Your Relationships and Foreign Language Acquisition

if she hasn’t lived overseas, there is a pretty good reason for her english skills. Plenty of practice, if you know what I mean.

if she hasn’t lived overseas, there is a pretty good reason for her English skills. Plenty of practice, if you know what I mean.[/quote]

No offence T, but that is crap.

There are MANY women in Taiwan who have great English and aren’t professional girlfriends.

if she hasn’t lived overseas, there is a pretty good reason for her English skills. Plenty of practice, if you know what I mean.[/quote]

No offence T, but that is crap.

There are MANY women in Taiwan who have great English and aren’t professional girlfriends.[/quote]
No offence taken, a pretty generalistic comment I made, I’ll admit. Too generalistic.
But…in my experience, locals here (both men and women) under 30, that have exceptional english, (and I mean better than good), have either lived overseas, or spent significant time with foreigners.

Just like, I have been told (on more than one occasion) that I am wasting my time expecting to learn chinese to a decent level without a local wife or girlfriend.

It’s not a slander, it’s the way it is. Think about all the guys you know who speak superb chinese, and of those, how many have done it without a local girlfriend/wife? I can think of 1.
It’s not impossible, but it’s the exception not the rule.

[quote]But…in my experience, locals here (both men and women) under 30, that have exceptional English, (and I mean better than good), have either lived overseas, or spent significant time with foreigners.

Just like, I have been told (on more than one occasion) that I am wasting my time expecting to learn Chinese to a decent level without a local wife or girlfriend. [/quote]

How does my good friend answer when asked how his Chinese ability got so good? “我喝了很多口水.” Literally: “I’ve drank a lot of spit”-- a rather colorful way of saying he’s been in a lot of relationships with local women.

Seriously though, while I think intimate relationships can help, they aren’t the be all and end all of language acquisition. I work with some local teachers with absolutely whiz-bang English skills-- and they haven’t been overseas and don’t have foreign S/Os.

For the expat, I think having a local S/O can be a curse as well as a blessing for Chinese skills. In my opinion, it can make the expat complacent and allow him to avoid many situations by simply letting the local S/O deal with them all. Myself, I think my Chinese ability is improving (though still needs a lot of work). This is, in large part because it has to. My gf is not local, so when the time comes to call the landlord, go to the bank, order new natural gas cylinders and so on, there’s no lazy way out; I have to deal with it.

Language acquisition can be helped along by intimate relationships, but it’s not true that every local who speaks good English has had a foreign bf/gf; nor is it true that every foreigner who speaks semi-decent Mandarin has a local spouse.

Toasty is the only one I know who’s managed to learn chinese well without any local g/f.

It can be done, but more work.

[quote=“Mr He”]Toasty is the only one I know who’s managed to learn Chinese well without any local g/f.

It can be done, but more work.[/quote]
I said I knew of one, and yours happens to be the same as mine.

Toasty, you’re not just 1, you are the 1. :wink:

(We are so off topic btw)

My husband is another. He can read, write, and speak Chinese and he’s an American. But he’s worked very hard to get to that point and also did some growing up in this country.

So that makes 2! :slight_smile:

that would be the key point I feel.

Getting “any” makes Chinese learning better and faster.

The only issue is that you end up sounding like a sissy, dueto teh fact that women and men use slightly different wording when espressing themselves.

[quote=“Mr He”]Getting “any” makes Chinese learning better and faster.

The only issue is that you end up sounding like a sissy, dueto teh fact that women and men use slightly different wording when espressing themselves.[/quote]

Mr He you make a good point. I now have a male Chinese teacher after too many people asking me why I speak like a girl. This hasn’t happened in English since highschool so I assume it was to do with female teachers and the SO. Anyway I now get criticised for sounding like I am from the South which is probably also a teacher issue but I see it as progress.

[quote=“Truant”][quote=“Mr He”]Toasty is the only one I know who’s managed to learn Chinese well without any local g/f.

It can be done, but more work.[/quote]
I said I knew of one, and yours happens to be the same as mine.

Toasty, you’re not just 1, you are the 1. :wink:

(We are so off topic btw)[/quote]

You only know one foreigner who speaks good Chinese and who doesn’t have a local wife? You’ve got to meet a more diverse crowd of people.

When I was a grad student back in the mainland, all of the foreigners I knew with good Chinese (I mean, talking fluently about the role of women in Qing dynasty Chinese-fluent, not “I’ll have a danbing for breakfast”-fluent) had picked up their Chinese from class or interacting with other students or people on the street. Even if a few of them dated locals, they didn’t learn any Chinese from them.

If your local g/f is your primary source of Chinese education, you’ve got a long way to go. (But don’t we all?)

My 78SOB ex refused to speak Chinese with me and refused to help me with it. So he doesn’t count. And my chinese is good.
My best friend here has no foreign friends except for me and has never had a foreign boyfriend. but most people think she is ABC.

Well, I learned from talking to my ex - apart from that I learned it at MTC, from a private tutor, at the university of copenhagen, and a bundle from working as a mandarin speaking guide.

Immersion is key. If you spend significant time iwth a Taiwanese s/o then that will a very important part of it, but there are other ways as well.

[quote=“Truant”][quote=“Mr He”]Toasty is the only one I know who’s managed to learn Chinese well without any local g/f.

It can be done, but more work.[/quote]
I said I knew of one, and yours happens to be the same as mine.

Toasty, you’re not just 1, you are the 1. :wink:

(We are so off topic btw)[/quote]

I didn’t have a local girlfriend for my first 11 years here, and learned Chinese well enough. Make that two. My current and future girlfriend learned English well enough to teach it before she even met me, so there’s another. Honestly, I can think of more examples too. I don’t think the generalization T made is fair. :wink:

Maybe not, but it explains a fair bit.

It’s harder to immerse yourself, if you surround yourself with English. If you have a local s/o and you speak chinese with her at least part of the time it helps a fair bit.

Everything is true. This is true, that is true. The thing over there, it’s true too.

Slam me all you want, but this thread was split after a post from a visitor to Taipei who met a girl at Carnegies and went back to his room. He commented on how good her english was.

I guess you guys are right, she probably studies 6 hrs a day in class, and this was the first time she met a foreigner, let alone went home with one hours after meeting at a popular foreign nightspot, which she probably was at for the first time too. :sunglasses: What was I thinking?

What Truant wrote was a generalisation. As such, people are always free to contradict by telling of their own experiences - but the odd case that doesn’t fit his generalisation is not enough to disprove it. I think that he’s right for many people, that having a Taiwanese partner can significantly improve your Chinese, but obviously it’s possible to get fluent without (just harder). Immersion (as other people have said) is key and the easiest way to gain that immersion is with a Taiwanese partner. There are other ways to do it - by having Taiwanese friends, a job where you have to speak Mandarin, living with a Taiwanese family or simply by studying really really hard. But it is true that for many people I know that a Taiwanese other half has been their route to fluency (or at least competency).

Lordy, sometimes the local lasses cop it very badly in here.

Why not villify the manwhore that plucked her out of a local club and into his hotel room? Is there any difference between a lass being attracted to a bloke in a public place and easing into the cot with him later on and a bloke casting his wild oats?

Who knows, she may have studied English for an eternity back at the nunnery and this was her first fling on getting out . . and if not, so what?

HG

I agree, but let’s not get off track.

The question is: how many people attribute the learning of a language well to spending time with an SO (or not so SO) who speaks it? The reason being, most people I know with excellent language skills have in fact done it this way.

most. most. m o s t.
not all.