You say something in Mandarin, a native speaker corrects you, and you adjust. The next day, another native speaker tells you to revert to your original phrasing. What’s going on?
This happens all the time when learning Chinese, and there are several possible explanations. Maybe you misunderstood the correction and adjusted in the wrong way. To avoid this, always repeat back after being corrected to confirm both that you understood the feedback and that you adjusted accordingly.
Another possibility is that one of the native speakers is just wrong. The first time this happened to me, I thought it was odd, but I quickly realised that just because someone is a native speaker doesn’t mean that they know everything about Chinese.
In this article, we’re going to explore what native speakers of Chinese know, and perhaps more importantly, what they don’t know.
Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episode (#230):
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People learn the language they engage with
People learn to use language according to their needs and interests. Most don’t have a specific interest in the language itself, how it works, or how to learn or teach it. Assuming that they do will lead you astray.
Since you’re reading this article, you’re probably interested in learning Chinese and might also be interested in language in general. You notice how things are different in your native language compared to Mandarin and think about how we say things in different languages and why. Most people don’t do this.
Don’t ask a fish to explain fluid dynamics
For normal people, the language is just something they have grown up with and use for various purposes. We can think of a native speaker as a fish in water. While you can learn a lot from observing a fish swim or asking it to show you how to do it, don’t ask the fish to explain fluid dynamics or biomechanics.
Also, while the fish can tell you much about some parts of the ocean, it knows less about others. It knows what it has been exposed to, which is a lot, but it doesn’t know everything.
What native speakers know about Chinese (and what they don’t)
It seems to me that people greatly overestimate how much they know about their native language. This is obviously true when it comes to explicit knowledge about phonology and grammar (try asking someone on the street to explain the third tone or the usage of 了 and you’ll see what I mean), but it’s also true for how the language is used to communicate. It’s also true that many non-native speakers idolise native speakers and assume that they know things that they don’t and that their feel for the language is infallible.
Disclaimer: This is not meant as criticism against native speakers
This article might sound a bit critical, but my goal is not to diminish native speakers. I’m a native speaker of Swedish, and having taught Swedish to foreigners, I know there are lots of things I don’t know or can’t explain. Beyond Chinese, I’ve also learnt English and French, which means I can approach the subject from multiple angles.
I’m immensely grateful to native speakers who have helped me learn Chinese. It would abe absurd to try to learn a language without relying on the people who speak it natively. Still, knowing about their limitations is crucial for dealing with situations such as the one mentioned in the introduction to this article. And that’s what this article is about.
About right and wrong when learning Chinese
Before we dig into what native speakers know (and what they don’t), let’s talk briefly about right and wrong. To some readers, it might be obvious that there is a right and wrong. Maybe there are official dictionaries and government agencies in your country that dictate what proper language is, and if you don’t follow these standards, you’re clearly wrong.
This prescriptive approach is not very useful when dealing only with native speakers (let people speak the way they want; it’s their language), but it’s not obvious that this extends to second-language learners.
While we can argue about the importance of following an official standard, we can all agree that as second-language learners, we need to use Chinese in a way that allows us to communicate in the language. In general, or when in doubt, following the standard makes this easier, as I’ve argued here for pronunciation: Standard pronunciation in Chinese and why you want it.
Can native speakers of Chinese be wrong about their own language?
To other readers, the idea that a native speaker can be wrong might be what’s strange. A language is defined by the people who use it, so if native speakers think something is right, then it is right by definition. Or perhaps the words “right” and “wrong” aren’t appropriate to use here.
This descriptive approach is what most linguists are interested in and completely dominates in academia. We’re interested in studying the language as it’s used, not how governments say it ought to be used.
This is also what most language learners want to learn. Do you want to pronounce “download” in Chinese as xiàzài (下载) because this is what’s listed in an official dictionary, even though everybody actually says xiàzǎi? For more about how native speakers can be “wrong”, please check Can native speakers be wrong about Chinese grammar and pronunciation?
Can native speakers be wrong about Chinese grammar and pronunciation?
