Another language thread: So how good do I need to get?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Along the same “learning a new language” vein that’s been going around lately…

I’m going back to school and it turns out I have a lot of time and my classes at this point aren’t taxing me that much. I took two years of French in high school and remember a bit but am thinking of learning something else.

I’d like to learn something a bt more exotic. In the other thread a couple of people mentioned learning Mandarin. I would be very interested in learning Mandrian both because you don’t see it taught much and it’s possibility to become very useful in the future.

However the college I’m at only offers one year of it due to low demand. I’d be interested, but I’m going to guess I’m going to need more than a single year of Mandarin to ever use it effectively which is one of the goals. My brother took FIVE years of Spanish and said he still has problems just for the fact that native speakers speak so incredibly fast he can’t keep up.

Suggestions?

2

When taking a language, I found that there was an initial book-learning phase, but after that, months of practice via IM were immensely helpful. Of course, I was also meeting speakers and taking classroom lessons at the same time.

I find that even after seven years of fairly regular usage,and being able to converse easily at a day-to-day level, I still have to search for words, and my reading speed is less than a third that of English. But if I was in a total immersion situation, that would change rapidly.

On the other hand, there’s something to be said for just jumping in. Here’s my experience with a trial lesson at a school which teaches Japanese via total immersion.

If you’re taking a language for interest in languages, not because you need a specific one for some other purpose, I’d suggest taking one that has many speakers in your area with whom you can practice. Listen to radio, watch movies, read books in the language as well. Try to immerse yourself, even if you can’t totally.

3

I’d say that its going to be a long, difficult, frustrating, and ultimately useless year. The biggest problem you are going to face is the inability to look up characters in a dictionary. If, you run across a Spanish word you don’t know, you can easily look it up in a Spanish-English dictionary. If you run across a Chinese character you don’t know, you are essentially screwed. Tones also make learning the language more difficult.

If you want something useful, I’d strongly recommend a different language. If you want to study Chinese for fun, well then knock yourself out. If you do, then other activities such as banging your head against the wall, getting kicked in the crotch, and watching a 24 hour Carrot Top marathon might be up your alley.

4

This is an amusing and informative rant about learning Chinese:

http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

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I’m convinced book learning alone will never get you that far. People who majored in French in college came here and could barely communicate with people once they got here (indeed, some have still never gotten used to the ways that West African French differs from book French), and people who never took a day beyond our ten week’s training do just fine. School can be helpful, especially if you need to write, but I think it isn’t enough on it’s own to be fluent. You need intense one-on-one conversational contact and most importantly, a good reason to learn the language. Knowing a set of rules and vocab is a very different thing than being able to use those rules and vocab appropriately in conversation.

Why do you want to learn a language? To speak with people? To read newspapers? To work in an office that speaks that language? Figure out why, and then start doing those things.

The vague idea of “I’d like to know Chinese” isn’t enough unless you are one of those people who picks up languages very easily. You need to know exactly why you want to learn this and to what level (and what skills…reading? writing? speaking? listening?) are the most important. If you just say “I want to be fluent because it’s a good idea”, you are going to give up when the going gets tough. But when you say “I want to be able to speak enough to deal with day-to-day life and participate to some degree in business meetings because I would like to seek a management job in an area speaking this language” then you have something you can work with.

And work at it every single day. Talk to someone- even if it’s just amongst your fellow learners- in that language for at least an hour a day. Indeed, I find that I learn more from interacting with my fellow learners and native speakers than I do from native speakers alone. If that is not possible, spend an hour a day listening to television or radio in that language. It will be hard at first, but with time you will learn.

6

[QUOTE=treis]
This is an amusing and informative rant about learning Chinese:

[/QUOTE]
Oh sh*t! :eek:

Looking like I might go another direction… :frowning:

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[QUOTE=Cyberhwk]
Oh sh*t! :eek:

Looking like I might go another direction… :frowning:
[/QUOTE]

Yeah, just don’t think you’re going to substitue Japanese if you’re scared off of Mandarin as an asian language. Everyone I know who speaks both says it’s harder, and the writing system is definitely harder. I didn’t think this could be true before I started learning it, because hey, they have an alphabet, right? Must be easier. Yeah, except for the fact that almost every single character consists of multiple pronunciations and meanings (I know that the number of characters used in Chinese is greater, but I wonder if the multiple pronunciations were taken into account, which would have more [ie treat a different pronunciation of the same character as multiple characters in the count]), and if you don’t know the compound there’s no way of knowing how to read the characters without being told.

