:roflmao: :roflmao: :roflmao:
O—kay then. Whatever you say.
(Not sure I’m going to be able to take anything said by this poster too seriously now. )
Intermediate speakers to very near-native in 12 months!!!
I want this program. I’ll pay ANY amount of money to do it! This is gonna save me 15 years of self study! I WANT it!
I know things are supposed to have changed to an astonishing degree since I lived in China; but to have changed that much – I just can’t believe it. Frustration and China go together like zhong and guo.
I flew into Taiwan after a year of self-study, and was immersed here “from the get-go”, as you say. I arrived here with little understanding of my surroundings, and didn’t have any trouble finding the immersion experience. Most people I encountered either couldn’t or didn’t want to speak English, and I learned very rapidly. 
Just sharing my own experience here.[/quote]
We had about the same experience then, which I am disappointed to say doesn’t seem to be the common experience.
I admit, I’m just a beginner at Chinese, but my English is fairly good and I’m baffled by the above statement. Much as Middlebury sounds like a great place to live, I don’t see how it is possible to be more immersed in Chinese in Middlebury, Vermont (with fewer than 2% asians) than in Taiwan (with 99.9% native Chinese speakers).
Sure, you can speak Chinese with your classmates, but once you leave the classroom you’re back in white, English-speaking America. Or did you not leave the classroom?[/quote]
Middlebury has a fairly unique immersion setup. When I was there as a first-year Chinese student I made, in 2 months, the equivalent of 2 years’ university study progress and I thought I was pretty good until I learned I was their average student! Their site has an explanation of their immersion setup:
middlebury.edu/academics/ls/
For levels 1 & 2 Chinese it is the best. Princeton’s program came close for level 2, but Zhou Zhiping (the Princeton Chinese dept chair) told me they just couldn’t make it work for level 1 like it did for him when he was at Middlebury so he scrapped it.
What they achieve in Middlebury in 8 1/2 weeks of class is about the same as what ICLP can do in 9 1/2 in Taiwan, for levels 3/4. PiB can do that in 7 1/2 weeks of class. (this taking out all the holidays from the calendar. There’s very few holidays in the summer).
I’m confused as to what you mean by immersion, having lived here for seven years.
I consider myself ‘functionally fluent’, by which I mean that that I can do whatever I need/want in Chinese; watch films, read newspapers (slowly…), fill in forms, visit the doctor, talk to my friends. But for me, that’s the ‘problem’; I have little motivation to study, these days. I don’t really want to be a translator or read Tang poetry, so I get lazy. Sometimes I go through spurts of interest, but I’m more likely to work on my other languages than Chinese, these days.
With Chinese, I find the more you learn, the more you realise you are not much good at it.
btw, seven years is not a long time. It took fourteen or fifteen years to reach competency in my native language, and I’m still refining that.[/quote]
I might have conflated posters earlier, since there are 8 people or so I’m responding to. Sorry about that.
By immersion I mean that the more exposure one has to Chinese, the more immersed one is in it. Schools have consistently found that a higher % of one’s time using a foreign language leads to a faster rate of learning. ICLP’s records have as a curious complaint from every year of students, that their first term there experiences a monsoon of homework, long hard days, but that later terms are much lighter. I chalk that up to the environment - my experience was much like Dragonbones, immersed from the get-go - but for various reasons the average student falls in this sort of no-Chinese trap while in Taiwan. (L2 students in China fare vastly better here. My L2 roommate, got more respect by acting like a jackass to service people, a princeton undergrad for ffs grow up, than a very gentlemanly ICLP student here does trying to order with L2.) The more Chinese you speak, the better you learn, but moreover it’s the conjunction of class + out of class language that makes the real difference.
If you fly in for year in Taiwan, the average student’s immersion just won’t be what it’s like in China.
