As I reflect on my experiences learning Chinese (especially within the context of trying to cram Korean into my brain), I keep remembering new details to add.
So, I do consider myself self-taught, but that isn’t 100% true. I did have lessons with private tutors (though for only a single session and three sessions, respectively), and I did take a semester of Chinese lessons at Shenzhen university on my way out. I saw the first tutor because she was pretty, but she was a terrible teacher. The second was because I was prepping for the HSK 6 and wanted some targeted help on my writing. She bluntly told me I would never pass the HSK 6, so I dropped her and passed by a wide margin. I did prepare for the spoken portion by chugging a flask of erguotou.
I had finished a year of formally teaching at a international high school and while transitioning to “the next phase,” I enrolled at Shenda on a lark. After years of bumping into students studying formally and being amazed at how sucky their Chinese was, I wanted to get some first hand experience. I was placed into the highest level classes (“Business”), but dropped out after two weeks, not because it was too hard, but because it wasn’t the right learning environment. Firstly, the class was too small, the pacing too slow, 3 out of the 4 teachers had thick regional accents, and one of the teachers who also happened to be the dean constantly talked a bunch of BS about the CCP.
The “Advanced” class was a lot more lively and I got along with the teachers better. Again, I had access to a library full of textbooks, and worked heavily on those. So, the main take away was high-volume self study, working on pronunciation with some friends, and a bit of writing practice with homework.
Around that time, I “graduated” to my first literature in Chinese — a collection of short stories by 三毛. After leaving Shenzhen, I spent six months on the road, couch surfing and staying in hostels. At one point I picked up a martial arts novel by 金庸, but I never got into it. I had a textbook or two with me, and I recall spending hours going through a database of short news articles on my computer while training myself on word segmentation. [Chinese is written without spaces between words].
I stopped “studying” Chinese when I began my PhD at Beijing Language and Culture University, but I was attending graduate courses taught in Chinese and working my way through textbooks written in Chinese. I was proud and defensive of my Chinese level. I joined a speech competition at the university in my first year and was shocked to not win.
I had basically hit the pinnacle of what I could achieve in Shenzhen, and I was expecting Beijing to magically infuse me with a flawless accent. As I poured myself into written, academic Chinese, my spoken ability actually declined significantly. It probably didn’t help that my social circle in Beijing was mostly anglophone.
I started reading literature again, alternating between original works in Chinese and translations of world literature, including Norwegian Wood, Love in a Time of Cholera, Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary, 《三体》（全集），《复眼人》、《活着》、《酒国》、and some book about a code breaker whose name I cannot recall.
I am extremely fortunate to have been the 大师兄 at my research group and had a classmate who helped me edit a few conference papers. Though in the end, when it came to writing the beast of my dissertation, some sections got native speaker edits, but most of it was entirely on my own. The defense committee made noises about it not being perfectly written, but there wasn’t exactly anything I could do about that.
So, what’s next for my Chinese? I don’t have any interest in performing and 相声, singing competitions, or dating shows (though in my younger days, I may have fancied the attention). I would like to continue expanding my vocabulary, especially along the literary lines. The highest possible achievement I can envision would probably be to publish some poems or 随笔 (informal essays) in Chinese.