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Mandarin: Number of hours | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| victor Tetraglot Moderator United States Joined 7319 days ago 1098 posts - 1056 votes  6 sounds Speaks: Cantonese*, English, FrenchC1, Mandarin Studies: Spanish Personal Language Map | Message 17 of 34 18 April 2005 at 5:42pm | IP Logged |
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Malcolm and I have briefly touched on this in a private conversation, as to the number of characters needed.
I think that at grade 6 level Chinese, it is sufficient to read newspapers and get most of the content. Typically, secondary school Chinese is composed of short stories/essays (ɢ, sanwen), many poems including ʫ and δ (tangshi, songci), and generally non-modern Chinese (wenyanwen) make up the rest. Many expressions and proverbs come from more "sophiscated" Chinese mentioned above. I have a school children's dictionary with approximately 4000 characters, and I think that's around the number of characters you would encounter in daily life. For reading more advanced material such as novels, I dare to guess that you would need 1000 characters or more (in addition to the 4000). What do you think Cthulhu? Edited by victor on 18 April 2005 at 5:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| aldo Triglot Groupie Thailand Joined 6597 days ago 50 posts - 52 votes Speaks: English*, French, SpanishB1 Studies: Italian, German, Dutch, Mandarin, Thai, Khmer, Malay | Message 18 of 34 05 November 2006 at 11:50pm | IP Logged |
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If you drop trying to read and write you will accelerate your learning. IN Asian languages I try to follow the same thing everyone did in their mother language: learn to speak and comprehend first and then learn to read and write after I have that pretty well mastered.
It is like pushing two carts at the same time when you try to speak, comprehend and read and write. Srop some weight and you will move faster. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| glossika Super Polyglot Pro Member China english.glossika.com Joined 6537 days ago 45 posts - 72 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English*, German, Italian, Russian, Taiwanese, Shanghainese, Tok Pisin, Malay, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Romanian, Croatian, Serbian, Icelandic, Georgian, Indonesian Studies: Czech, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Latvian, Persian, Arabic (Written) Personal Language Map | Message 19 of 34 18 February 2007 at 3:29am | IP Logged |
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I learned Mandarin in 14 months, up to about 4000 or 5000 characters (and since I don't do much reading of classics, I doubt it's any more than that today). Soon thereafter I got a job translating financial news into English, and expanded my translation skills to other areas in the following year. I also worked as an interpreter.
During that first year of study I was in a Chinese speaking environment and forced to use the language daily. In addition to that, I spent an average of 4-5 hours per day (at least Monday to Friday) studying on my own or with private tutors. I didn't want to enroll in classes because I don't like learning that way and felt it would stifle my progress. I know it was 14 months, because I took a 2-month trip to Europe right after that and upon returning got a job doing translation. Of course I continued to learn, but that was a major turning point. That equals about 60 weeks (14 x 4.3). To be conservative, let's say I did at least 4 hours per day from Monday to Friday, and did 2 hours each Sat and Sunday. Many days I did more, reading late into the night, using the dictionaries, writing out characters, etc. But for argument's sake, 60 x 24hrs/wk = 1,440 hours. Not just that, but I spent a good deal of my time outside being surrounded by the language. At least 6, if not 8 hours a day. Conservatively, that's 48 hours per week. In 60 weeks, I got 2,880 hours of passive Mandarin exposure, in addition to 1,440 hours of active studying. In 14 months, I was exposed to a total of 4,320 hours of Mandarin, conservatively, maybe even closer to 5,000. During the five years that followed I continued to learn new things mainly through exposure. But I was still learning new things on a weekly basis. I was reading a lot as well and having hours of intelligent conversations in Mandarin every week. Today, I've honed my sales and negotiating skills in the target language and I've given speeches on topics ranging from globalization, logistics, communication, foreign trade, linguistics/language, and music. I've gone on to learn other Chinese languages particularly Southern Min and Wu. I'm also interested in learning as many of the others as possible. Let me take a look at my notes to see what my progress was like. According to my notes, I had already learned how to recognize several hundred characters prior to my arrival, just as preparation. By my fifth month, I knew about 1500 and my rate increased to about 500 characters per month after that. By the 10th month, I knew close to 4000 characters. I would say that by the end of 14 months I had a working vocabulary of 10,000+ (not individual characters). A few years later from random testing I found that I knew more than 80% of vocabulary in larger