I’m currently studying Chinese, and next year planning on going to Taiwan.
What I’m wondering is exactly what the title says, how much can I expect my Mandarin to improve during a year in Taiwan?
I just did half a mock tes for the TOCFL Level 2, and I found it pretty easy. There were some downloading issues with Level 3, so I haven’t tried that yet. But anyway, that means that right now, my Chinese is pretty basic. What I’m hoping is though, that, I will attain a level of equal to TOCFL Level 3 or 4 by the time I go to Taiwan, in August. I study Chinese, at an average, maybe 10 hours a week. I spend that time learning characters, watching TV-series (subtitled, of course), reading a bit of children’s books, etc.
I’m mainly curious because it might happen that I want to continue studying there, for a degree. My guess for time required studying Chinese there first to do that is about two years. But that’s just based on that I have a friend in Beijing wanting to study for a degree there next year, after first having studied Chinese there for two years. And I haven’t really asked her whether she thinks it’ll be tough or not. To me, at least, it sounds pretty tough studying for a degree in a language like Chinese.
This is just pure playing with the thought right now. Clearly, it will depend a lot on how I like it there, how my Chinese improves, etc. But, do you guys think it’s possible to do something like this?
Thanks a lot!
Edit: It seems I posted this thread twice, by mistake. Please delete the other one as I think I’ve made all of my edits in this one. Sorry!
“Anything is possible if you put your mind to it.”
A real life example is this guy, which may inspire you. He learned enough Japanese in 18 months to read technical material and have job interviews in Japanese, so that he landed a job as a software engineer at a large Japanese company in Tokyo.
He says the basic elements for his success were:
The belief that he could become fluent in Japanese.
Constantly doing fun stuff in Japanese.
He did this outside of Japan, in a non-Japanese environment in Utah, USA. So Sko, the probability of your Mandarin improving while in a Chinese-speaking country increases greatly as long as you consistently apply yourself (and we’ve all heard/know of people who have lived several years in a country and can just barely ‘get by’ in the local language).
Realistically though, you should have limited expectations. It usually takes 2-3 years of serious study in China or Taiwan to reach a level where you can hold a conversation with reasonable fluency and read a newspaper. Some people can achieve a little more; many achieve less. After 2-3 years of study you can stop studying full time and start functioning in society. Important factors will be whether you have learned another language before, how you study, and how well you adjust to Taiwan. I would say that the most important factor is whether you enroll in classes when you first arrive. People who delay starting classes usually do not learn so much because they are busy with other things and soon learn how to live in Taiwan without speaking too much Mandarin (which is surprisingly easy to do). There are a lot of stories of frustration with slow progress on these boards. Read them and come back with your questions. Good luck! You will probably learn a lot in one year but realize you have much further to go.
I’ll definitely be taking classes as soon as I get there. I have read about people going here and to China to teach English to support themselves while learning Mandarin, and how most of them fail pretty bad, beacause of lack of energy and time.
Does it really take 2-3 years? That really sounds like a lot. So far I’ve been progressing pretty steadily since I started studying a lot more, I’m not sure I really see what would take so much time. But what do I know?
[quote=“Steve4nLanguage”]“Anything is possible if you put your mind to it.”
A real life example is this guy, which may inspire you. He learned enough Japanese in 18 months to read technical material and have job interviews in Japanese, so that he landed a job as a software engineer at a large Japanese company in Tokyo.
He says the basic elements for his success were:
The belief that he could become fluent in Japanese.
Constantly doing fun stuff in Japanese.
He did this outside of Japan, in a non-Japanese environment in Utah, USA. So Sko, the probability of your Mandarin improving while in a Chinese-speaking country increases greatly as long as you consistently apply yourself (and we’ve all heard/know of people who have lived several years in a country and can just barely ‘get by’ in the local language).
Good luck![/quote]
That really is amazing! I try to do things similar to what he did but he must have been a lot more dedicated than I am!
I’ll definitely be taking classes as soon as I get there. I have read about people going here and to China to teach English to support themselves while learning Mandarin, and how most of them fail pretty bad, beacause of lack of energy and time.
Does it really take 2-3 years? That really sounds like a lot. So far I’ve been progressing pretty steadily since I started studying a lot more, I’m not sure I really see what would take so much time. But what do I know?
Mandarin is notoriously difficult to learn. The language is tonal, and fluency requires mastering thousands of characters. Mandarin competence takes 2,200 class hours, with half of that time spent in a country where it’s spoken, according to the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service Institute, whereas Spanish can be learned in 600 to 750 class hours.
