Learn The High-Frequency Patterns That Make Chinese Tick
As Tim Ferriss argues in The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life:
"Language is infinitely expansive (much like cooking) and therefore horribly overwhelming if unfiltered.
... what you study is more important than how you study.
Students are subordinate to materials, much like novice cooks are subordinate to recipes. If you select the wrong material, the wrong textbook, the wrong group of words, it doesn't matter how much (or how well) you study. It doesn't matter how good your teacher is. One must find the highest-frequency materials.
Material beats method."
One of the best linguistic filters is Ferriss' Deconstruction Dozen, twelve carefully selected sentences that reveal the "soul" of a language. Think of it as the "80/20 Rule" (a.k.a. "Pareto Principle") applied to grammar.
Here are but a few of the essential patterns and grammatical rules that you will uncover in the Chinese Deconstruction Dozen:
You'll immediately notice that Chinese is a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) language just like English (with some important exceptions).
You'll see that Chinese verbs don't change form ("conjugate") based on who is doing the action or when it occurs.
You'll see that time adverbs usually come first in Chinese (or right after the subject pronoun), not at the end of a sentence as in English.
You'll discover that nouns stay the same whether acting as direct or indirect objects, and don't have feminine or masculine forms.
Get the most out of the PDF 1-pager
My version of Ferriss' Deconstruction Dozen has a few modifications to be aware of:
I add literal translations so you get a better sense of how Chinese equivalents are constructed.
I include hànyǔ pīnyīn (Romanized Mandarin), traditional characters (繁體字), and simplified characters (简体字).
I also include IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) readings so you can see exactly how the Mandarin is pronounced.