I don’t find it creepy or ideological after all, China is creepy and ideological in different ways. But then so is Taiwan. Didn’t Chen Shui-bian just recently say that if the Waishengren like the mainland so much, they should just swim over there and live? Why are the Chinese schools subsidized by Taiwan so little, while schools in Japan and China fare much better? There’s politics everywhere. IIRC, ICLP almost got shut down in 1997 because anti-China politicians felt no need for Chinese schools, since that’s for China, and tried to cut all the funding to all the Chinese schools.
If Chinese people are proud of their language and heritage, that’s a good thing - especially if it helps me. There’s nothing wrong with that Chinese people still feel a strong connection to their culture and language. You talk about how Chinese culture has vanished like it’s a good thing - but when you learn a language, shouldn’t you also learn the culture? I happen to disagree that the Chinese culture has just gone up in smoke. That’s ideological. The Taiwanese people who’ve never been to the mainland, or only visited to find it economically backwards, will attest that the two are nothing alike, much like how many HK people do (i.e. they go to Shenzhen and get harassed by beggars, then say WE ARE NOT THE BAD CHINESE!!!). But I have also known a number of Taiwanese who have gone to live there to do business for 5-10 years, who in their experience say “Taiwan and Chinese culture have really no differences.”
Coming from the mainland to Taiwan, the main differences I notice are the politics is much different, the women are less liberated, and most everything is shinier and nicer than in China. But I can’t say that the Chinese culture has just vanished. It’s still there, under the surface, behind the veil of all that politics.
I know things are supposed to have changed to an astonishing degree since I lived in China; but to have changed that much – I just can’t believe it. Frustration and China go together like zhong and guo.[/quote]
I was referring to frustration with the language environment.
:roflmao: :roflmao: :roflmao:
O—kay then. Whatever you say.
(Not sure I’m going to be able to take anything said by this poster too seriously now. )[/quote]
If you want to discuss this childishly, nobody is making you post on this thread. It sounds like you don’t have any evidence and are just wasting your time now. For the record, I was thinking more of starting at after 3 years college Chinese (an intermediate level, but I suppose it could qualify as advanced too). This much has been widely reported.
The federal government itself uses a two year program at FSI to go from scratch to near-native, but will place its people in other programs if they quality.
[quote=“jacktorrence”]Intermediate speakers to very near-native in 12 months!!!
I want this program. I’ll pay ANY amount of money to do it! This is gonna save me 15 years of self study! I want it![/quote]
Your 15 years of self-study has more or less been found accurate by linguists, (Betty Lou Weaver in particular), but so has the 12 months figure has by other linguists (i.e. Boris Shehktman for Russian, Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese). The Kubler (Williams college) article I’d read indicated why; it placed a day in these certain serious intensive programs as effective in a range from 2-3 weeks (intermediate) or 3 months (high advanced) of self-study just living in these areas working in a Chinese job, personal factors playing a great role here. Linguists and geniuses tend to get more out of living abroad self-studying. 15 years is 180 months, if we take 1 month = 1 day (conservative), that’s 180 days of program study needed, while 12 months in these programs has approximately 200 days of study. This is to reach the ACTFL SD level of proficiency.
Since you sound so willing, these programs in general are pretty reasonably priced (curiously PiB says its 5th year students test near-native, and 1 year = 8 weeks). These programs beat working on it yourself.
It doesn’t mean that more language training can’t help. The FSI has a “beyond 3” program (Defense institute level 3) which takes students from the near native SD level to new heights. (because let’s face it: there is a lot of linguistic knowledge out there. Your average conference level german interpreter most likely can’t translate the Critique of Pure Reason into English without a dictionary.)
:roflmao: :roflmao: :roflmao:
O—kay then. Whatever you say.
(Not sure I’m going to be able to take anything said by this poster too seriously now. )[/quote]
If you want to discuss this childishly, nobody is making you post on this thread. It sounds like you don’t have any evidence and are just wasting your time now. For the record, I was thinking more of starting at after 3 years college Chinese (an intermediate level, but I suppose it could qualify as advanced too). This much has been widely reported.
