When Thinking In Chinese Starts To Become Natural

It's Saturday. I woke up this morning feeling luxuriously lazy, and thought to myself, "It's the weekend. I don't want to do anything at all!"

Then, an instant later, these words came into my head:

这 是 周末. 我 什么 都 不 想 做. zhè shì zhōumò. Wǒ shénme dōu bù xiǎng zuò. (literally, "This is weekend. I what all not want do.")

I was myself surprised that the words came to me so naturally. I got out of bed and went to my computer (电脑 diànnǎo, literally "electric brain") to test my sentences on Google Translate.

Google Translate agreed with me that the sentences I had formulated meant pretty much what I had intended.

"This is the weekend. I don't want to do anything."

That was a pleasant surprise, because I hadn't expended any conscious effort in thinking about the words. They just popped into my head, and in the right order.

This is partly thanks to consistent effort. I have been putting in an hour every day on Duolingo for 32 days at a stretch, and the practice is paying off. (Of course, my current stint is my third go at learning the language; I've spent a few months on it earlier, in 2013 and again in 2016, but this is the first time I'm seeing good progress.)

But another reason is the utter simplicity of Chinese grammar. The words are like Lego blocks. They don't mutate, and they fit together in certain defined ways. Once you internalise those patterns, you can simply slot words into their assigned places without conscious effort, and the sentence just works!

If this is my progress after a month of consistent yet only moderate effort, it gives me hope that I can achieve my goal of speaking Mandarin fluently in a year.