So if you take classes for ten hours a week for 48 weeks per year (the standard class schedule at Taiwan’s language programs), you will have 480 hours. In two years, 960. So you will need a bit more than two years to reach the State Department’s estimate for in-country hours.
I have been in Taiwan for a year studying full-time, not knowing any Mandarin when coming here, and I am functional but far from being fluent (my tones are still problematic). I can understand what most people say and can read pretty much all I need to read to function in society, however the news are still quite difficult. I have to concentrate really hard, and I manage to understand if I play them often and look up some words.
You could do much better than me though because I admit I could have been more effective and I am not so good at socializing, but this is me.
I have talked to another student who was quite serious and thoughtful and he said that he planned to stay here 2 years to get fluency. I saw him often and I can tell that he was not missing a single opportunity to practice his speaking. So I think 2 years is reasonable even for serious learners to achieve high-level fluency.
I have been in Taiwan for a year studying full-time, not knowing any Mandarin when coming here, and I am functional but far from being fluent (my tones are still problematic). I can understand what most people say and can read pretty much all I need to read to function in society, however the news are still quite difficult. I have to concentrate really hard, and I manage to understand if I play them often and look up some words.
You could do much better than me though because I have wasted a lot of time and I am not so good at socializing with Taiwanese people, but this is just me.
I have talked to another student who was quite serious and thoughtful and he said that he planned to stay here 2 years to get fluency. I saw him often and I can tell that he was not missing a single opportunity to practice his speaking. So I think 2 years is reasonable even for serious learners to achieve high-level fluency.[/quote]
I have this fear that I won’t really socialize enough either. It has never been my strong side. I will study hard, of that I’m sure, but unfortunately that’s not enough when it comes to languages.
[quote=“Feiren”]Mandarin is notoriously difficult to learn. The language is tonal, and fluency requires mastering thousands of characters. Mandarin competence takes 2,200 class hours, with half of that time spent in a country where it’s spoken, according to the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service Institute, whereas Spanish can be learned in 600 to 750 class hours.
So if you take classes for ten hours a week for 48 weeks per year (the standard class schedule at Taiwan’s language programs), you will have 480 hours. In two years, 960. So you will need a bit more than two years to reach the State Department’s estimate for in-country hours.[/quote]
Ok, yea, I suppose I need to realize that it’s harder than I’ve been expecting.
However, I’m not sure that means I wouldn’t be able to study for a degree there after 2 years. The level of comprehension is usually much further ahead the one of speaking and writing. Writing would probably become a problem during examinations, that would be another issue, I suppose. Albeit a smaller one, I feel.
Mandarin is not taught in a brain-friendly way. Full stop. That’s the issue.
People like the guy who learned Japanese in a year are unusual. They are outliers on the scale of language learning. The average person – most people – the vast majority of human beings – cannot do that (not to mention, do they have the time and resources to do it). Bringing up people like that only makes the majority of normal people feel stupid, which they are most decidedly not when it comes to language acquisition. After all, every one of them has a native language already.
If you had comprehensible-input based instruction in an immersion environment like Taiwan, I believe you could get someone pretty damn fluent in a year. Another year to really press on expanding vocabulary, and you’d have a good model of language acquisition + learning that effectively gave people broad competence in the language. Unfortunately, it’s done backwards in Taiwan – lots of vocabulary first, and little repetition or attention to making the language that is being considered automatic. That’s why it doesn’t work for the broad mass of people (compare the numbers starting a first-year Chinese course with the numbers who become proficient, never mind really professionally fluent).
[quote=“ironlady”]Mandarin is not taught in a brain-friendly way. Full stop. That’s the issue.
People like the guy who learned Japanese in a year are unusual. They are outliers on the scale of language learning. The average person – most people – the vast majority of human beings – cannot do that (not to mention, do they have the time and resources to do it). Bringing up people like that only makes the majority of normal people feel stupid, which they are most decidedly not when it comes to language acquisition. After all, every one of them has a native language already.
If you had comprehensible-input based instruction in an immersion environment like Taiwan, I believe you could get someone pretty damn fluent in a year. Another year to really press on expanding vocabulary, and you’d have a good model of language acquisition + learning that effectively gave people broad competence in the language. Unfortunately, it’s done backwards in Taiwan – lots of vocabulary first, and little repetition or attention to making the language that is being considered automatic. That’s why it doesn’t work for the broad mass of people (compare the numbers starting a first-year Chinese course with the numbers who become proficient, never mind really professionally fluent).[/quote]
Maybe I can find input material myself when I’m there? I mean, being in Taiwan, I can’t imagine it being hard to find material on your own. I would do this in addition to studying at a university, of course, so that I have an excuse to be there at all.
