How long does a person take to speak Chinese?

[imron]

merged with similar topic.

[Chinadoog]

After 8 months of studying, 6 of which have been spent in China, I can have basic conversations with people and they have no problem understanding me. I still consider myself to be a beginner, and I'm not really at the point where I'm willing to say that I can ''speak Chinese,'' but really, if you study every day for a couple hours and have access to native speakers a few days a week you will learn really quickly. You don't need to be good at all to have basic conversations with people.

Living in China doesn't necessarily accelerate the speed at which you learn Chinese.If you have a lot of English speaking friends and you have a girlfriend who speaks English, you probably won't learn much faster than you would back in your home country. Going into resturaunts and ordering, or going into a store and asking if they have a specific kind of tea doesn't really help you learn that much either. You need to get yourself into actual conversations with people where you talk for more than a few minutes. I know people who have lived in China for 10 years and still can't speak the language.

[tooironic]

I'd say about ten years.

[rezaf]

I have been studying Chinese for 3 years in China, I'd say living in China and having Chinese friends won't solve the problem, because the the everyday conversation in Chinese is very easy and most of the time it's about 吃饭 but having said that upgrading yourself from the easy conversations to real conversations is something that will take a long time

(5 to 10 years?). When I was a beginner I always thaught that if I studied hard it would only take me 3 years to become comfortable in handling all kinds of conversations but now I know that Chinese is a very old language and it's age makes it very difficult even for a basic conversation, the language is deeply rooted in the culture and in order to speak it you really need to emerse yourself in this culture. Grammar and vocabulary are not enough for speaking this language. You should learn 礼节 (etiquette), the food, the history... so that you can choose the right words, otherwise you will always remain a laowai(alien), your Chinese won't improve from a certain level and after sometime you will become like many other foreigners in China who hate everything about China and complain all the time.

[Caidanbi]

I found that I could carry on basic conversations after about a year - year and a half. But it takes years to become fluent. It really depends on how much time you devote to studying, and honestly, everyone learns languages at a different rate anyways.

[louanto1]

I know someone whose level is comparable to a native speaker (he's been studying Mandarin for at least 10 years), but he still encounters people who (apparently due to that fact that he is a white person) seem to misunderstand him-even though he has worked as an interpreter. I had asked him about this as I would meet people who I would talk to endlessly and have few if any errors on my part. But, after some years, I might be just wanting some food and I feel I am back to a beginner's level when the person taking my order repeats what I say or looks confused.

In my experience, I was able to get around fairly well being self-taught within a couple of years. Although, I still make stupid mistakes or get a couple of characters coming out of my mouth switched around. I try to remind myself that I have done just fine seeing as i have accomplished understanding at least 60-70 of the t.v. news and can read and write.

[tooironic]

That's an interesting comment louanto1, and one that deserves its own thread. As English (native?) speakers we take it for granted that half the world wants to speak our language. We are used to it, and most people (in Australia at least) make concessions for people who have heavy accents, weird grammar, etc. Conversely, Chinese who are not used to Westerners may unconsciously put up barriers to prevent understanding, especially on first meeting.

[HedgePig]

I know someone whose level is comparable to a native speaker (he's been studying Mandarin for at least 10 years), but he still encounters people who (apparently due to that fact that he is a white person) seem to misunderstand him-even though he has worked as an interpreter.

I remember reading many years ago about a cartoon which amused me. I haven't seen the original but it went something along these lines. A foreigner in Beijing asks two people in the street for directions to the Summer Palace. His accent, tones, grammar etc. are flawless but he just gets blank stares. He repeats the questions, the two locals look completely nonplussed and don't say anything as they seem to have no idea what he is saying. Eventually he just gives up and walks away. As he's walking away, the one guy turns two his friend and says,"You know, I could have sworn he was asking for directions to the Summer Palace."

I suppose that's much less common now especially in bigger cities but perhaps the idea of a foreigner speaking good Chinese is still just incomprehensible to some. (I just wish that I could fool myself that is the reason for the blank stares I get!)

[Lu]

I think some of that misunderstanding is due to listening for the wrong language, the Chinese person trying their best to understand this foreigner's English but can't make head or tail of it, because it's not in fact English.

[chrix]

this kind of phenomenon has also been reported for Japan...

[Erbse]

I think we talked about this before quite some time ago (or was it on some other forum?). The conclusion was to say 1 or 2 very simple sentences in Chinese which cannot be misunderstood, before actually asking what one wishes to ask. This is just to make clear, hey, I can speak Chinese and I will use Chinese to place my order/ask for directions/...

[wushijiao]

I think I mentioned it once.

[XiaoXi]

I studied Chinese for a degree in the UK, which included a year abroad in Tianjin, and since then I have lived for a further 2 years in China. However, I feel very cagey about the word "fluent". I can talk on almost any topic to my Chinese friends - where they are used to my accent and I to theirs - but it is also possible to bump into a Chinese person whose Chinese I have great difficulty with, and I feel as if I have made less progress than I have. In reality, there are always going to be situations even for relatively advanced learners that take them back to square 1, or near it. The man who fixed my washing machine the other day understood my Chinese perfectly, but I could not understand more than 10% of his, as he came from a county outside Chengdu and could not speak putonghua.

If he doesn't speak putonghua then that's nothing to do with your Mandarin ability since he's pretty much speaking a different language. I might understand 10% of a European language due to the similarities with English but I certainly wouldn't say that my English ability was less than perfect (not that it is perfect) because of this.

[wedge]

Hey guys I'm about to move to Beijing for the rest of the year to learn Chinese and this is the question that's constantly on my mind.

In my experience, most of the comments are spot on -- It really comes down to just how much you are actively practicing and using the language. Even 15 minutes of real conversation is better than an hour of drills and audio lessons.

I know it's a bit of a controversial topic here but every case of which I am aware of a foreigner becoming really good, surprisingly fast at Mandarin involves dating a local. Makes total sense to me.

[tooironic]

I know it's a bit of a controversial topic here but every case of which I am aware of a foreigner becoming really good, surprisingly fast at Mandarin involves dating a local. Makes total sense to me.

Not me.

[chrix]

Yeah, I'm with tooironic, I can't hear this anymore...

I think it devalues the concept of a relationship...

[Meng Lelan]

Yeah, I'm with tooironic, I can't hear this anymore...

Oh dear, first John of CPod was rumored to be deaf and now chrix can't hear anymore.

[renzhe]

Yes, this should deafinitely stop.

[Meng Lelan]

Yes, this should deafinitely stop.

But this would fall on deaf ears.

[wedge]

Sorry to have brought that up. My only point was the obvious one that practice makes perfect and the more situational immersion, the better. If you had to pick a metric of studying effort that highly correlates with progress, it wouldn't be years studied or class hours or flashcards memorized or months in China. It would probably be something like "number of words spoken or read." (of course impractical to actually keep track of this)

Perhaps a better example -- when I was younger, my cousin from Hong Kong came to the US to live with us to attend a US high school. We just threw him in -- no TOEFL classes, he had no Chinese classmates that he could self-segregate with. He used English 7 hours a day and could only make American friends. His English was pretty comfortable within 2 years (hanging out with groups of Americans, working as a waiter, getting into arguments with strangers) and he was fluent by the time he graduated.

On the other hand, there was a group of Korean kids in my (US public) high school. Most of them had been there since their tween years. But they only hung out with each other and took TOEFL classes separately. For most of them, their English remained halting.

So the lesson for me when I make the move to Bejing is: Stay away from expats and ABCs!