The federal government itself uses a two year program at FSI to go from scratch to near-native, but will place its people in other programs if they quality.[/quote]
You’re stuck talking about “years of college study” and “second-year” and all that. Has nothing to do with being “near-native”.
Three years of college Chinese is not “advanced”, except in the college catalogue. A degree in Chinese qualifies you to start getting moving learning the language.
The point is that if you really believe that these programs are making people “near-native”, there’s no point arguing with you, because your standards are very low for what “near-native” really is.
Don’t worry, it’s normal. Just about everyone goes through that period of believing their Chinese is really, really good, even “near-native”. Then, eventually, they discover that no, it really isn’t.
I know precisely ONE non-native speaker of Chinese whose Chinese I would truly describe as “near-native”. And he learned all his Chinese in Canada.
Snooker, on all levels what you are saying is just not possible. Let’s look at just the vocabulary you must gain in a one-year intermediate-to-native course.
An intermediate student may know 2-4000 words. Let’s be generous and say 4000. A near native would have to know at least 15,000. So that’s at least a 10,000 vocab jump in a year. Over 30 new words a day to master (not just passively retain), which means knowing how to use them in a wide variety of contexts and knowing the subtle differences between synonyms.
This is flat out impossible.
:roflmao: :roflmao: :roflmao:
O—kay then. Whatever you say.
(Not sure I’m going to be able to take anything said by this poster too seriously now. )[/quote]
If you want to discuss this childishly, nobody is making you post on this thread. It sounds like you don’t have any evidence and are just wasting your time now. For the record, I was thinking more of starting at after 3 years college Chinese (an intermediate level, but I suppose it could qualify as advanced too). This much has been widely reported.
The federal government itself uses a two year program at FSI to go from scratch to near-native, but will place its people in other programs if they quality.[/quote]
You’re stuck talking about “years of college study” and “second-year” and all that. Has nothing to do with being “near-native”.
Three years of college Chinese is not “advanced”, except in the college catalogue. A degree in Chinese qualifies you to start getting moving learning the language.
The point is that if you really believe that these programs are making people “near-native”, there’s no point arguing with you, because your standards are very low for what “near-native” really is.
Don’t worry, it’s normal. Just about everyone goes through that period of believing their Chinese is really, really good, even “near-native”. Then, eventually, they discover that no, it really isn’t.
I know precisely ONE non-native speaker of Chinese whose Chinese I would truly describe as “near-native”. And he learned all his Chinese in Canada. [/quote]
You are a bit of a pessimist there. The repeatedly cited standard was the ACTFL (what US colleges use) and the FLI (what the Foreign Service uses) pin down as the “SD” (Superior-Distinguished) level, which is what is generally called near-native. I’ve read repeated accounts by linguists whose expertise is to study and evaluate language training at this level. They all indicate that certain highly focused training programs can and do get people to the SD level in the time period I discussed earlier. How do they know this? They tested it, scientifically, by working with the US Foreign Service and various language programs for Chinese, Russian, and the other tough languages. I don’t see how your criteria are at all scientific, not like the ACTFL/FLI tests are; you say you only know one person you’d “truly describe” as near native. How could you possibly, as a non-native, make that assessment? ACTFL tests for beginners levels take 20 minutes, much less the exhaustive battery to see whether someone is merely fluent, or near-native, the difference between understanding Stephen King and engineering related contracts.
Before getting myself into all this, I did my research, I read all those scholarly articles and reports by experts in the field. I’m not going on my hunches.
[quote=“Muzha Man”]Snooker, on all levels what you are saying is just not possible. Let’s look at just the vocabulary you must gain in a one-year intermediate-to-native course.
An intermediate student may know 2-4000 words. Let’s be generous and say 4000. A near native would have to know at least 15,000. So that’s at least a 10,000 vocab jump in a year. Over 30 new words a day to master (not just passively retain), which means knowing how to use them in a wide variety of contexts and knowing the subtle differences between synonyms.
