Progress After X Amount of Time. HELP.

[sneakymonkey]

For those of you with experience...

Assuming 20 hours of classes a week at a school in Beijing how much progress could a beginner expect to make in say 3 months, 6 months, 1 year. I understand that there are other things to factor in such as the amount of dedication one puts in to their studies, interaction with locals, etc. But please generalize for me. I'm trying to decide how long to study in China for.

[Danski]

Such a hard question to answer - depends on the person's ability really. Some people are just never going to learn Chinese even if they spend 10 years studying it. Other people can pick a lot up really quickly. If you are looking for something approaching "fluency" then figure devoting 5-10 years to the goal.

3 months? If you work hard you'll know a few hundred words, be able to write a coupel of hundred characters and be able to recite some sentences that you've learned from your text book.

6 months? You should be quite adept at substituting lots of vocab in to memorised sentences.

1 year? You should be able to have fairly simple conversations but not at a level where you'll be able to get a job that requires you to speak Chinese.

It really makes me laugh when people ask these sort of questions. I don't know a single person that's not underestimated the amount of commitment this project needs.

I once met an American girl in HK who was talking about how she was taking a sabbatical to go to Beijing to learn Chinese. You know, she thought it would be good for her job if she took time out to learn the language and clients would respect her for learning chinese and how she thought it would be great to do something interesting with her life. . . .

And how long was this sabbatical??? . . . . 6 weeks. Doh! It was only my British reserve that stopped me spurting out my beer and laughing openly in her face.

6 weeks. Hahaha. Still makes me laugh to this day.

[Chappie]

At the uni where is I was they had 7 levels.

Every level a semester! So if you a very dedicated hard student. You can do it in 3.5 year. But most of the time its like 5 years. For the lazy bastards 10 years

[Jizzosh]

It really depends on how much you focus yourself, your ability, and how mcuh you speak to people. You absolutely must use the language as much as humanly possible. My friend was fluent in about a year and a half, but he's Mormon, so he had to visit people's houses and talk to people in Mandarin at all times, go to Mandarin speaking churches, etc. He was utterly surrounded by it, and he accomplished fluency within two years.

Just force yourself to speak, listen, and do everything in Chinese, and once you get the ability to have basic conversations, you can then continually add new words. You'll be there in no time...

[trevelyan]

>> 6 weeks. Hahaha. Still makes me laugh to this day. Very Happy <<

lolol. took me 6 weeks to figure out my first Chinese-English dictionary.

笨鸟先飞