[quote=“Truant”]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.[/quote]
Sorry, but I attribute the excellent language skills of most (most most most ) people I know to endless hours of hard work, usually through language study programs or in my case self-study. Honestly. Most of the people I know who try to learn chiefly via an SO aren’t really serious about acquiring the language and only learn a wee bit to get by, usually with poor pronunciation too. I don’t doubt your conclusions based on the people you know; we probably just know different types of people! Small sample sizes? Of course, those who also have an SO who is willing to patiently correct and help them will progress more quickly.
[quote=“Dragonbones”][quote=“Truant”]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.[/quote]
Sorry, but I attribute the excellent language skills of most (most most most ) people I know to endless hours of hard work, usually through language study programs or in my case self-study. Honestly. Most of the people I know who try to learn chiefly via an SO aren’t really serious about acquiring the language and only learn a wee bit to get by, usually with poor pronunciation too. I don’t doubt your conclusions based on the people you know; we probably just know different types of people! Small sample sizes? Of course, those who also have an SO who is willing to patiently correct and help them will progress more quickly.[/quote]
The counterpoint to this is the person who has an SO who is not competent in his/her mate’s mother tongue-- or other languages. In the case of my friend, his SO is not capable of conversing in English or my friend’s native tongue. He only can speak to her in Mandarin. Does having an intimate relationship with someone with whom you can only speak Mandarin have an impact on your abilities in that language? You bet. I also think Truant has a point about some of the women you might meet in an expat bar in Taipei. It’s naive to disbelieve the reality that at least some of them have acquired their language abilities through past relationships with foreigners. Nothing wrong with that reality, but we may as well acknowledge that it exists.
Indeed. A particuarly notable group are the Bangkok sex-pats, who usually pick up their paltry Thai from bargirls, who are usually piss poor peasant daughters from up in Issan, to the north east. They not only speak a crude pidgeon patois, but often unconsciously use the feminine form of Thai and invite nothing but contempt from the rest of the Thais for their miserable effort.
Girly Taiwanese Mandarin is also a laugh on a big foreign bloke, quite often expressed clearest in a high pitched, “zhende ma?”
However, I agree with Dragon bones, language acquisition is simply about hard work. Put in the effort and you will reap the reward regardless of what your SO speaks. Inevitably being able to benefit from a SO speaker of your desired target language, you have to first get up to reasonable speed. Think about it, how long could you handle baby conversations with someone in English?
My situation is probably a bit different from most people posting in this thread. My wife is HK Chinese. Some HK Chinese speak Mandarin well, and more do not. She doesn’t. In pretty much every way, my spoken Mandarin is miles ahead of hers. She never studied it much, whereas studying Chinese has pretty much dominated my after work time for the better part of my adult life.
When Chinese people hear a foreigner speak good Chinese, they are naturally curious to know how he or she got good. One of the first things they will ask is how long you’ve lived in China. If you’re a fast learner (as I was, at least for doing certain things with spoken langauge that gave the impression of higher proficiency) and your revelation of the amount of time you’ve spent in China doesn’t satisfy the person asking as being enough time to have learned as much as you have, then the next questions are always “are you married? Is your SO/wife/husband Chinese?” And when I say yes and yes, the normal reaction is 难怪你的国语讲得那么好 . I try not to show it, but that kind of gets on my tits. It annoys my wife too, because if she ends up having to speak Mandarin in the presence of the person who asked these questions, then she ends up getting embarrassed.
I think having an SO who speaks Chinese can help your Chinese on, but only if you know how to make the most of it and only if your SO has patience and good language awareness. However, there are plenty of people who use other strategies for learning language. I’m one of them. I’m a language teacher and that gives me certain advantages that the non-language teaching person married to a Chinese speaker doesn’t have. There may be certain situations where one of you with a Mandarin speaking SO can use more appropriate language than I, but overall, my language proficiency and that of lots of other non-Mandarin-SO having learners can compare to plenty of folks who’ve been at it for a similar amount of time with a Mandarin speaking SO. And for the people who think the likes of Dashan are that good because they married a local, I’d have to counter that at least in the case of Dashan, he was well on his way to being that good long before he hooked up with a local.
I also know plenty of foreigners, some of whom post here, who are married to locals but whose Chinese, while alright, is nothing special at all. Improving your Chinese by interacting with a Mandarin speaking SO can be an effective strategy, but it is just one strategy. Most foreigners I know whose Chinese is near native and who have a Chinese SO probably would have gotten that good without the SO. The affective factors that drove them to integrate and acquire near-native skills were already there. The SO is just an obvious sign that those factors were present, not the cause of them.
Spending even a night or a week or a month or two with a lover whose “only” language is your target language has to do more for breaking down affective barriers than almost any other experience I can think of. Here is somebody you want to be with and communicate with, who is loving and gentle and who probably feels like she has all the time in the world. Of course other types of study are essential, and the person who practices his second language skills primarily by drinking and picking up strangers is going to end up with gutter english or chinese or whatever else.
Still, having a really fun lover who speaks your target language and isn’t all that interested in learning yours has to be one of the most pleasurable, amazingly effective foriegn language learning experiences anybody will ever have. It’s not the be all but it is easy to imagine how some people, mistakenly perhaps, regard it as essential.
