK is the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (汉语水品考试), a standardized proficiency test for non-native Chinese speakers. There are six levels in total and each one is progressively more difficult. It’s not necessary to take the test to learn Chinese but understanding which level you fall in will provide more structure to your learning.

Screenshot of Mandarin Bean, a free online database of articles categorized by HSK levels. Many apps and online resources use HSK to organize their educational materials.

My favourite platform to find a tutor is Preply. There are many tutors to choose from—starting from $5/hr up to $50/hr. Your best bet is picking someone in the midrange, somewhere between $10-$20/hr. They will provide a good balance of skills and value for your money. As you gain more experience working with tutors, you will learn the types you work best with.

Take the lead on your learning

A mistake I made was relying too much on tutors to lead my learning when I should have taken the charge more. When you don’t come to class with a plan or idea of what to learn, many tutors will follow textbooks like the HSK workbooks because it’s convenient and structured. However, the material is bone dry and forgettable. Unless you want to pass the HSK exams, following the HSK material is not worth your time.

A photo of my HSK 5 textbook. Each chapter starts with a story built around vocabulary list followed by exercises. The book is very academic and has put me off from learning Chinese.

When working with a tutor, treat it as a two-way conversation. Most of my tutors defaulted to teaching mode and would throw lots of material at me, hoping some would stick. As a heritage speaker, this won’t work for you because you are not starting from zero. Build a plan to learn skills you’re lacking. With my last tutor, we worked on reading since this was an area I was weak in. Together, we read articles from Mandarin Bean. The articles were short and relevant to recent news covering topics on AI, social media shopping, lifestyle, and more. Sometimes, she would find opportunities to form a mini lesson around questions I had. There was no lesson plan to adhere to, and each class was very flexible. I much preferred this format of learning because it was more natural than sticking to a textbook (besides Mandarin Bean, I also recommend DuChinese. Check out my post about reading resources on how to approach Chinese reading).

After many lessons with the tutor, I felt confident enough to learn on my own for a bit, so I stopped working with her. Tutors are very useful for addressing specific needs. Some students may need more time and longer learning periods. But it’s important to not restrict learning to lessons and build opportunities in your life to engage with Chinese.

Have you worked with a language tutor before? Tell me about your experience in the comments below.