This is flat out impossible.[/quote]
To be more specific, I said 12 months of training, which in some usages differs from how “year” is used in relation to schools (what with the long breaks and such). Also, the usage of near-native is going to be vague here, it’s always been vague, but I’ve been meaning the SD level, which is typically considered the level for near-native speakers.
I personally don’t see how learning at the rate needed to reach SD is flat out impossible, since all these people who’ve researched it indicate it is (and I personally don’t distrust them, I think they’re quite credible). Perhaps you’ve seen something that suggests it takes much much longer to reach that level? Not just personal experience, I mean people who have come in and found this very hard limitation through testing & research. If you’ve read anything like this, I won’t doubt that you have, but the important thing is that the impossibility was verified, and that it’s relevant to those schools like IUP, ACC, FSI etc. (hopefully in a place where I can go and look at it)
This is not as strange as one might think. If you live in Toronto or Vancouver, you can practically live your entire life immersed in Chinese (Mandarin or Cantonese) if you are motivated to do so. There are gov’t brochures printed in Chinese, locally produced Chinese TV and radio, many many Chinese TV channels from TW/HK/CN, all-Chinese malls, multiple Chinatowns, endless KTV spots, countless Chinese supermarkets, Chinese speaking doctors and dentists, Chinese dollar stores, Chinese car dealerships, etc., etc.
Walking through the halls of Univ. of Toronto, I’ve seen non-native speakers/students chatting away in Mandarin. Strange at first, but then again, perhaps not so strange since I was in the Asian languages section of the library.
:roflmao: :roflmao: :roflmao:
O—kay then. Whatever you say.
(Not sure I’m going to be able to take anything said by this poster too seriously now. )[/quote]
If you want to discuss this childishly, nobody is making you post on this thread. It sounds like you don’t have any evidence and are just wasting your time now. [/quote]
Let’s keep it civil, please. Ironlady is very experienced in the area of learning Chinese, and is merely indicating how ridiculous she finds the claim that these programs can achieve this goal in 12 months. I agree with her ROFL, based on my 15 years of experience learning Chinese. Perhaps we haven’t seen the miraculous effectiveness of the programs, but more likely, we’re just demonstrating healthy skepticism and have a much more stringent definitions of ‘intermediate’ (not that high) and ‘near-native’ (demi-god status) than you or these programs do.
I’m a member of the American Chinese Teachers Association and am a qualified oral proficiency rater for that organization. My doctorate is in teaching Chinese. I’m also a trained and qualified conference interpreter and rub elbows with native speakers a lot – in a purely linguistic setting. So yes, I think I know something about what’s near-native and what’s not.
You have to understand that the evaluations given by any organization depend a lot on what the purpose of those evaluations is. The gold standard is to be evaluated by someone who has no interest whatsoever in the grade given. That cannot be said for any program “evaluating” the students finishing their programs.
I was rated with a “Professional” rating in Mandarin by the Federal Government – in 1987. Yep, after that rigorous 20-minute test. Believe me, my Mandarin was nothing like professional at that point. Standards are very low. The test for the NSA around that time was to translate a passage from “Practical Chinese Reader Book II” (yes, book II) about the PLA soldier carrying the bag of grain for the girl.
The question of where the learning environment is better for a beginner is a valid one. There are arguments for and against both places. China tends to have more up-to-date methodologies for teaching and materials – they’re up to about the 1990s in pedagogy! – while Taiwan is still mired back in the 1970s or perhaps 80s for some books/teachers. Cost of living is probably lower in China, but earning potential is better in Taiwan, especially if you have home-country debt to be paid while you’re studying (the RMB just doesn’t go far towards that even at “foreign expert” salary levels). Neither place really considers how Westerners learn and the results of 20-plus years of educational experience in Western countries on the learner, so that’s a wash. There are psychological pressures as well – for some, the more Westernized environment of Taiwan is a better place to learn because the stress of the whole ‘total cultural immersion’ is alleviated somewhat. Immersion is not the do-all and end-all of language acquisition, especially if it brings other stresses that mess up the individual’s experience.
