I have just started learning mandarin. After about 20 oral lessons i have reached the level where I can ask for/order certain things and describe what I am doing or what I did yesterday. I would like to hear from people who have walked this road before and become proficient. How long time did take you do be abloe to discuss more abstract topics? Any advice would highly appreciated!
I took 3 and a half years or 27 hours in college, have a minor in Chinese, and I live with a Mandarin speaker and I’m not proficient at all. I started off being pretty good and I did better then most the non-chinese speakers (there were a lot of Cantonese and Taiwanese speakers in the class so they did better than everyone for obvious reasons). But most people went to China for a semester or year while I didn’t have the money or time. When they came back the were incredably more fluent. The problem was I never used it all in any kind of non-academic way besides listening to my girlfriends conversations with her parents. I never built the actual connections with the language in a real setting. I forget more and more of it every day.
Moral: Go to China or Taiwan! or you’ll never really learn it. Hard work is no substitute for a real setting.
Thanks for your reply!
Yes, eventually I intend to go to either China or Taiwan. I just want to learn some essentials first. Say I learn the basics before I go, how long do you think it will take me to learn it well enough to have discussions and so on?
I found Manderin grammar (which I assume is similar in other dialects) to be ridiculously simple. The rules can be learned in a few days, and the rest is memorizing nouns and adjectives. And those pesky measuring words.
Learning to read and write on the other hand, was enourmously difficult. I’ve forgotten all the characters I learned except those for my assigned Manderin name.
I studied Chinese for two and half years, and when I stepped off the plane, I didn’t understand a damn thing. For a month, I didn’t understand a damn thing. Eight months later, I was comfortable in chatting with folks about most things, although abstractions were still difficult.
I made very little progress in learning to read. I have a poor visual memory.
oh oh oh, I can answer this one. I takes a lot of time and effort. For me, Mandarin was my first foreign language and I didn’t know how to study languages. I spent I dunno something like 8 hours a day for two years straight at University. Then I went to Taiwan for a year. When I got off the plane, it was really hard. Within a few months pretty comfortable with basic conversation and it was total emersion.
Did two more years at University in the US to complete the major, then went and travelled around the backwoods of China for a couple years – where people speak Mandarin as a second language if at all.
It really depends. You want some basics, you probably do alright if in country for 6-12 months (and work at it every day). You want a decent level, the vast majority of people need to learn characters – and those are just a bitch to memorize. You want to get to business level, then you’ve really got to put in the classroom work and the character work. Get beyond that you’ve got to go after the classics - and that’s a helluva commitment.
Study in the US, and you don’t get the daily immersion. Study in China or Taiwan, and you don’t get a good grounding in what the language really means (try having someone with English as a second language teach you the exact meaning of a word or it’s true equivalent meaning in English). Doing both is pretty tough. My UC Davis professor, who first learned courtesy of the US Army during korea and went on to a PhD at Harvard, always said that his experienced “proved” two years of university, one year in a Chinese environment, made for decent conversation. Going to the Chinese environment with only 1 year at University wasn’t a strong enough base. I have to say his observations were generally spot on.
anyhoo, I’m definately at business level. But I had 4 years university in the US, a year in between in Taiwan. Spent a couple years more or less on my own in the backwoods of China, about 15 years total in Taiwan, HK and China, plus my wife is Shanghaiese.
Anyhoo, you really have to work at it. Some people have had pretty decent success with specialization. One buddy of mine married a Taiwanese gal and lived there for about 6 months. He knew he couldn’t get fluent. What he did was only learn restaurant Chinese. He knew the names of 100 dishes, x number of veggies, preparation styles, the usual waiter pleasantries, how to get the check, another beer, and all that jazz. They loved to eat at Chinese restaurants, and he was “fluent” for restaurants. So, if you’ve got something you really like, you might be able to specialize and be really competent in a narrow area.
jia you!
Wow, that brought a smile to my face… I haven’t heard that in years! I’ve got to take a vacation one of these days…
Hi Chinaguy,
Having spent some time in HK and beeing married to woman from Shanghai do you speak any Cantonese? Haviong spent some time in Taiwan, what about Taiwanese?
I can swear quite fluently in multiple dialects. However, I made the concious decision to focus only on Mandarin. The trouble with a dialect is you travel 100 miles and what you learned no longer works.
Cantonese I understand a bit. Probably speak 1-200 words or so. Enough for the real basics. However, in HK now most younger people can understand and speak basic Mandarin.
Shanghaiese I understand quite a bit and speak some. Again, I’ve never studied it but hear it at home every day.
I lived in China for 2 years and managed to pick up pretty good mandarin. I was in my teens at the time, though, and that resulted in me being able to soak the language up like a sponge. I continued taking it through highschool and for one year in university once I got back to Canada. Oddly enough (or maybe not) I learned exactally zero from my formal education here in canada.
After 5 years of not being around anyone that has been willing to speak mandarin with me I’ve been reduced to the above mentioned “restaurant” mandarin. I too need to get back to China and re-learn.
Anyway, the moral of my story here is that total immersion is by far the best way to go (in my experience.)
cheers,
-n