Ironlady is the resident expert here. Let me give you my story, though there are no guarantees your learning process will be anything like mine.
I studied Chinese for four years in college, including a 3-month stay in Taiwan to take classes at the ICLP. When I graduated, I was perfectly capable of holding conversations, reading not-too-complicated books (with a dictionary!), and writing basic essays that were comprehensible but far from inspiring. I’ve been in Taiwan 5 years, and the thing that really made my Chinese shoot up to a new level was working as a translator and realizing how little I knew.
Translation really helped me because it allowed me to internalize ‘natural’ Chinese constructions, which I think is a big barrier for foreign language learners in general. What I mean is that, as an English speaker, you may look for equivalent phrases in Chinese when the closest you can find is just an approximation. As a random and not-so-great example, I rarely hear Taiwanese people say “閉嘴” (which would mean “shut up”, a phrase commonly used in English), instead saying something like “吵死了” (lit: noisy to death). Another one is “impressive,” commonly used in English, but in comparison you rarely hear native speakers say “那部電影的特效真令人印象深刻”.
So it depends on what level of Chinese you want. I was conversational after a four years of not particularly studious university classes (I’m sure it could be done in much less time), but the Chinese I spoke and wrote was immediately recognizable as a foreign guy speaking Chinese. If you want to sound like a local, it will take a lot longer.
Translation helps because it’s massive, motivated (aka “paid”!) reading input. All language comes from input that has been comprehended, and by definition, translation is that. I once took a year off from interpreting out of frustration with my slow progress, and spent the year translating only. When I came back to interpreting, to my surprise, I was more fluent than before.
On the other hand, I find that the LESS I concentrate on giving more and more words, the MORE my students are able to express in Chinese and the more fluent they are. I teach beginners almost exclusively, to be fair. But I’ve got a student now who’s had 5 hours of Mandarin and plans to go to Taiwan in the near future. By the time that happens (2 months from now) he will really be conversational. He’s doing 3 hours a week now, so that would be 10 weeks or 30 hours, assuming we don’t miss any lessons for other reasons. It really depends on what the focus of your class time or study is. Only a handful of people is going to “get it” by learning sentence patterns and vocabulary, then decoding lesson texts a few times, then going on to stuff more into their heads.
IMO it has much more to do with “What can you DO with what you’ve learned/covered/acquired” than “How much have you learned/covered”?
And I don’t think I’ll ever sound like a local. But I’m okay with that. I’m not a local. I would lose my incredible Mandarin-linked cuteness if I spoke perfectly.
Ah, when I say sound like a local I mean in terms of grammar and usage. I too like having a little bit of a foreign accent (and therein an excuse for when I do inevitably slip up or use the wrong chengyu).
If you put in a really solid effort for a year, I think you can make good progress, depending on your starting level of course. The problem you have is a) you’re nowhere near as good as you think you are (this applies to everyone before they go to Taiwan/China, including myself), and b) you won’t be as good as you’d expect after a year. I did what you’re contemplating, put in a solid year working my ass off. At then end I could write a nice smooth essay (with some grammar imperfections of course), read most of newspapers/magazines provided their didn’t have too specialist vocab (like a financial article for example), communicate in most situations no problem. But I still felt I needed to study more. After another few months self-study (in total ~2 years full-time worth of material), I felt I only needed practice and anything else I could pick up in daily life reading books/watching TV/whatever. Thats a good, baseline level of communication, where you can use Chinese in almost any situation and be confident you’re not going to have major communication problems. But that is a loooong way from have flawless Chinese.
I would agree with this (although I hear people say 閉嘴 all the time). It takes time, a looooong time. But if it that important? How many Taiwanese people can speak English in the same breezy, informal way native speakers do? Not many at all, but there’s no shortage of Taiwanese that can communicate just fine, work in foreign companies and do anything their language proficiency requires of them.
[quote=“Steve4nLanguage”]“Anything is possible if you put your mind to it.”
A real life example is this guy, which may inspire you. He learned enough Japanese in 18 months to read technical material and have job interviews in Japanese, so that he landed a job as a software engineer at a large Japanese company in Tokyo.
He says the basic elements for his success were:
The belief that he could become fluent in Japanese.
Constantly doing fun stuff in Japanese.
He did this outside of Japan, in a non-Japanese environment in Utah, USA. So Sko, the probability of your Mandarin improving while in a Chinese-speaking country increases greatly as long as you consistently apply yourself (and we’ve all heard/know of people who have lived several years in a country and can just barely ‘get by’ in the local language).
