You've probably heard the parable about sharpening the
saw. There are two
people who want to cut down trees. The first one sets to immediately with a
blunt saw and no skills. The second person first spends time sharpening their
saw and improving their knowledge. In the beginning, the first person gets ahead
whilst the other one spends time improving their ability. But once the second
person gets going, they quickly gain the lead with the improvements they have
made.
The point of the story is clear – preparing in advance can pay off in the
future. As you're reading this blog, you're likely aware of this. There are
plenty of sources of information on how to learn languages more effectively, and
this blog is just one of them. If you have good teachers, they will also spend
some time guiding you on how to learn as well as what to learn.
If you've been using rote repetition to try and learn Chinese vocabulary,
discovering SRS and sentence mining would be a huge boost to your Chinese in the
long term. If you've been focusing on memorising grammar structures, having
someone encourage you to seek opportunities to speak Chinese in real situations
would also be very beneficial.
It's clearly worthwhile spending time to find out about the most effective ways
to learn, seeing what other people do and also discovering what works best for
you personally.
However, it can be easy to overdo this when it comes to learning languages. You
certainly won't learn much Chinese if you spend 100% of your study time reading
blogs about it in English. Languages are a special category of learning, and one
where sharpening the saw offers fewer benefits than it can for learning other
kinds of material.
This is due to the fact that everyone has an innate ability to learn languages.
Adult learners do have some advantages and can apply intelligent study methods,
but ultimately you're trying to train an existing system that works incredibly
well if you can feed it with the right input.
Imagine if you were suddenly teleported to some remote location where an
unfamiliar language is spoken. Let's say you can't leave for two years and your
only option is to get on with making a living in this new place. Even if you
know nothing about effective ways to learn foreign languages, you're guaranteed
to make incredible progress in that language out of necessity. No-one else
speaks your native language and you're only option for communication is to
acquire the local one.
In that situation, there's more than just motivation behind the progress you
would make. You'd be constantly exposed to input and constantly be forced to
produce that language in real situations. Your innate ability to learn languages
would thrive in that environment.
The point I'm making here is that whilst it is good to sharpen the saw, the best
thing you can do is still to find every opportunity to get real input and use
Chinese in real situations.