So if someone tells you their name, you have no way of knowing how to write it, and if you read the name of a town you’ve never heard of, you don’t necessarily know how to pronounce it.

phew, ok, rant over. Have fun with Chinese! :slight_smile:

8

[QUOTE=treis]
I’d say that its going to be a long, difficult, frustrating, and ultimately useless year. The biggest problem you are going to face is the inability to look up characters in a dictionary. If, you run across a Spanish word you don’t know, you can easily look it up in a Spanish-English dictionary. If you run across a Chinese character you don’t know, you are essentially screwed. Tones also make learning the language more difficult.
[/QUOTE]

Not so, Grasshopper. It’s fairly straightforward to look up a Chinese character, even in a paper dictionary. Y’see, a typical Chinese character is composed, building-block-style, from a couple of ‘radicals’, which number around 250 or so (depending on who’s counting).

One of these ‘radicals’ (most of the time, the topmost or leftmost one in the character) is used to index it in the dictionary. Simply count the strokes of the character (it’s easy, once you learn proper stroke order and get to handwriting the characters a lot), and look up the number of strokes under the radical, and you got it about 85% of the time (in my experience).

Okay, not so straighforward, after all. But in my experience, Mandarin is loads easier to learn to speak (not so much to write) than any other language I’ve tried learning. It’s even easier than Spanish. Mandarin has no grammatical gender, no tense, no verb conjugations, no irregular verbs, no noun case — it’s a very clean and simple language, grammatically. Tones are not that much of a challenge, if you try and if you practice off of native speakers as much as possible.

9

[QUOTE=ignis_glaciesque]
Not so, Grasshopper. It’s fairly straightforward to look up a Chinese character, even in a paper dictionary. Y’see, a typical Chinese character is composed, building-block-style, from a couple of ‘radicals’, which number around 250 or so (depending on who’s counting).

One of these ‘radicals’ (most of the time, the topmost or leftmost one in the character) is used to index it in the dictionary. Simply count the strokes of the character (it’s easy, once you learn proper stroke order and get to handwriting the characters a lot), and look up the number of strokes under the radical, and you got it about 85% of the time (in my experience).
[/quote]

Hence my use of “essentially” screwed. 250 things to learn before being able to look up something (with an 85% success rate no less) is much more complicated than it would be for a Latin alphabet based language. Besides, what exactly are you supposed to do with the 15% failure rate? For someone that is only going to take a one year non-immersion, I think my statement is pretty accurate, if a bit exaggerated.

[QUOTE=ignis_glaciesque]

Okay, not so straighforward, after all. But in my experience, Mandarin is loads easier to learn to speak (not so much to write) than any other language I’ve tried learning. It’s even easier than Spanish. Mandarin has no grammatical gender, no tense, no verb conjugations, no irregular verbs, no noun case — it’s a very clean and simple language, grammatically. Tones are not that much of a challenge, if you try and if you practice off of native speakers as much as possible.
[/QUOTE]

Tones might not be that much of a challenge for you, but I am certifiably tone deaf. I lived in Shanghai for 3 months, and I’ll be damned if I heard the tones. I’d take horrid grammar over tones any day. If I say: “go to the park want I to”, you can understand that. If I say (accidentally): “Monkey shoot park banana with hammock” you got no clue what I am saying.

I’m not saying that it’s impossible to learn Chinese, but only taking one year is setting yourself up for a big steaming cup of Fail.

10

If you’ve got a year to learn a new language, you may be better off learning something similar to a language you already speak rather than reaching for the stars and picking an exotic, unfamiliar, completely foreign language.

I see you’ve learned some French… so how about Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese? They’re all romance languages and draw upon some common elements, so you could expect to have a reasonably good command of the language by the time your year is up. Given that Mandarin has no common elements with any language you speak, it’s unlikely you’d learn more than the basics in the same amount of time.

BTW, unless you’re a native speaker and constantly immersed in the language, you will never ever ever manage to keep up with the “normal” speed of Spanish or Portuguese. Take it from me… I speak perfectly fluent Portuguese (and have since childhood), but I’d need to spend a few weeks speaking it constantly before I could even attempt to follow along when two native speakers are chatting with each other.

11

Learn Hindi. It’s exotic and the written script is way easier than Chinese. I just started this week, so we could be study buddies. :slight_smile:

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Once you figure out which language you’d like to learn and get started learning it…

[QUOTE=even sven]
And work at it every single day. Talk to someone- even if it’s just amongst your fellow learners- in that language for at least an hour a day. Indeed, I find that I learn more from interacting with my fellow learners and native speakers than I do from native speakers alone. If that is not possible, spend an hour a day listening to television or radio in that language. It will be hard at first, but with time you will learn.
[/QUOTE]
This is excellent advice. I learned more Russian from frequent chats over coffee with Russian-speaking friends and learning-like-me fellow students than I ever did from a textbook or language lab. TV and radio broadcasts are also a great idea; they are often the most understandable form of the spoken language (think “BBC English” or “American news anchor”) to all speakers of that language, though they may seem a little fast at first. With this kind of exposure, and through more colloquial conversations with fellow students and native speakers, you should get the kind of practice you need, which cannot usually be replicated in classrooms and/or through books.

