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Immersion advice - 14 months


odaiba

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Hi Odaiba,

Forget the very possibility of being fluent in Chinese in 14 months.

Given your ambition and your proposed plan, I have no doubt that you will progress tremendously during your time there. But 14 months is simply not enough time to become fluent in a language so different than your native tongue.

Where will you be? You'll be comfortably conversational. If you are extroverted, you'll be able to handle yourself in almost all casual social situations. You'll understand the main idea of television shows (if they are based on daily life), and you'll be able to travel the country with ease.

You won't be able to understand much specialized language (business, medicine, law, etc) as you simply have too many words to study before you specialize.

My advice to you is threefold:

  1. Roleplay with your tutor. Get out and experience life with your tutor, and write down what you don't know how to say but want to. Study this material later.
  2. Review 60% of the time. Don't become an academic of Chinese who has gotten through advanced Chinese books but can't hold his own in a conversation.
  3. Never, ever, put your iPod down. You should be listening to Chinese speech 25 hours a day. Old lessons, future lessons, anything.

Good luck!

Dan

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If you're interested, I wrote more about how long it takes to learn Chinese here:

#23 -- And now your advertising campaign consists mainly of answering posts here, hoping to drive traffic to your website.

You are selling a book for $26 a pop which consists of old information that you have re-hashed and re-packaged and are the eight thousandth person to "discover."

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