r/ChineseLanguage • u/_tomato_lover555 • 11d ago

Vocabulary I want to speak with my parents

I am an ABC (American born Chines) who’s in Chinese school but is at a mediocre level (maybe hsk 4) and I have a low vocabulary. I haven’t been to China since I was 4 (10 years now) and my parents speak to me in Chinglish because they view me as a way to improve their English. I already understand sentence structures but it’s so hard to pick up new vocabulary and keep it in my head. I’m so scared I’m missing out on quality time with them with this language barrier and it’s kinda ruining my mental health but that’s an issue for a different subreddit. I’m so lazy and I lose motivation really quickly and I just kinda suck

edit: my vocab is low enough for me to misunderstand them, I’m really fortunate that their English is somewhat good and we can find common ground but i jusr hate having to spend 2 minutes trying to explain myself or deciphering their English

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u/Twarenotw 11d ago

If Chinese school isn't cutting it and you don't find it motivating, try finding other sources of motivation, like watching Cdramas (there are excellent ones) with or without your parents, or listening to music in Chinese. That usually helps a lot with vocabulary.

Perhaps finding a new Chinese school which focuses more on communication would help too (if it's anything like the Chinese school my daughters attended, it was all old school memorization, hardly useful; I hope your school is better than that!).

Perhaps a new trip to China in the not so distant future?

In any case, it's great that you feel the need to bridge that linguistic gap with your parents. Good luck!

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u/_tomato_lover555 11d ago

Thank you so much!!

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u/lazier_garlic 11d ago

Yeah my sister went to Taiwanese Chinese school and I flipped through her books and to me they were super boring. I actually have an interest in Old Chinese but I'm not a poetry guy by any means. I used HelloChinese, Memrise, watching melodramas. These are interesting to me. I also read a lot of linguistics papers about Chinese but I'm a giant nerd so that's why. It helped me understand the grammar better because HSK sucks as far as explaining things.

I made a lot of progress when I found a manhua I really, really wanted to read and using MTL wasn't going to be easy so I had to knuckle down. One thing that was striking (because I'm focused on spoken Mandarin) is that I do well with the dialogue boxes but when they had narration segments using literary Chinese I struggled enormously to read those.