Make the effort also to seek out newspapers and other publications in the language you want to learn. A well-equipped research library, such as a university library (many of which allow the public to read materials inside the library), should subscribe to a variety of publications in a number of languages. If you know recent international current events in English, for example, you should be able to find the same events in the foreign-language publication, and with a little practice, figure them out. But anything will do, really; I used to have fun practicing my Russian by reading Krokodil, the Russian-language cartoon and humour publication from the USSR. Yep, the local university’s library had a subscription.

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[QUOTE=Cyberhwk]
Oh sh*t! :eek:

Looking like I might go another direction… :frowning:
[/QUOTE]

Actually … from a buddy of mine who is studying chinese -

Ignore written chinese. You will never learn to write it. Stick to spoken chinese. You can actually get reasonably fluent in spoken chinese, at least enough to get around and you can always ask a local for directions somewhere specific like a place to eat or shop. Besides, in general if you want to visit mainland china, you will be going with a tour group and the guides are pretty fluent in english=)

14

[QUOTE=treis]
I’d say that its going to be a long, difficult, frustrating, and ultimately useless year. The biggest problem you are going to face is the inability to look up characters in a dictionary. If, you run across a Spanish word you don’t know, you can easily look it up in a Spanish-English dictionary. If you run across a Chinese character you don’t know, you are essentially screwed. Tones also make learning the language more difficult.

If you want something useful, I’d strongly recommend a different language. If you want to study Chinese for fun, well then knock yourself out. If you do, then other activities such as banging your head against the wall, getting kicked in the crotch, and watching a 24 hour Carrot Top marathon might be up your alley.
[/QUOTE]

treis – Regarding looking up characters – Not true. It takes a while to learn how to use a character dictionary, but it isn’t impossible. I had to learn classical Mandarin characters when I studied Korean, as the Koreans used a lot of them at that time in the newspaper, and we were expected to be able to read the papers. One looks up characters either by knowing the radical, which is a bit tricky, or by the number of strokes. It isn’t that hard once you get used to it.

Now, remembering the damned things if you don’t see them every day – THAT was tough, even for my Chinese friends in grad school, who always had to check over their letters home with a dictionary before sending them.

15

[QUOTE=Radegast]
Now, remembering the damned things if you don’t see them every day – THAT was tough, even for my Chinese friends in grad school, who always had to check over their letters home with a dictionary before sending them.
[/QUOTE]
It’s tough even for native Chinese speakers - not just those of Chinese origin raised in the US. From treis’s link:

16

[QUOTE=aruvqan]
Actually … from a buddy of mine who is studying chinese -

Ignore written chinese. You will never learn to write it. Stick to spoken chinese. You can actually get reasonably fluent in spoken chinese, at least enough to get around and you can always ask a local for directions somewhere specific like a place to eat or shop. Besides, in general if you want to visit mainland china, you will be going with a tour group and the guides are pretty fluent in english=)
[/QUOTE]
I would say the exact opposite. Listen, if you want to become really fluent in Chinese, IMHO you have to learn the characters. Chinese is an extremely logical language, and often one can guess the meaning of two seperate characters put together to make a new word. I’ve never met a foreigner studying Chinese as a second language that could do that from only learning how to speak.

Now, if you were to spend one year only on written chinese or verbal Chinese, I’d say certainly go for the verbal. You’ll probably be able to speak on daily survival conversation at a reasonable level. I doubt if you’ll ever get much better than that though.

If you spend that year memorizing characters, and you get up to 1,000 or 1,500, you’ll still be functionally illiterate.

When I took chinese at university, the professorial guidance was 2 years of university level Chinese, then a year in Taiwan (this was a long time ago). At the end of the 3 years, the reading and writing kinda matched and there was a decent level of fluency that went beyond daily survival stuff.

As to looking up characters, it’s a pain in the ass but I was doing it within 1 month of starting chinese. During university, I probably spent 1 or 2 hours a day only looking up characters, and it certainly takes away from time better spent studying the language. Of course, now in the modern age, you could just write the character on a PDA and programs will automatically look it up, give the meanings and pronunciations, combinations, etc. Takes about the same time as looking up a word in an English dictionary, so this point is moot.

Now in the PC age, you don’t have people checking over their letters home to see if the correct characters were used. Of course, nowadays you’re getting more and more people that rely on the PC to write instead of being able to handwrite 10 thousand characters from memory.

As for Japanese and Chinese. My Japanese was never that good but I did study Japanese pretty seriously for 1+ years after becoming fluent in Chinese. Japanese characters are MUCH easier. Seriously. Sure there’s issues around on and kun readings, but lemme tell you trying to figure out an obscure pronunciation of a common character is a lot easier than trying to figure out an obscure character.