Well - some great tips here. I do still go back and forth on it because I know that my quality of life in Taiwan would be better if I could speak the language. And sometimes you think things are going well - you think you understand something and then learn you have it completely wrong - you misheard the tone or the sound. And it’s embarrassing and discouraging.
I have watched Benny the Irish Polyglot and he has some good tips. Basically just aim to be understood and aim to understand about 80 percent of what you hear - use context to glean meaning and fill in the blanks.
Tones are not even terribly important – IF your pronunciation (otherwise) AND your word order/choice is correct. There are very few words in Mandarin that are distinguished only by tone, and those are usually (though not always) so different in meaning in the first place that there can really be no confusion if they occur in context. (Another point against traditional language teaching – the focus on sentences, instead of connected text. It artificially inflates the importance of single words and small details.)
If you want to speak Chinese, you can. If you want to ignore the idea that you need to do something really, really different from what you’ve been doing, that’s up to you. The rest of the suggestions here are really only variations of the theme you’ve been working with for a long time already. You can argue about “how” to “learn” tones. You can argue about “how much” to try to understand. But at the end of the day, acquisition is based on comprehensible input and lots of repetition in unique contexts. That’s what you don’t get, for the most part, in traditional language teaching programs.
If you keep repeating the methods that haven’t worked for you for a number of years and a large number of NT dollars, you lose the right to get sympathy for how you “can’t” learn Chinese. Do yourself a favor and try a drastically different approach. Then if you can’t get it (which I have never seen happen, BTW) that’s another matter. People get too hung up on how “Benny the Irish Polyglot” can magically learn 10 languages, and ignore the fact that they themselves have perfectly acquired one already, and can do it again if they get the right input.
I think you’re underestimating how hard that is for learners early on. People get the concept easily enough – there are four tones and a neutral one, simple. But lots of people have trouble differentiating when someone’s speaking. It takes a long time to internalize the tones as a meaningful unit.[/quote]
No, I know that tones can be a BIG difficulty. That’s why I pointed it out as the one big obstacle in oral Chinese. It was certainly difficult for me to get the tones down (the difference between the 2nd and 3rd tones was my big challenge).
Well - I have heard that -if you get the right words in the right order and speak at a proper pace then tones don’t matter? My fourth tone is terrible - so I was glad to hear that. Anyway. - Taiwanguy - some ‘tough talking’ from you - proper what I needed. Stop whinging on a forum and get on with it. Does anyone in Taipei have the same teaching approach as Iron Lady?
She’s one of a kind. If you’re willing to give it one last go, try it out, why not. All I know is she’s very, very different from the teachers here. It may be what works for you.
I’m lazy and stupid. May be that could explain why I knew more Chinese before coming here and trying several times to learn it.
That, or perhaps that Chinese is a language from Hell which sounds are all the same except for minusculus yet of great importance differences that I fail to grasp everytime, and that you can not know how it sounds by looking at the written words, and that they use like 2,000 different romanization systems, apparently all of them based in English pronounciations, English, which is a freaking NON fonetical language… that you can not know how it sounds even if it uses pretty much the same characters than my own language.
I guess that the fact that I don’t really need it, and that every time I try to I create some sort of chaos around, also affects.
[quote=“jesus80”]I’m lazy and stupid. May be that could explain why I knew more Chinese before coming here and trying several times to learn it.
That, or perhaps that Chinese is a language from Hell which sounds are all the same except for minusculus yet of great importance differences that I fail to grasp everytime, and that you can not know how it sounds by looking at the written words, and that they use like 2,000 different romanization systems, apparently all of them based in English pronounciations, English, which is a freaking NON fonetical language… that you can not know how it sounds even if it uses pretty much the same characters than my own language.
I guess that the fact that I don’t really need it, and that every time I try to I create some sort of chaos around, also affects.[/quote]
Like I said, six years of Spanish and I can’t even introduce myself. Fewer than that of Chinese and I could read 17th century ghost stories. Different strokes for different folks.