dictionaries of 30-40,000 entries. During my first year of study, I bought a book in a bookstore called 諧聲字根 ISBN 957-05-1174-5 which greatly helped my ability to classify characters into sound shapes. The book lists 1650 sound characters that are used to compound with radicals, of which I consistently reviewed and learned about 800-900 useful ones (these I do not include in my character counts, which I used a separate dictionary for). These 1650 sound characters act as mnemonics to the pronunciations of thousands more Chinese characters, which eliminated my need to memorize pronunciations by rote. I remember that by my sixth month, I could still understand very little of what I heard, but I was starting to hear everything much more clearly allowing me to finally able to look things up that I only heard and wanted to learn. After the 6th month, my listening skyrocketed. But it literally took 6 months to train my ear to hear all the individual sounds and syllables. Beginning students should definitely take heed to these notes and the amount of effort required. The time period looks short, but I was working my ass off to learn the language! This was not my first foreign language so I had experience in learning languages and how I personally learn, but it still took me 6 months of immersion to start making sense of what I was hearing. Most of my frustration came from homophones/tone distinction. The fewer than 500 syllables of Mandarin need tones to distinguish meaning. I was often mixing up something somebody said with something completely different. It was a lot of trial and error as far as listening. At 8-9 months, I was moving past a threshold of basic communication into more expressive ability. By 12 months, I was gaining a lot of confidence on the subjects and amount of things I could discuss and talk about, including current events. I still had a limited vocabulary for basic knowledge things like names of plants and animals (like squirrel, oak, pine, badger, antelope, cheetah) and scientific things (like molecule, proton, helium, organic, Saturn, glucose, diabetes, light year, sphere, lava, stalactite, etc.) which I could freely talk about in English. By buying a pocket-sized Chinese edition of a DK picture book of general knowledge and science facts, I quickly overcame this lack of vocabulary. I could even whip it out during conversation to find the words I wanted to use and discuss if necessary. With practice these words became as easy to use as in English. Another thing one must do is focus a lot more on building more advanced but common verbs that are used frequently, like persevere, stimulate, discipline, an impetus, execute, integrate, evolve, cultivate, sustain, compensate, subside, evacuate, infiltrate, etc, all of which are on my lists of words I studied toward the end of my first year. These words fill out your conversations giving it more life and expressive power. The key to Chinese really lies in how much vocabulary and sayings you know. Grammar and syntax is a no brainer and most sentence structures can be accomplished within the first month. Spend lots of time on speaking and listening, because the pronunciation is probably the largest hurdle. One good habit I developed that I still use today is, repeat what the person just said like this: "what does ____ mean? -- ni ganggang shuo ____ shi sheme yisi ne" By repeating what they said, they will immediately correct you if you say it wrong, or you thought you heard something else. Then they will proceed to tell you what they mean. I also get a chance to write it down or make a mental note of it. Doing this, I acquired new words in the middle of conversation several times a day. The reoccurrence of the words during the next week or month just reinforced it. Even though my Chinese is pretty good today, I still do not hesitate one bit when I hear a word unfamiliar to me. In fact, a lot of people talking on the phone might assume you're Chinese once you reach a certain level, but if you want to make sure they know you're not Chinese, it's good to keep asking what things mean. Based on how Chinese culture is, it's not always a good idea to be assumed by others to be Chinese. As a foreigner, you get special treatment (usually beneficial). To beginners I would agree with ALDO by saying you should focus on learning how to speak the language first. Learning how to write or read what you can already say is a lot easier. My approach to Mandarin was pretty similar, but I did force myself to learn how to say a lot of what I was learning from dictionaries and word lists. It did make it harder though and you need the time commitment to make it work. Good luck. 14 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Aritaurus Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6575 days ago 197 posts - 204 votes Speaks: Cantonese, English*, Japanese, Mandarin Studies: Spanish | Message 20 of 34 23 February 2007 at 2:31pm | IP Logged |
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As a fluent Cantonese speaker, I never really had the opportunity to learn Mandarin but I became reasonably conversational after two to three years of watching tv dramas. If you add those hours and factor in the time that I have been using the language in a live scene, I probably have around five hundred or more hours. I already have decent command of Chinese characters so that helps a lot.