Good luck![/quote]
I’d be impressed if his level was verified by a native speaker, until then I’m skeptical. I visit my old workplace not long ago and met the Japanese doctor that replaced me. He can read English scientific papers, could speak enough English to get through the interviews with my English boss, but to be honest, his English sucks. It’s really bad. So, you know. Things may not be all they’re cracked up to be.
Hi, I knew a foreign students who studied Chinese in Southern Taiwan University for 2 years, then she joint chemical department.
Chemical department only taught in Chinese, but she did a great job.
If u’re interesting, you can find some details via clc.stust.edu.tw/en
I’ve translated or re-translated about fifty sentences of Mandarin per day for about a year now. Originally, I was relying a lot on automated procedures and already-made parallel corpora, but the translations, while probably alright, were not what I was seeking. The official test is this weekend, so I’ll see how it’s helped.
I prefer to keep translated sentences as syntactically parallel as possible, hunting for adequate terminology to fit into it, even if they’re less frequent or less natural (to in translation back to the native language) by comparison. It’s how I got a hold of the major discrepancies between English and Spanish terminology (e.g. “gustarse” as “to please one('s tastes)” as opposed to the more common “to like”). Now, it was easier for me to cheat using this approach from English to Spanish because there’s a huge overlap in cognates and a small group of exceptions in “false cognates.”
It’s taking more time with Mandarin because I don’t have that cheater’s route like I do with other I-E languages, but my understanding is the one S-T language under the belt makes others (Japanese, Korean, Burmese) easier, as well. There are stumbling blocks in this pursuit, of course (e.g. “生他的氣” vs. “be angry with him”), but enough research into the two languages can very often crop up syntactically and semantically matching items.
(Side note: Japanese and Korean aren’t classified as Sino-Tibetan languages.) As for translation as a teaching method, the jury’s out on whether it’s a help or a hindrance. Several of my classmates are currently researching this very topic, but I don’t know what they’ve found thus far. Obviously, it’s different when you’re translating yourself. I’d recommend a useful exercise would be trying to translate one sentence from Chinese to English to match a variety of different situations, for example, one translation into colloquial English, one into a more formal written English, one into what it would sound like if announced over the MRT, or if President Obama said it in a speech, etc. That will liberate you a bit from thinking in terms of 1:1 equivalency.
Things like “生氣” are complicated by their cultural background. This phrase in particular comes from Chinese medicine and implied (at least back in the day) physiological changes in addition to just being angry. But don’t ask me too much about it since I have a poor understanding of Chinese medicine (and don’t have a particular interest in it, either). It’s also complicated by the utter flexibility of Chinese: 我生他的氣, 我氣他, 他氣死我, 他讓我生氣, 我對他生氣… they all mean about the same thing despite being wildly different grammatically. No wonder Taiwanese people love to (erroneously) say “There’s no such thing as grammar in Chinese.” It certainly does seem that way at first.
Translation is great for acquiring vocabulary; not so much for acquiring structure. Same with extensive reading. Once you have the structure of the language under your belt, wide reading is the best thing in the world for you. Before that, it’s largely a frustration because you cannot understand, and if you don’t understand, you cannot acquire. Even worse, if you misunderstand, you acquire wrong. Not a good thing.
Then I’ve been using the wrong examples for a long time. Thanks. Wiki says that they’re Altaic languages, but their writing systems share a bulk of the Hanzi set and have pretty clear cognate phonetics (hence my confusion). I know of one good book on it for Korean.
The 1:1 equivalency challenge is extra, and I force it on myself to get a better understanding of which constructions are VN, VV, JN, etc. Chinese-Chinese dictionaries are also very helpful, too, since they tend to extend abbreviated pieces, using the same characters from the definiendum in the definiens.
I studied Chinese medicine some years ago, so coincidentally detected as much in this and a few other terms (mostly dealing with 氣 or 精), so have struggled to get a workable 1:1 terminological match. Luckily, constantly considering how to do it has solidified its meaning for me, and the same is true for other terms and combinations that don’t fit a bijection/reordering scheme.
The point that you mention isn’t so bad. It’s alright for terms to play different roles, but perhaps you might agree that your examples would be seen as meaning about the same thing, even under radically different English wording:
(1) 我生他的氣。 “I am angry with him.”
(2) 我氣他。 “He piques me.”
(3) 他氣死我。 “He infuriates me.”
(4) 他讓我生氣。 “He makes me angry.”
(5) 我對他生氣。 “I am angry with him.”
Sentences (1) and (2) aren’t hardly syntactically aligned, but (3), (4), and (5) are more syntactically aligned.
If, perchance, there is the word in English which could preserve the syntax of (2) better, even if extremely rare, (e.g. “I 氣/[am-riled-by] him.”) I will opt for it over the translation above when studying.