Regional language variation for Chinese learners
Let’s continue exploring what native speakers know and what they don’t.
People learn the language that they engage with and that is required of them. This means that native speakers learn the pronunciation and grammar of the language communities they engage with growing up (at home, in school, and in society at large). This typically does not adhere to a government standard.
This is worth highlighting because it’s the most common explanation for the situation described at the beginning of this article, where two native speakers don’t agree on what you should say.
China is vast and the population is huge. People speak Mandarin in different ways. Most people don’t even speak Mandarin as their first language! Expecting more than a billion people to agree on how to use a word is naïve. To learn more, see Learning to understand regionally accented Mandarin.
Native speakers and native speakers
The process doesn’t stop; we keep learning as adults:
- A nurse immerses themselves in medical terminology, communicating effectively with patients and colleagues.
- A journalist sharpens their writing skills to inform or engage an audience while constantly absorbing new language through extensive reading.
- A teacher of Chinese might have formal training and thinks about the language constantly, prompted by student interactions.
In addition, people have different interests. Someone who plays computer games all their free time will learn language appropriate for fast-paced communication in that context. Someone who skateboards will learn to communicate in that environment. Someone who reads a hundred books per year is likely to have a broader range when it comes to the written language.
It would be strange to think that all these combinations of professions, backgrounds and hobbies would result in the same knowledge about Chinese. I don’t mean to judge and say that some combinations are better than others, but they are clearly different, and being aware of this as a second-language learner is important.
Spoken and written Chinese are fundamentally different
Spoken language is the real language; it is the dance itself, while the written language is merely the choreography notes. Just as you don’t need to understand the written choreography to perform a beautiful dance, you don’t need to know the ins and outs of grammar rules to speak fluently, as proven by native speakers of any language.
As mentioned, we all master the spoken language we’re surrounded by growing up. This process happens naturally, driven by immersion and interaction within our environments. A child growing up in Sweden will master Swedish pronunciation and syntax without ever needing explicit instruction. Their understanding is intuitive, grounded in context and repeated exposure. The same is true for native speakers of any language, including Chinese.
The written language, however, is different. As mentioned, you can dance beautifully without knowing how to write choreography. Similarly, you can speak fluently without understanding the theoretical principles behind grammar or phonetics. Just as you can swim without studying fluid dynamics or biomechanics, you can communicate effectively without explicit linguistic knowledge.
Whom to ask for feedback on your written Chinese
Feedback, answers, and help with written language require expertise from people experienced in reading and writing. A professional editor or a teacher trained in linguistics is far better equipped to explain grammatical and vocabulary usage than someone who doesn’t read or write unless they have to.
Not all native speakers master the written language to the same level. For confirmation, ask any university professor if all native students can write well (hint: they can’t).
Thus, whom you ask for answers or feedback matters greatly. If you’re a beginner and write basic sentences, this doesn’t matter, but the better your writing becomes, the more important whom you ask for feedback becomes.
If you’re a good writer in one language, you can transfer some of that ability to Chinese, meaning that it’s not obvious that all native speakers you ask will actually be better writers than you are. They are likely to be far superior when it comes to grammar, word choice and so on, but not necessarily when it comes to structuring an explanation or choosing appropriate examples.
How to get honest feedback to boost your Chinese speaking and writing
Native speakers’ explicit knowledge of Chinese is limited
As mentioned, fish are typically good at swimming but not good at explaining fluid dynamics or biomechanics. To do that, you need a theoretical education.
This means that most people are bad at explaining their own language. If they are observant, good at introspection, and think about language a lot, they might be able to come up with ad hoc explanations that are not bad, but they can only base their answers on what they have experienced, which is by definition limited. A fish doesn’t know the whole ocean.
This happens to me as soon as I try to help someone learn Swedish. When they ask things like “Why do you go down on that word in that sentence?” or “Can you explain why this verb can’t be placed here in this sentence?” or “What’s the difference between these two words, really?”, I can only shrug and say that I don’t know; I need to look it up.
If learning languages has taught me anything, it’s humility. There are so many things we don’t know, even in our native language.
