Benchmarking progress in Chinese to stay motivated

When we begin learning Chinese, everything feels new and exciting. Every word we learn opens new doors and moves us forward, and when we listen and read, we can feel we’re making progress.

This sense of forward movement can be strongly motivating. I love learning new things, and I think part of the reason is that progress is so noticeable.

This is great for beginners, but the effect diminishes as you learn more. You reach the intermediate plateau, No matter how much effort you invest, you don’t seem to be moving forward anymore.

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This shift poses a challenge for many learners. If you no longer feel your efforts are taking you closer to your goal, how can you maintain the motivation to continue learning?

There are many answers to this question. First and foremost, humans are motivated to learn things for reasons other than a sense of improvement over time. In Self-Determination Theory, there are three basic psychological needs:

• Autonomy is about being in control of your learning situation and your actions within it. For independent learners, this is rarely a problem, but if you’re locked into a course with a curriculum that doesn’t closely match your own goals for learning Chinese, or if you have a teacher who makes all the decisions for you, autonomy can be severely lacking. This is one of the major issues in formal education.
• Competence is about feeling that you’re able to operate effectively within the activities you perform. This is only indirectly linked to language proficiency, as how competent you feel is much more about the tasks you engage in and your expectations, not how good your Chinese is on some kind of objective scale. As some teachers are fond of saying, it’s not about how difficult the language is, but what you ask students to do with it.
• Relatedness is about connecting with other people and finding meaning through social relationships. This can be with your teacher, fellow learners or with native speakers of Chinese. The desire to fit into a social situation, integrative motivation, can be powerful, but also elusive if you’re studying in your home country.

Out of these three, only the second is related to a sense of improvement, because when you feel that you can do more in Chinese this week than you could last week, this strengthens the feeling of competence.

Still, learning Chinese is about much more than that. For a full discussion of intrinsic motivation, please read the article from which the description of the psychological needs above was borrowed: How to learn Chinese in the long term with intrinsic motivation.

How to learn Chinese in the long term with intrinsic motivation

The intermediate plateau is an illusion, you are still moving

Before trying to answer a why question, such as why you are no longer making progress, it’s always worth scrutinising the question’s premise: is it true that you’ve stopped learning? Is there an intermediate plateau, or is it just a cognitive illusion?

The truth is that if you are engaging with the language, you are still learning. However, the more you know, the less difference each new thing you learn will make.

• If you know ten words in Mandarin, learning another ten will double your vocabulary and dramatically increase what you can say and do in the language. Learning the eleventh most common character, 这/這 (zhè), “this”, is extremely useful.
• If you know a thousand words, learning ten more is only an increase of one per cent. And it’s worse than that because the words you’re learning also become less common, and so you’re less likely to encounter them. Learning character number 1001, 玉 (yù), “jade”,  is still useful, but not as useful. You are fifty times likelier to encounter 这/這 in a text compared to 玉.

For more about the intermediate plateau and how to overcome it, please refer to How to get past the intermediate Chinese learning plateau:

How to get past the intermediate Chinese learning plateau

Benchmarking progress in Chinese to stay motivated

So, as long as you engage with the language, you are learning. It might not feel like you’re learning as much as you used to, but you are still moving, it’s just that each step forward is not as big compared to the distance you’ve already travelled.

This is akin to watching the shadow the sun casts on the ground. If you watch the shadow intently, it looks like it’s not moving at all, but if you mark the edge and come back an hour later, it’s clear that it has moved.

This leads us to a method to stay motivated as an intermediate and advanced learner: benchmarking. By clearly marking your current position, you can then repeat the process later to show that you have moved, even if it doesn’t feel like it. Just like the shadow moves across a sundial even if you can’t perceive the change as it happens.

Beyond that, benchmarking is also necessary if you want to evaluate different methods for learning Chinese. Without knowing how much progress you make, it’s hard to say which methods work best for you.