[quote=“LucyQ”]Yup - what the title says.
I have been in Taiwan for five years, spent around $200,000 TWD on courses, books, tutors and apps. I have met with three language exchanges. I have spent many hours studying and drawing those difficult characters.
After five years of paying and struggling and still barely able to string a sentence together, I am letting go.
Chinese and me just isn’t to be.
Anyone else empathize?[/quote]
I lived in Taiwan for dogs years. I still can not read or write ANYTHING. I can barely read “Taipei” , “Taichung” and “Kaohsiung” in chinese.
I am not proud of my lack of achievement. And quite jealous of those furriners who can read and write. But long ago, I looked at those chinese characters and said NEVERMIND.
I speak it ok though. But i must admit I struggle now that iv been out of Taiwan for more then a decade. Yesterday ran into a couple guys from Taiwan and I had to revert back to english now and then as Id forgotten the Mando word for this and that.
All i know is that Mandarin fucks up your english ! And learning to read and write it is a lifetime endeavor.
You could just learn to speak and understand it when spoken to, wouldn’t that be enough?
Once i could understand the average news report I said to myself . OK Done.
And I am half Taiwanese !!
My mom should have sent me to a Taiwanese school until Middle school, then I would’ve learned this indecipherable script.
But hey, looks like arabic writing is even stranger.
I’m really bad at Spanish, French and Italian. I did a fair bit of French at uni and can read it pretty well, and Spanish and Italian I understand because of an ex and from French cognates, but I have shocking pronunciation which is a really high affective barrier for me. Plus I don’t care that French people roll their eyes, Spanish people laugh and Italians fall to the floor clutching their ears. 
I understand, and I can (sometimes) get stuff done, jiu hao.
You need to isolate exactly what the problem is then figure out strategies. Be honest.
Plus you need to get a Taiwanese significant other who can not speak your language well. This way you can learn because you have to.
I’ll second this. Rosetta Stone uses this method, and I studied German using Rosetta Stone for two years before taking a tour of Germany, Austria, and northern Switzerland. I was able to hold basic conversations fairly well, could read most signs, and generally just get by. I supplemented with an introductory reader and a phrase book. I’m now using Rosetta Stone to study French. It’s so much more enjoyable than memorizing vocabulary lists and grammar rules.
Rossetta Stone is cool, I have to admit. I used for learning Chinese and I reckon that it helped… but the pronunciation validation is just evil or screwed. Sometimes you get stuck with some stupid word forever.
I changed the validation to the easiest setting. The “normal” setting is maddening, yes.
I won’t lie. It’s helped that my wife speaks next-to-no English. But my Chinese was improving rapidly even before we started dating (and we still only see each other on weekends, so she doesn’t get all the credit!).
Actually, the one thing that made my Chinese skyrocket faster than anything else was tying and failing to translate. Translation, when done well, is the most intimate form of reading and comprehending a text – even if it takes a dictionary to do so. When you run into difficult concepts or grammar, you have to think through how to decode it in a way that makes sense so you can reassemble it in English. There has been a lot of scholarly debate on whether translation is an effective tool in language learning or just a misleading approach, but it worked really, really well for me. The trick is to have a very analytic method where you approach the problem, identify it, solve it, and figure out where your solution could have been better. It takes time, effort, and more than anything else, interest.
Grammar-translation is often dismissed out of hand, but it has its place. However its hard to ‘sell’ if your language education runs on the premise that teachers and classrooms are a good idea: how does gt fit into that system? It’s also not going to get you a fuller language-user profile: it would take a person with a lot of * to extrapolate how to chat with a taxi driver or get something dry-cleaned from grammar translation only.
I did some translation when I was back in the UK. I didn’t speak Chinese apart from a couple of visits to Taiwan the whole time I was there which was five years. Now I have really skewed, weird Chinese: I can read most docs but my spoken Chinese is ‘functional’. Ahem. I have a bias because I did a lot of dead languages as a kid (no spoken form), though.