Examples of questions normal people can’t answer
In Chinese, here are some things you might have wondered:
- What are the main usages of 了?
- How is the third tone pronounced?
- What’s the difference between jǐnliàng and jìnlìang, and how are they written?
If you ask these types of questions to someone without formal training, you’re unlikely to get a helpful response. Someone with a keen eye and ear for language might be able to give you a decent attempt at the third question, but certainly not the other two. The problem is that you won’t know if you can trust the answer, because even people who have no clue will often happily answer anyway.
The more confident a native speaker sounds, the less you should trust them. Teachers who say things like “This is my spontaneous answer, but I’ll check a corpus and get back to you” are much more reliable than those who assume that their intuitive answer must be correct.
Fish are good at swimming but not particularly skilled at understanding fluid dynamics or biomechanics.
Do you even need explicit knowledge about Chinese?
So, if native speakers’ explicit knowledge of Chinese is weak, a natural question to ask might be if you actually need it as a second-language learner. If native speakers can acquire the language anyway, maybe you can too.
You don’t need much explicit knowledge to learn a language effectively as an adult. People tend to overestimate the role of explicit learning, whereas researchers mostly agree that language learning is largely implicit. My suggestion is to learn Chinese implicitly through exposure with a seasoning of explicit instruction.
When explicit knowledge about Chinese is useful
There are exceptions, though. Knowing some theory can be immensely helpful because it highlights things you might not even notice. The third-tone question above is a great example of this. I misunderstood how the third tone worked from the very start (I didn’t realise it was just a low tone), which is one of the most commonly observed issues among students. Read more here: Learning the third tone in Mandarin Chinese.
You can’t learn pronunciation simply by understanding the theory, but the theory can help you pay attention to the right things. Some of these you might not even hear, so it’s possible to think that you’re doing it right for years, only to realise that you are wrong. I wrote more about the role of theory when learning pronunciation here, but the same argument can be applied to other aspects of the language too.
Wrapping up: What does this mean for learners of Chinese?
So, what’s the point of this article? I think that a deeper understanding of what native speakers know and what they don’t know can help you navigate interactions with native speakers.
Native speakers are not infallible, especially when it comes to explaining the language. It is common to encounter conflicting advice from native speakers due to differences in region, education, profession, background, gender, age, humility, personality, etc.
Sometimes, both answers are delivered with extreme confidence. I’ve been in situations where a teacher (who should know better) claims everybody says A, not B, or that X is always wrong and that you have to say Y, even though this is wrong. For some concrete examples of this, check 7 things you were taught in Chinese class that are actually wrong.
The main problem here is not necessarily knowledge, but humility. People think they know a lot more than they do. If you believe them, you will get confused.
7 things you were taught in Chinese class that are actually wrong
Some final advice for the road ahead
For language learners:
- Be aware that native speakers vary greatly in their language ability and explanatory skills. Rely on them for practical language exposure, but don’t count on their explanations being accurate.
- Don’t focus too much on explicit knowledge. There are some situations where understanding grammar or pronunciation helps, but most of the time, you simply don’t need that. Read and listen more.
- Seek out advanced learners or professional teachers if you want to dig deeper. This is by no means a guarantee that you’ll get good answers, but someone with academic credits in Chinese phonology or syntax is more likely to understand what’s going on than someone who hasn’t.
- Teachers are also wrong sometimes. Not all of them have a formal education, and going through one doesn’t magically give you an open mind and humility. Your teacher being wrong occasionally is not strange, but if your teacher never expresses any doubt and seems to know everything, they probably don’t.
For language teachers:
- Be open about the limits of your knowledge. Admitting gaps is not a weakness; it’s an opportunity to learn and grow. No one knows everything about their own language, and that’s okay.
Editors note: This article, originally published in 2011, was rewritten from scratch and massively updated in December 2024.
12 comments
“The first mistake people make is to lump native speakers together in one single group. There is a huge difference between a native speaker who reads a hundred books a year and has a PhD, and a native speaker who dropped out of school at the age of fifteen and spends all his free time playing baseball.”