Setting a baseline: defining your current level in Chinese

The first step in effective benchmarking is to establish a clear record of your current level in the areas you wish to improve. I strongly suggest that you limit your benchmarking to specific areas, big (listening comprehension, speaking ability) or small (tones, character knowledge).

Benchmarking everything is incredibly time-consuming and inherently complex, but you can achieve a lot simply by focusing on smaller aspects of the language and by being consistent. By limiting your focus, you will both make more progress and notice it more clearly. By keeping the conditions and variables as constant as possible, you make sure that you don’t accidentally measure different things at different times.

You can use proficiency exams such as the HSK or TOCFL to benchmark your current level, but note that while these exams purport to cover everything, they seldom do. They also cover language proficiency in a very specific way, which might not be aligned with your goals for learning the language.

Using the HSK as a roadmap to learning Chinese

How to benchmark your Chinese proficiency

Below, I will focus on benchmarking specific aspects of the language. Here is how to do it:

1. Document your current skills: Assess your abilities across different language skills (reading, listening, writing, and speaking) and describe them as accurately as possible.
2. Use consistent materials: If you are measuring reading speed, for example, choose texts of similar difficulty and genre, or even use the same text (but further into it, of course).
3. Record your methodology: Write down how you conducted your self-assessment to ensure that future comparisons remain consistent.
4. Be realistic: This is not a scientific experiment, but a practical tool to measure progress. Focus on capturing trends, rather than exact data points, for a clearer sense of progress.

Let’s have a look at some concrete examples of different aspects of the language.

Benchmarking reading ability

Reading is one of the easiest abilities to benchmark because it can be done without involving other people.

Things to benchmark:

• Full comprehension: Reading simpler texts with complete understanding.
• Gist understanding: Tackling more complex texts and extracting the main ideas.
• Genre diversity: Exploring texts across different styles and subjects.

Key metrics to track:

• Your subjective gauge of comprehension.
• Frequency of dictionary use.
• Time taken to complete a text.
• Your emotional response, such as whether you feel comfortable, frustrated, or confident.

By revisiting the same or similar texts over time, you will see improvements in comprehension, speed, and confidence. I’ve written specifically about reading speed in Chinese reading speed revisited and about learning to read aloud in Learning to read aloud in Chinese.

Chinese reading speed revisited

Benchmarking listening skills

Listening is also relatively straightforward to benchmark. Use audio materials to measure how much you understand now versus in the future. My course The Fluent Listener also includes simple tools for benchmarking and progress tracking. 

Things to benchmark:

• Spontaneous vs. scripted: Listening to an interview is not the same as listening to a story read aloud.
• Single listen vs. multiple listens: How much can you comprehend on the first pass? What about the second or third? Listening again can be immensely helpful.
• Your participation: Are you yourself participating in the conversation? This puts different demands on listening compared to if you’re only listening.
• Informal vs. formal Chinese: Everyday conversation versus structured, professional monologues.
• Dialects and accents: Compare standard Mandarin with regional variations.

You can record the same metrics as for listening ability, i.e. subjective comprehension, unknown words, time to reach full comprehension (number of listens) and your emotional response.

Benchmarking writing ability

Writing is more complex to benchmark as it often requires external feedback. However, it is also uniquely suited for self-assessment because written work is permanent and can be revisited.

Strategies:

• Start a blog or journal in Chinese to collect your writing over time (you don’t need to make it public).
• Experiment with different writing tasks:
  • Formal vs. informal styles.
  • Various topics and genres (e.g., fiction, essays, accounts, or explanations).
  • Writing with or without tools like dictionaries or input from teachers or chatbots.
  • Typed texts vs. handwritten texts (if you care about handwriting).

Feedback:

Receiving feedback on your writing is essential, not only for improving in general but for benchmarking specifically. Unlike reading, you can’t judge how good your writing is right now. If you wait long enough, you might be able to later say that your writing today was worse, but even that might be tricky.

So, beyond self-comparison, try asking a native speaker or teacher to review your work. You can also try using AI for this.

• Compare different samples.
• Highlight recurring errors.
• Offer an overall assessment of your progress.

