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Finding the courage to continue | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| dbag Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5023 days ago 605 posts - 1046 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 25 of 37 11 March 2013 at 10:11am | IP Logged | |||||
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Don't get discouraged until you have put in at least the 2200 hours that FSI estimate it takes an English speaker to learn Mandarin. To start getting worried before that would be completely unreasonable.
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| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4445 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 26 of 37 11 March 2013 at 6:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Being in Canada and studied French ("the other official language") in school I was totally disillusioned
anything positive would come out of it. Out of a class of 30 people I can guarantee you only several who went to France as summer exchange students would attain some level of conversational fluency. The rest of us would pick up words & phrases in a systematic way but totally unable to carry on a conversation at a basic level. Some years ago went to Taiwan for summer exchange. The group was mostly Chinese ex-pats from the US & Canada and the majority were brought up in an English-speaking environment with a few exceptions including myself who is bilingual. Living in N. America Mandarin is not my strong language. During my stay really made an effort to go out to local diners, shopping on my own and exchanging money at local banks with every effort to disguise myself as a local. Back to my experiences in Canada learning French I find the conventional textbook approach too boring and failed miserably. The way I'm brushing up on Mandarin is by watching pre-recorded TV programs, films & documentaries online. Anything media in the Chinese language I can get my hands on with subtitles (including China, Taiwan & Singapore) other than textbooks and audio resources geared to learning. Textbooks don't usually reflect real-life situations very well. You get into standardized greetings like: "Hello, how are you?" "I'm fine thank you and you?", "Bonjour, comment ça va?" or "你好嗎" type of thing. And always have a dictionary or online dictionary handy to look up word and phrases. A TV program evolves around a central theme and a set of characters. You find all sorts of words & phrases in different "textbook" levels all mixed in. In a real-life situation you don't really think about a word being a level 1, 2 or whatever you just say what you have to say. Edited by shk00design on 11 March 2013 at 7:04pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| caitwn Triglot Newbie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4296 days ago 7 posts - 14 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, Portuguese, German | Message 27 of 37 21 March 2013 at 3:50am | IP Logged | |||||
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Taiwan is a great place to be and the best place to learn Chinese while also earning money. There is, however, one thing that makes it a little more difficult for beginners to make fast progress.
Depending on where you are in Taiwan, people use varying amounts of Taiwanese (or even Hakka in places) in their conversation. Conversations change from Mandarin to Taiwanese and back again mid-sentence. It is not only hard to understand, but even hard to know what you should be able to understand. This can be extremely frustrating to someone with very limited listening skills. You seem to be doing very well, then suddenly you understand nothing at all. Once you gain basic skills in Mandarin, you can recognize the Taiwanese as something different and it doesn't frustrate you so much that you can't understand those parts. I lived in Taiwan for over ten years. I found that I made really fast progress in Mandarin only when I was taking regular classes. At other times, I made progress, but much more slowly. If classes are not available, get an experienced tutor who will push you. If you can arrange 10 hours per week of instruction, you will start to see really good improvement. Chinese is not a language you just "pick up". It takes a huge amount of work. But it feels great each time you make a breakthrough. Don't be discouraged. If you continue making the effort, it will pay off. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4534 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 28 of 37 21 March 2013 at 3:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
Six months is nothing though. I have had the luxury of studying German for the last six months with relatively little distractions and I am still struggling. The Foreign Services Institute, which offers intensive training for US Federal personal overseas, estimates that it takes about TWO YEARS (4000 hours) of intensive study for English speakers to reach a functional level (German is apparently four times easier to give you a sense of the relative difficulty). From what you have said you've spent about 250 hours studying Chinese so far, so you should be impressed with your progress. :) They FSI also reports that the number one complaint people make is their ability to follow conversations when multiple people are speaking, like at the dinner you attended. Edited by patrickwilken on 21 March 2013 at 3:10pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5960 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 29 of 37 21 March 2013 at 5:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
Good point. The FSI graduates basically dreaded events like evening parties having lively conversations with multiple native speakers. It was preferrable to stand up to give a speech in a roomful of native speakers. I think many people tend to think of social or casual conversation as being easier when it's usually harder for language learners. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| dbag Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5023 days ago 605 posts - 1046 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 30 of 37 22 March 2013 at 1:04am | IP Logged | |||||
Where did you get the 4000 hour figure? The figures I have seen, stated that it takes 2200 hours to become proficient in Mandarin (as stated above). Edited by dbag on 22 March 2013 at 1:11am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4534 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 31 of 37 24 March 2013 at 3:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
Funny, I was wondering where you got your 2200 hour figure too! I read the 4000 figure in a review article the FSI put out as part of the 50th anniversary. I think the number included self-study hours in addition to class hours, but I haven't got the article in front of me. I'll see if I can dig up the reference, or perhaps someone else here can provide a link. UPDATE: If you look here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Language_Learning_Dif ficulty_for_English_Speakers Their schedule calls for 25 hours of class per week with three or four hours per day of directed self-study. So the 2200 hours indicated for Chinese learning is only class hours, not self-study hours. I don't think that's obvious from the Wikibook entry, but it was from the article I read about a year ago. Edited by patrickwilken on 24 March 2013 at 4:04pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| cacue23 Triglot Groupie Canada Joined 4300 days ago 89 posts - 122 votes Speaks: Shanghainese, Mandarin*, English Studies: Cantonese | Message 32 of 37 19 April 2013 at 2:17am | IP Logged | |||||
Being a Chinese, I'd like to point out that for the current generations, there's no such thing as a "monolingual Chinese", since English is a compulsory subject in the school system, and all people are exposed to learning foreign languages (at least the languages with a roman alphabetical writing system) to some extent. For previous generations, though, there are people who don't know a word of a foreign language. When they immigrate to a country where this language is spoken, they usually stick to the Chinese community and (because of age) never get close to fluency in the language. I've known people who's been in an English-speaking country for decades and still struggle to make one coherent English sentence. The moral of the story is that immersion isn't everything (duh). Ideally, people should be exposed to the language before moving to the country, since it increases the efficiency ten-fold, and I don't think I need to tell you guys why. But since that was not the case for Ian, I guess his progress in Chinese is quite ok so far. When I moved to Canada, I was 14, exposed to English since age 3 and had formal schooling since age 8, but I still couldn't really follow a conversation for three full months. After the initial 3 months everything I learned previously were neatly sorted out in my LTM and ready for use. I knew that I had my youth and a good-ish looking background in my favour, but now, after 10 years in an English-speaking country, I still have my good and bad days - good days being that I could almost pass for a native, bad days being that I stumble to put together one grammatically correct sentence without sounding too much like I've been thinking. So yeah, really no reason to panic, yet, keep making one baby step at a time and it'll be fine. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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