As soon as I read that statement, I knew you were on to something with this article. Great point of view.
The strange thing is that “native speakers” do tend to be idolised by learners who should know better – or rather, one particular “native” speaker.
It’s worth remembering something a good friend of mine said years ago: “We’re all learners, but some of us started learning earlier.”
That hits the nail on the head! No-one pops out of the womb with the capacity to hold a conversation, and in fact it takes years full of many errors for any so-called native speaker to reach the level of holding a very simple conversation.
That’s a really neat way of putting it, I’ll remember than and use it next time I run into this kind of situation. Thanks for sharing!
Good points, Olle. I think, as you imply, you have to have reached a certain level of proficiency/fluency before this insight is even available to you. Living in the North i.e. in the heartland of supposed “standard” Mandarin Chinese makes one even more likely to take taxi drivers and random university classmates as authorities on their language.
My own experience was different. I learned Chinese in Nanjing and Suzhou where the many Wu dialect(s) are the language of everyday communication. Even as an upper-intermediate speaker living in Jiangsu I know in talking to my girlfriend’s 83 year old grandmother who uses literally two verbs for everything (搞 and 弄) when she speaks Putonghua, says 跑 to mean 去, asks me if I’d like to 吃茶 when I come over, and frequently asks my girlfriend or her mother or even me occasionally how to say the name of a fish or a vegetable in Mandarin, that I can’t go to her for the proper use of 尽管. This has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence or cultured-ness. She simply never, ever speaks Putonghua in her daily life. I am literally the only person she speaks it with.
In short I think one can be disabused of the idea that native speakers know everything much more quickly if one studies in the South, or in East Central China or in Western China, or really anywhere other than Harbin, Beijing, Jinan, Tianjin etc… and even in those cities one should be hearing enough Jinan hua or Tianjin hua to realize that “native speaker of Mandarin” often translates to “native speaker of a local dialect, trained speaker of standard Mandarin” for a lot of the people you are going to run into at the pool hall or the basketball court. This is not to say that Mandarin speakers in non-standard dialect-regions are incapable of speaking excellent Putonghua. In fact my current teacher walks into class most days talking loudly in Chongqing hua on her phone and then promptly switches to flawless Putonghua as soon as class begins. It’s a skill she has acquired though, not something heaven-sent or as we‘ve learned to say in Chinese “天生的.”
Living in the North i.e. in the heartland of supposed “standard” Mandarin Chinese makes one even more likely to take taxi drivers and random university classmates as authorities on their language.
Excellent comment! It’s also the case that many people in the north (read: Beijing) don’t know the difference between standard 普通話 and 北京話, thinking that they are one and the same. For example, I’m currently taking a phonology research course with a teacher who has worked as an examiner for the pronunciation exams taken by teachers, news anchors and so on. She said that some Beijingers have the attitude that “I’m from Beijing, therefore everything I say is 100% standard and correct”. Making oneself the reference point for what is correct is ignorant and a bit arrogant (and it would be so in any other language as well). It also makes it hard for some people to understand why they fail the exam even though they supposedly speak perfect standardised Chinese.
After having taken linguistics courses with mostly native speakers as classmates, it’s also striking how different their intuition for the language is. It’s not uncommon for half the class to approve of one way of saying something and the other disapproving of the same sentence (obviously, only tricky cases are dealt with in this way, but they are too common to make me comfortable).
This discussion reminds me of the disbelief many of my fellow high school students felt when they were presented with grammatically-correct English sentences in our grammar book. They simply could not believe English was written in such awkward phrasing. My point is that the spoken language and the grammatically-correct language have huge variations and truth be told, the oral language takes precedence over the academic view because language is only relevant when it is used for daily conversation. If one only uses language a certain way in an academic situation, it will not find itself being used often enough to be considered “standard” for purposes of oral conversation.
Excellent article. I can confirm the same widespread assumptions you describe, and have also been frustrated by them many times.
Your English looks superb to me, but I’d like to point out one typo, so that you can correct it:
“Trusting native speakers TO always TO give you the right answer is also bound to create problems.”