Consistency in feedback is crucial; try to work with the same evaluator to reduce variability. If you benchmark your speaking in January with 张老师 and then repeat the process in April with 李老师, this won’t be very useful unless they are professionally trained to asses speaking ability according to a specific framework (and even then it might not be reliable).

For more tips on improving your writing ability, read 20 tips and tricks to improve your Chinese writing ability.

20 tips and tricks to improve your Chinese writing ability

Benchmarking speaking ability

Speaking is arguably the hardest area to benchmark due to its fleeting nature. The best way to get around this is to record yourself. If you think that your voice sounds strange, it just means that you haven’t done this a lot, and should start doing so now. While it sounds like it would be impossible to notice progress yourself, this is not as hard as it seems!

Strategies:

• Best performance: Prepare and practice before recording.
• Casual performance: Record impromptu speech without preparation.
• Reading aloud: Read a text aloud to gauge pronunciation and fluency.
• Improvised conversation: Discuss random topics to assess spontaneous communication.
• Voice messages: Most messaging apps allow you to record and send audio snippets. This function is great for language learning, and in addition to many other benefits, it allows you to listen to your own recordings from way back.

Feedback:

• Ask native speakers to evaluate recordings with specific criteria in mind, such as fluency, pronunciation, and tone accuracy.
• Compare recordings over time to identify improvements or areas that need more focus.
• Use my pronunciation course to get professional feedback (with a follow-up to check progress).

Practical tips for effective benchmarking

There are many more ways of benchmarking your Chinese proficiency than those mentioned above. You can be as specific as you want, so the number of ways to benchmark is large.

Generally speaking, the more advanced you are, the more important it becomes to define what you want to improve. As a lower intermediate student, it might be okay to try to “improve speaking ability”, but at an advanced level, you need to be more specific. Maybe you want to improve your ability to describe graphs because that’s important in your job, or you want to avoid sounding too repetitive when telling stories. Focus on one thing at a time.

Here are some general tips:

1. Organise your records: Maintain a clear structure for all your texts, recordings, and notes. Use folders labelled by date and skill type for easy access. Or save them in a note-taking app or whatever you prefer. Do this from the start and you will save yourself a lot of pain later.
2. Stay consistent: Always use similar materials, topics, and methods for benchmarking. There are uncountable ways of combining the metrics I’ve discussed in this article and you can never check everything. That doesn’t matter as long as you stay consistent.
3. Track progress over time: Space your evaluations out by months or years to see significant changes. Naturally, the more advanced you are, the longer time you should expect to spend before noticing improvement. Also, the bigger your target area, the longer it should be expected to take.
4. Celebrate small wins: Acknowledge every sign of progress, no matter how minor it seems. Part of the reason benchmarking is great is that it makes progress visible.

Wrapping up: Benchmarking vs. logging

To wrap up this article, it’s worth pointing out that there is a related concept worth bringing up: language logging. As the name implies, language logging is about recording your journey and noting down how much time you invest in doing what activities.

This is not the same thing as benchmarking, but still clearly related. Language logging is about documenting the process; How much time did you spend on listening this month? Was it meaning-focused or language-focused? What did you learn from the experience?

Benchmarking is about the result. What is your listening comprehension like? What are your strengths and weaknesses? Have you improved since the last time you benchmarked?

Naturally, it’s best to combine the two: benchmark first, then log your learning for a certain period, then benchmark again and evaluate the results. This allows you to connect both the amount of time you invested and what activities you engaged in with the progress made, potentially providing deeper insights into what works best for you. Good luck!

I’ve written more about language logging in a series of articles, starting here: Chinese language logging, part 1: Why and how to track your progress.

Chinese language logging, part 1: Why and how to track your progress

Editor’s note: This article, originally published in 2011, was rewritten from scratch and massively updated in December 2024.

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I've been learning and teaching Chinese for more than 15 years. My goal is to help you avoid making the mistakes I made and those I have seen other students make. Sign up for my weekly newsletter and get a 7-day crash course on how to learn Chinese!

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