The thing is, the classroom experience and how much Chinese you get to speak outside of class are not the only factors to be considered. Adult learners come with a lot of baggage – financial, emotional, experiential, familial. They have responsibilities that have to be considered as well. And they tend to like to have their goals considered so that a course will take the quickest pathway to achieving those goals. “Customization” is not really the hallmark of China or Taiwan. Another last consideration is visas – how easy is it to get them and how easy is it to stay in-country for a period long enough to acquire the language. And, for all that folks rail against the Taiwanese accent, at least that’s a standard accent representing a de-facto country (I’m not getting into all that here). Pick up your Chinese with a local PRC accent and while you may be seen as very “authentic” (assuming you become dead-on “near-native” after spending a looong time there) you won’t get any farther in a language-related career or a job that uses Chinese language than a native of that area would without standardizing his or her Mandarin.
But talking about near-natives just doesn’t make sense if you’re talking about the Chinese teaching market these days. That’s another reason why there are six new beginning-level books for each advanced level book – if ‘newspaper level’ is deemed advanced – and there is very little organized instruction going on at the really high levels, other than courses that adhere to traditional ways of thinking (time for Classical Chinese now, etc. etc., instead of figuring out what this very low number of advanced students really needs to do.)
Then it sounds like you have a problem with how the proficiency levels for these tests are set up. I made it pretty clear that when I said ‘near native’ I was referring to a very specific level of proficiency which has, by many, been called ‘near native’. You should know by now exactly what I was talking about. I personally have no interest in arguing over what the term “near native” means, it’s a term which like any other and is just used to convey ideas. I have followed a common usage and not been misleading.
It sounds like you want to challenge common notions about what the various levels of Chinese proficiency should be called, maybe there’s been an argument about that before, but I’ve no stake in it.
This explains a lot about your beliefs about language proficiency and what it takes to get to a certain point. As a former ACTFL rater, I can tell you that you are quite mistaken about what “Distinguished” means on the ACTFL scale. It most certainly does not mean “near-native.” The “Distinguished” grade is generally accepted by both ACTFL and ILR involved people as theoretically being at the same level of ILR level 4, which is “Full Professional Proficiency” (italics mine). I say theoretically because there is very little testing done in either the ACTFL or ILR systems that is aimed at anybody above an ACTFL Superior or ILR 3.
The descriptors for both scales basically make it clear that language users at Distinguished/ILR 4 have a high level of sociolinguistic competence, but are still easily distinguished as being non-native speakers. More pertinent to ILR and the agencies that use it, I would point out that “professional proficiency” means just that: a high level of proficiency in the language needed within the user’s profession. It does not mean general proficiency or proficiency in pretty much any domain of language use, which is what most testing people have in mind when they start talking about constructs like “native-like” or “near-native.”
The ILR emphasis on “professional proficiency” is also a source of consternation for already highly proficient language users who are tested by FSI or who go through FSI programs. As an example, I know of a few people who scored solid 10s or 11s on the HSK and who I and the Chinese people who knew them considered “near-native.” One of them was arguably native-like. None of them scored above 2.5 on the FSI’s Chinese speaking test because it is a test of professional proficiency, not general proficiency. FSI assessment is now well beyond (but also backward in some ways) the Practical Chinese Reader days described by Ironlady. FSI teaching and assessment focuses on embassy talk; these folks I mentioned had never used language in that kind of environment. This talk about FSI or whatever programs getting people to the level of “near-native” is just plain wrong. Those programs teach students the Chinese they need for their jobs, and they are probably good for that. The aim is not to bring them to near-native proficiency. That would be a waste of time and money.
