To be quite honest, I think that if you’re not planning to stay for the long haul or for an actual career (like less than 20 months) , not learning mandarin won’t kill ya. It will make for a more basic expatriation experience which gets boring eventually. If you’re living a life that is adjacent to the locals like they don’t exist and only have meaningful relationships with english speaking ones won’t make you learn anything new.
Mandarin isn’t necessarily hard if 1) you live in a mandarin speaking country, 2) you are actively taking classes and 3) are taking these classes seriously. When I was my dorm during my thesis, I’ve seen double diploma students (these usually stayed the year) go from 0 to hanging around with taiwanese locals and speak mandarin in a very correct way, because your oral skills will progress way faster than the written ones. So, if you’re just planning to take your english classes for 6 months and have a little fun without any will to go to Taiwan in the near future, mandarin will clearly not be as useful. However, it’s never bad to learn the basis of a language while you’re there.
It actually is , to some studies I heard about it takes 5x longer to for reading and writing compared to say another European language. There simply isn’t any language that compares with the difficulty of mastering the reading and writing component.
You can only get so far with the mastery of Mandarin without delving into the reading and writing component. I know this from personal experience as I learned to speak before reading and writing and there were many errors due to the Taiwan dialect I was learning .
They made the whole world hate them . Fecking idiots ! Talk about a massive own goal !
Guoji hua lol…
SHE taking the RMB there…
I learned Chinese for years but basically have given up on it now I have very little interest in mainland Chinese content or ever living in China and that is the problem. I coast along with my level in Taiwan.and see little benefit from getting more fluent for my future goals (mainly because it’s only really used in Taiwan and China ). I agree a small amount of Chinese can go a long way living here even if just for a short time.
Living in Taiwan is pretty tough for foreigners to integrate with locals , one further issue is that many Taiwanese don’t speak Mandarin as their 'friendly language ’ . Their local language for friends and family when joking could be Taiwanese or heavily influenced Taiwanese Mandarin (Taiwan Guoyu ). So yeah…Challenging.
I think it’s actually as easy to speak English with many people in the cities cos they want to speak English with you and prefer it so they can practice their English. Some will be much more eager to hang out with a newbie who speaks English with them , and knows nothing about Taiwan , than Mandarin
I would pay no attention to some suanming racists on PTT.
Ive studied Chinese now for 13-14 years. Well say studied, but I have never stopped trying to improve. Now I can speak easily with groups of Taiwanese and keep the conversation with the group at the same pace and nobody really accommodating me as a foreigner. If I speak English to Taiwanese friends, they will change to Chinese. After all this time, its only at this point that can say has really helped me to integrate here, which I am happy about, but its a long slog.
I’m almost at as many years as you, though I admit I haven’t really picked up a text and tried to improve my vocabulary in about five years. Chinese can be learned to a high degree of fluently in 2-3 years if you do nothing but study it all the time and only hang out with native speakers. The problem is that you get into those language intensive programs and your brain turns to mush about three weeks in. Three years is a long time, but, if you started from zero, you’d be at grad school, native-level fluency (in all aspects) at that point. All depends on the goals.
I stalled after 2-3 years of fairly intensive trying. I blame the tones. No idea what people are saying unless they are pointing to something I just mentioned.
Yeah I studied Chinese intensively for two years in China and did the hsk, but at that point my Chinese was still pretty shit. I think at every point I’ve forced myself to be reading and improve, with lull periods of no progress. What really improved things for me was working in companies where you have to talk to customers and colleagues all day in Chinese.
It’s a long slog, and if I was better at learning languages, more organized and started earlier, I could have made a much better fist of it. I never really learned another language before
That would suggest you don’t have any innate language acquisition ability for Asian languages. Chinese isn’t that hard but it does need a good ear. Whenever I hear friends struggling after two or three years of hard study my advice tends to be give it up. Pursue something you have ability in.
Yeah I have friends who speak Italian and Spanish and German fairly fluently but can make no headway with Chinese. Everyone’s brain is wired differently.
Just chiming in to say that Mandarin and Arabic are the only two languages I’ve learnt to a level where I can get by and I found Arabic to be unquestionably harder than Mandarin. Arabic grammar is insane and still gives me nightmares. Mandarin’s grammar, on the other hand, is mostly fairly straightforward. Once you get the hang of tones, you can get by in Mandarin fairly quickly. The same can’t be said for Arabic.
Writing system aside, I’d argue that Mandarin is actually a relatively “easy” language. Tones are the only other headache for English speakers, but even they pale in comparison to some other tonal languages…
I find the same with mandarin as far as grammar. Tones and some sounds are tricky, even for a good number of locals. But its not crazy difficult. However the writing is quite difficult which bumps the language to the hard side of the scale instantaneously.
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). So yeah…Challenging.