OP, think about your individual abilities and preferences. It’s interesting to note some people love Rosetta Stone and have really benefitted from it. I had the Thai one but I persisted for 2:38 minutes before thinking ‘Whaaaat? People actually learn from this? Hooow?’ Ditto Pimsleur: I ADHD out of that rubbish even faster than RS, but some people swear by it. If it’s not working for you, it’s an ineffective system, not a failure on your part. Try it, love it, try it drop it.
Bear in mind what I wrote about a language user profile: one set of activities won’t help you develop every skill so mix it up. Design your own program.
Ask Benny on repeat is working for me, slowly.
Yeah it’s a slog, but 5 words a day and you’ll be set in 2 years.
Actually, it helped me a lot even with that.
I was always bored learning a classroom. What they taught was too easy – but I wasn’t getting any better. Strange Catch-22. That’s when I realized they weren’t really teaching me what I wanted to learn. (I’m sure it was useful for a lot of people, but it was uninteresting to me.)
When I first got to Taiwan, my Chinese was functional, but I had a lot of communication problems. It wasn’t about the language itself so much as the logic behind it. People could rarely follow my line of thought when we were discussing anything more in-depth than the weather and how school was going and how nice Taiwanese people are. It drove me nuts. And I knew the problem was 100% with me.
Through really, really anal analysis (hah) of my own translations and through back translation, I learned a lot about the “flow” of Chinese and how to build a logical line of argumentation or even just discussion. I had lots of communication issues with the mirses when we started dating five years ago – and it wasn’t because I didn’t know the right words or grammar, it’s because my sentences didn’t make a whole lot of sense when put together as a whole.
But of course, ymmv.
Once you get to preintermediate level you can learn from people around you. If you can get over feeling stupid and saying tingbudong every 3 minutes.
If you are serious, and take notes, there’s a lot you can pick up from daily life.
Developing the skill of hearing a word and remembering it without writing it down is tough but useful.
I’m getting close to feel like to get back to Rossetta Stone again… almost. 
[quote=“HenHaoChi”]Ask Benny on repeat suits me fine.
Yeah it’s a slog, but 5 words a day and you’ll be set in 2 years.
I didn’t read the OP.[/quote]
No, you won’t be set with 5 words a day for 2 years. You’ll have a bunch of individual words. This is what we most commonly see with students who’ve managed to pass a couple of years of Chinese. They can’t do much with the language they’ve managed to memorize. The words sort of rattle around in their heads, to be thrown randomly onto paper or into conversation, with the result that no one understands them, they blame “the tones” and then give up. They have no structure to “plug into”. To acquire a language, you need rich (complex) input that you can still understand. That’s how you acquire the grammar rules. Vocabulary is really incidental and can easily be added at any time, compared to the importance of acquiring the structure of the language.
Most of the “tips” in this thread apply to people who have some background in Chinese already. The problem is for a student who has tried numerous times and been almost completely frustrated. It’s not a matter of “finding the right strategy”, it’s a matter of admitting that, for the vast majority of people, class-based language teaching does not produce the level of proficiency we should be expecting. Ask anyone in a random Wal-Mart line in the US what language they took in high school, then ask them to say, well, anything in that language.
Anyone who’s been taking 15 hours or so of oral Chinese should be able to communicate on a basic level (with the understanding that it will not be easy at all times to deal with accents). Double that if you want to be able to fluently read that same amount of language.
It really is just that simple. Language you can understand/are told what it means + lots of repetition in unpredictible ways = acquisition. Repeating the same thing over and over = not so good. Ro$etta $tone (which never tells you what it means; it’s okay if you can guess correctly, but try the Mohawk edition and tell me what you really think after that) = not so good. Textbooks where you read a single paragraph for a lesson = not so good. Lots of reading you can understand + lots of listening you can understand = acquisition.