A few days ago I mentioned to my wife that I felt that my heart was finally beginning to open to the experience of learning Chinese and asked her if she ever had any problems that way. She responded that I had begun the process of opening her heart to the experience the day we met, I just started a little lower. My wife is pretty funny sometimes.
my mandarin is nothing to get excited about, and i do have a local wife. however, i think what has helped the most is spending time with her family (MIL helps with the boy). as none of them speak english, and i hate asking for translations, it’s worth it to press on.
this type of learning also exposes me to more authentic language than the books i used previously (which i would like to get back to when the degree is finished) …
[quote=“xtrain”]my Mandarin is nothing to get excited about, and I do have a local wife. however, i think what has helped the most is spending time with her family (MIL helps with the boy). as none of them speak English, and I hate asking for translations, it’s worth it to press on.
this type of learning also exposes me to more authentic language than the books i used previously (which i would like to get back to when the degree is finished) …[/quote]
That sort of exposure is very difficult to obtain without a local SO.
If you SO already speaks English or is interested in learning and your Chinese isn’t very good then having a mandarin SO is probably a dertiment to you. As you’ve probably discovered you can lean on her for everything when she is around and when she isn’t you can wait for her to get home to talk to the plumber or the guy who collects the da ge da bill or whatever else. That is what I do because honestly there is a lot of other stuff I want to learn, “conversational” mandarin I guess you’d call it. For example I was frustrated last night when I couldn’t quite manage “global warming is everybodies problem”. When that sort of thing happens I put it on a list and when the list has ten or twenty items on it I sit my wife down at starbucks or someplace she likes and work through the list. It is a practical, natural way to learn and since she has the opportunity to conduct “a marriage” in her second language she should be, and is, willing to do that sort of thing for me. Sometimes we will actually babble away in Mandarin with each other but that doesn’t happen very often if it is only the two of us. It just feels stupid because I know her English is so much better than my Mandarin. For me the real deal is meeting people who speak absolutely no English. That’s fun.
Yeah, hey Bob true but you must get to speak with her family? Are they all super fluent English speakers too? I get some of my best Chinese interaction with my SO’s mum and sister in law, and the great thing is you can get help on the fly if you are missing a word or two…my Mandarin basically sucks though.
My father in law and I have an unusual relationship in that we “never” talk to each other. Five years living twenty feet apart and we have maybe exchanged twenty sentences. It perhaps not as weird as it sounds as he doesn’t talk to anybody else either. My brother in law has bachelor’s in English and conducts business in the language on a daily basis but while quite a nice guy is not exactly the kind of person who likes to be asked questions. Mom in law is a bit more interesting as somewhere along the line she picked up quite a bit of, lets say, communicative English, not polished but works pretty well. If anybody listened to us they’d probably go nuts trying to keep track of what language we were using…
Oh and it’s hardly helpful that they all speak Taiwanese most of the time either.
I’m studying at Shit Da now and have a taiwanese girlfriend who i speak chinese with at least half of the time. My classmate who has been in Taiwan as long as me, and studied for as long as me, has a Japanese girlfriend.
We both spend about 4/5 hours a day studying chinese. Although out levels are pretty much similar in terms of vocabulary, most of what I say is grammatically correct compared to perhaps 65%in my friends case.
This is because you just get a feel for the grammar, similarly when i speak english i know instinctively if a sentence grammatically incorrect even if i couldn’t tell you the rule.
Because i have lots of conversations in chinese and listen to a lot more i have picked this up quicker than my friend who just has the odd conversation.
As for girls having good English here, I’m with truant on that one, especially if they have good English and go to carnegies
I get along all right in Chinese and I’ve never had a Chinese SO.
Maybe the definition re the girls learning English should be clarified: “she probably has spent a lot of time with foreigners.” Heck, she could have had a foreign female language exchange. Even the celibate can learn a language, I suppose. Quite a few religious studying at Fujen.
actually bob, the wife is an english teacher. that said, i do pretty much everything on my own anyways, at least the last few years. gas man, telephone, and whatnot. i’m that kind of person - and that might be what makes the biggest difference.
I have never thought about that side of it, but because my SO doesn’t speak Chinese and I speak a tiny bit, I end up having to manage with the situation (usually very awfully, but we get there), in in that respect I guess it helps me to learn a little.
Exposure to the language is clearly increased if you are in a serious relationship, i.e. one where you spend time alone with your partners folks. I lived with MrsHills folk for about five lifetimes. However, exposure doesn’t necessarily equate to increased learning. I am a classic case. I have been through just about every festival, emotional drama, foodstuff, and family member that they can throw at me. I have been exposed all the way baby. I watched a baby being born, brought home to live with us, weaned etc. Now Juan XiWei understands more Chinese than me. And she was conceived after I started my ‘exposure.’
Now it can’t be because I’m dumb. I suggest it’s because I have a) no need to learn Chinese (from a survive or die point of view) and b) I don’t want to learn Chinese.
Unless you [color=red]want [/color]to have, or feel a [color=red]need[/color] to have this code crammed into yer noggin there is nothing that exposure can do about it.
Exposure alone is definitely not sufficient. The input has to be sufficiently comprehensible (context can play a big part in this), and it also has to be involving and interesting.
Stephen Krashen cited some interesting research that showed that, in some situations at least, integrative motivation (i.e. feeling something in common with those who speak the target language) can be a more powerful determiner of second language success than instrumental motivation (learning primarily because you need to).
The research is cited in the second chapter of “Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning”. The whole book is available here: sdkrashen.com/main.php3
I got a Taiwanese old lady and I can’t speak the Chinee for shit. But that’s just 'cos I’m a lazy bastard and find that studying foreign languages is goddamn wuliao.
) people I know to endless hours of hard work, usually through language study programs or in my case self-study. Honestly. Most of the people I know who try to learn chiefly via an SO aren’t really serious about acquiring the language and only learn a wee bit to get by, usually with poor pronunciation too. I don’t doubt your conclusions based on the people you know; we probably just know different types of people! 
Small sample sizes? Of course, those who also have an SO who is willing to patiently correct and help them will progress more quickly.
My wife is pretty funny sometimes.