There are individualized programs in the FS that do aim to help FSOs go above ILR 3, but these are generally aimed at people who already went through FSI programs to get to ILR 3, and who had then spent a number of years in country using the language for their jobs. We’re talking about people who have done Chinese study in their first degrees plus a few programs in Taiwan or China plus an IUP/ICLP kind of program, then spent time at FSI, then worked as an FSO, and then finally were sent back to study more Chinese so that they might reach a level of sophistication (i.e., ILR 4 or 4+) that would be commensurate with their rising rank and supposedly increasing specialization within the FS. From Chinese 101 to ILR 4 or 4+, we’re talking about 10 to 15 years for most of these people, and that is for “full professional proficiency,” not general, native-like proficiency.
My opinion is that the difference between studying in Taiwan or the Mainland, or even in this bad ass, hardcore program or that one is basically insignificant. At any given level, and especially in the long-run for people who get really good, it is individual factors that make the difference. Wherever you do it, there is loads of sociocultural and pedagogical BS to tolerate when studying Chinese. Whether a learner’s goal is “get by” intermediate proficiency, professional proficiency or native-like proficiency, the decisive factor is his or her determination to find ways through the BS, not where he or she studies. I HAVE known people who could probably be rated as “Distinguished” or ILR4 who did it in a lot less time than 10 to 15 years. The only common factors among them was that they had a hardcore attitude about learning Chinese and they had really sharp independent learning strategies. Some of them had never attended any sort of “hardcore” program.
I would also add that the concept of “immersion” that is being thrown about in this thread seems a bit superficial. I recently interviewed about a dozen Hong Kong Putonghua teachers who learned as adults about their learning experiences. These are people who I would describe as highly successful learners. All of them had spent some amount of time studying on the mainland, but none of them really pointed to their experience there as having been crucial to their having reached the high level required by the DoE here to teach. Instead of immersion, the crucial thing for most of them was individual relationships. Pretty much all of them said that it was sustained interaction, as in at least a couple of years, with a mainland or Taiwanese speaker that made them good. In every one of these cases, these were just one to one relationships, not a large network of Putonghua speaking social contacts. Not one of these teachers had really “immersed” themselves in Taiwan or the mainland in that they had not settled and worked in either place. They just got lucky by meeting single Putonghua speakers with whom they hit it off. Hearing these experiences was a belief challenging thing for me, but as I thought about it, it was really just a small handful of unconnected relationships in Putonghua that got me to where I am now. How about you? If you consider yourself as someone who has achieved some goals in learning Chinese-goals that formal study alone won’t help you reach, do you think your success was more due to “immersion,” or more due to one or two special relationships?
That was a very interesting and informative post, Jive.
As for my “beliefs” about what near-native is, don’t you think that’s going a bit far to start talking about one’s beliefs? This isn’t religion after all. I only used near-native because not everyone knows what superior/distinguished might be about. My guess is most language students don’t know anything about it. Hence, I used the term, a vague one which I imagine means different things based on who you speak to. I still can’t think of a better, accessible term to put there, and it wouldn’t be fair to all these people who spent a good chunk of time railing against that word, to go back and change it. (or necessary, since they know what I was talking about, and I never said xxx proficiency = near native, only that when I said near native, I was referring to SD. I never attempted to define “near native”, that one still eludes the best linguists)
You raise very good points about developing connections who can speak a language with you. However, I don’t see the connection between your post and mine. If someone is coming here for a year and wants to make the most out of it, then how can a suggestion about 3-4 years be relevant outside the good advice: make connections, and keep them? (another suggestion: make native Chinese speaker friends in the US) I still believe, if you want to make the most out of a year, or even a term or summer abroad, go to China, as was the scope of my suggestion.
You spoke of my confusing use of “immersion” (as you readily guess, I am not a linguist), so I shall attempt to clarify my argument for you:
My original premise was that, in China from my experience, students in a number of serious programs (ACC, Middlebury-Hangzhou, Princeton in Beijing, and so forth) spoke more Chinese than those I know in similar programs in Taiwan (ICLP, Shida, Zhengzhi). My second premise is that, the more Chinese you speak outside of class, the more you learn. I gave lots of examples and experiences, hoping to paint a picture of what I see going on in these places. I conclude that if one’s goal is to learn Chinese smoothly as one can, then one ought to go to China.