Can Westerners become fluent in Chinese?

[Lu]

Well, if Noah spoke Chinese (with his 舟 with 八口 on it an all), God must have known some to speak to him.

[Meng Lelan]

If you want to be REALLY depressed about all your achievements in Chinese study,

So depression is supposed to be the goal of our achievements in Chinese study?

[liuzhou]

no accent

Impossible. Everyone has an accent.(unless they can't speak, which kind of rules them out of this conversation!)

[ironlady]

Unless, of course, HSK turns out to be a Tool of the Devil.... :rolleyes:

(waxing philosophical for a moment) The definition of "fluency" is kind of important, though (at least when you're dealing with organized classes and suchlike). Usually it ends up being set by people who don't even speak the language in question and/or don't teach any language. From a linguistic perspective, "fluency" can also be defined as the ability to smoothly use a limited subset of vocabulary in most or all of the grammatical structures of a language. So you wouldn't know every word in the language (as native speakers do not, either) but you would be able to use a subset of those words (say 1000 or 2000 words?) without thought, responding automatically to them and using them correctly in sentences to express your meaning. No hesitation, no "decoding", just immediate response that shows that the grammar of the language has been acquired by the brain and the rules are being applied automatically.

Then you get into arguments about what "proficiency" means as well, and the Giant Morass of Handwritten Chinese -- you MUST be able to hand-write characters from memory to be considered worthy vs. writing by hand is not an important skill today as native speakers only do it for birthday cards, shopping lists and phone messages, plus filling out the odd form (no surprise which side I'm on, but I do have hard data from doing surveys on the ground in Taiwan as to how and what people write).

In the end, in practical terms if not for bragging rights, proficiency and fluency end up meaning "you're able to use enough of the language easily enough and accurately enough to do what you need to do." That could be "get a bowl of noodles", "get the gist of a TV show" or "get your country's way about the final wording of a treaty." And given the breadth of purposes that exist out there, there are people who can negotiate treatires but might not understand a given TV show.

However -- if you've been over and over "what is fluency?" with the same few people saying the same things over and over, I can see where closing the thread wouldn't be a Bad Thing.

[Kobo-Daishi]

Dear all,

Lu wrote:

Well, if Noah spoke Chinese (with his 舟 with 八口 on it an all), God must have known some to speak to him.

XXXXX

That's rubbish.

It's a falsehood, being spread by Christians unfamiliar with Chinese, that the character 船 chuan2 for "boat" is related to the Biblical myth of Noah and the ark.

The character 船 is a xingsheng character. That is one side is the "radical" and the other side the phonetic element.

Phono-semantic compound characters

Just look at the Shuowen Jiezi and you'd see that 㕣, what looks like an 八 "eight" over a 口 "mouth", is merely the phonetic element.

Shuowen Jiezi entry

I think I know the source for this fallacy, a dictionary from more than 100 years back, by a clergyman's son, but I'll wait to write it up for my blog when I've time.

Kobo-Daishi, PLLA.

[Don_Horhe]

I think he was saying it tongue-in-cheek... Anyone with more than two brain cells would simply laugh at the biblical 'etymology' of 船.

[renzhe]

Actually, it's an inside joke on this forum, based on a really old thread which refused to die.

[Lu]

That's rubbish.

It's certainly rubbish, but I thought it would be funny in the light of the previous exchange. Sorry to confuse you :-)

[crazy-meiguoren]

So what would be "fluent"? My unofficial standard of fluency is how well a non-native speaker can communicate with a native speaker in the native's language. A certain degree of wrong usage is expected in many cases. As long as the imperfections don't get in the way of both parties understanding each other, I'll call it fluent enough. ;)

As far as the etymology of Noah's Ark is concerned, it's not Chinese, but from the Ozark region of the USA... everyone knows that Noah looked out of the Arkansas... ;)

[roddy]

So what would be "fluent"?

And so the circle of life is complete.

[M.E.Townsend]

I met friends speaking fluent Chinese indeed! I don't think that's a problem. But the right question probably should be "how non-native learners can learn to speak fluent Chinese".

[rezaf]

But the right question probably should be "how non-native learners can learn to speak fluent Chinese".

By working their fingers to the bone for at least ten years.

[JessieJessie]

Of course you can be truely fluent. like the canadian guy, da shan, who talks a lot on Chinese TV. It's just a matter of how much you practice. The most effective way, as suggested, is to find a Chinese girlfriend or boyfriend. B)

[M.E.Townsend]

10 years? could be much shorter or longer than that, I think. The key is practice. Even if you have got a Chinese girlfriend or boyfriend, if you don't practice your Chinese with her/him, it wouldn't work! I know friends with Chinese girlfriends but never actually speak any Chinese, except for ni2 hao3, etc. In School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) here in UK, 3rd year students can speak really impressive Chinese! Ok, these guys spend one whole year in China.

I'm currently using Chinesepod to help with listening. So I spend at least half an hour listening to Chinese nowadays. Recently I've been practicing my speaking with http://www.aichinese.com which uses some sort of voice recognition. Important thing is they come with Chinesepod lessons. I also do language exchange with one of my Chinese colleagues at lunch time. I think if I can stick to this approach, it shouldn't be long for me to speak well. if...

[rezaf]

The most effective way, as suggested, is to find a Chinese girlfriend or boyfriend.

The most ineffective way for me and lots of my friends because after sometime the conversation won't go any further than chi fan, shuijiao and yifu. Of course if you find a chinese partner with an incredible amount of patience who doesn't want to practise his/her English with you then it might work.

10 years? could be much shorter or longer than that, I think. The key is practice.

In China I have seen foreigners who are very advanced but when I think about it their Chinese is not really better than a native 12 year-old Chinese kid(and believe me, very few foreigners are that fluent). For me being fluent means college graduate kind of fluent which for a native speaker usually takes twenty something years, so I can't imagine getting there in less than 10 years. If you think about the size of the vocabulary of an educated Chinese you will notice that ten years is really the minimum for mastering all those words.

[liuzhou]

The most effective way, as suggested, is to find a Chinese girlfriend or boyfriend.

I strongly disagree. Nearly everyone I know who went that route ended up improving their partner's English, letting them deal with Chinese "situations" and learning next to nothing!

[renzhe]

A partner can be a great help, but only if you do everything else that needs to be done.

In other words: learn your characters, read your books, finish your textbooks, watch your series, watch your movies, listen to your podcasts, do your flashcards, learn your grammar. Do this for years. THEN a partner can be worth gold. It can be the last thing that makes the difference, but it is not a magic potion. 97% of your learning will be alone, the same way everyone else studies.

Just finding a girlfriend/boyfriend will not do anything. I know dozens of people who learned nothing that way.

[calibre2001]

Perhaps it's the future-inlaws (assuming they don't speak your language) who'll be the better language partner rather than the gf/bf?

[rezaf]

Perhaps it's the future-inlaws (assuming they don't speak your language) who'll be the better language partner rather than the gf/bf?

Most of the future-inlaws that I have seen can't speak Mandarin well(maybe except for some places in the north) and when the gf and the future-inlaws are together they will only speak their local dialect which is not really a good thing to learn as a beginner.

[gato]

Have you seen a lot of future in-laws? Hehe.