I'm not fluent in the language but I have a reasonable vocabulary for everyday chit chat and I can communicate with locals in Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and China no problem. At times, I may be stuck and I'll substitute the word I don't know with the Cantonese counterpart - which does not always work. I think if I was to learn the language from scratch, it would take me at least 2000 hours to get to the level I am at now. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| alfajuj Diglot Senior Member Taiwan Joined 6212 days ago 121 posts - 126 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Taiwanese, French | Message 21 of 34 03 April 2008 at 6:04am | IP Logged |
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I learned spoken Mandarin for a long time before I began to study characters in earnest. I definitely recommend this approach. Learning the characters can be viewed as a very different task which is helped by having knowlege of the spoken language.
I find it difficult to quantify the number of hours, as I learned in an informal way, but a good rule of thumb would be to expect it to take at least twice or three times as long to reach an equal level of proficiency as a European language. It is difficult to compare, really. An English speaker can pick up the basics of French phonology and be able to read and write very quickly. In Mandarin, you may have excellent speaking skills, yet still struggle to read basic texts. It's just a completely different thing. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| DavidW Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6527 days ago 318 posts - 458 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French, Italian, Persian, Malay Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Portuguese, German, Urdu | Message 23 of 34 31 July 2008 at 2:58pm | IP Logged |
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Here's something I put in another thread, but probably belongs here, about hours for "basic fluency" in Chinese:
Last year I studied Persian and Indonesian for about one hour every day. The only materials I used where recorded dialogs, namely the linguaphone Malay and Indonesian courses, TY Malay, the assimil Persian course and Persian DLI materials. For Persian I also frequently had oportunities to speak with natives. I primarily used the Professors shadowing method, learning the dailogs practically by heart. I ignored the written language, and anything not in a conversational register, although I copy out the texts of the dialogs in the courses I studied. I also had some previous knowledge of Arabic, with a vocabulary of perhaps 2500 words. I had 40 hours of one on one tutoring in Indonesia at the end of the year, over a ten day period, which is the first time I really used the language. At this point my progress in the languages was about the same. I had a vocabulary of about 2500-3000 words in each language, spoke correctly with good accent, sometimes a bit haltingly or searching for a word, and could handle conversation on most topics, given the person used fairly "standard" language (not too colloquial) I found I could comprehend well even fairly fast speech, and could read newspapers and light reading with a dictionary. I suppose this corresponds to an ILR rating of about 2/2+. Including conversational practice, I spent perhaps 350 hours on Malay/Indonesian and 400 hours on Farsi. The FSI says it takes 900 hours to get to a "minimum working proficiency" in Indonesian, and 1100 in Farsi. Not to say I reached this level, but taking the ratio of the hours I spent vs. the FSI number of hours: Indonesian: 900/350 = 2.57 Persian: 1100/400 = 2.75 Taking the average of this ratio: (2.57 + 2.75)/2 = 2.66 Given that the FSI says it takes 2200 hours to reach ILR 3, and I'll allow a 20% discount for ignoring the written language, 1760 hours, following this logic, I can reach the same level, 2/2+, in approx. 1760/2.66 = 662 hours, or roughly one year giving it two hours a day. Does this sound about right to you Mandarin learners? Indonesian is also a very "gramatically simple" language, according to Barry Farber, but I found despite lacking inflection and conjugations, the logic, patterns and constructions of the languge are not very familiar, and there is a good deal to be assimilated in order to express yourself naturally. This kind of grammer is perhaps more difficult to catergorize and interlectulise than verb endings, which can be neatly listed in a table. Personally, I found Persian to be more straightforward. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| victorhart Bilingual Tetraglot Groupie United States mandarinexperiment.o Joined 3708 days ago 66 posts - 155 votes Speaks: English*, Portuguese*, Spanish, French Studies: Mandarin | Message 24 of 34 09 November 2014 at 4:08am | IP Logged |
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As I understand it, FSI says it takes 2,200 class hours to get to ILR 3. HOWEVER,
you're always doing directed self-study for 3-4 hours per day AND your second year is in China, so the highly motivated students are probably also getting in some extra conversation and listening, at least. Calculating only the directed self-study time at 4 hours a day, but ignoring extra immersion time in China, that's an additional 2,460 hours or so. Therefore, my estimate would be, for a native English speaker to reach ILR 3 reading/writing/listening/speaking in Mandarin, at the very least 4,600 hours (which seems to be in line with glossika's post). Keep in mind that the above data is based on highly motivated polyglots who are good and experienced language learners, supposedly using best methods developed by FSI over many decades of experience. I created a thread recently on how long it really takes to learn languages. Edited by victorhart on 09 November 2014 at 4:15am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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