Need to be conversational in Mandarin FAST

[Shandongren]

Hi all Chinese learners,

I need your expert advice!

I am currently working in China and need to become conversational fast. I am at a bumbling basic level after four months here, but need to be at a business meeting-conversation level ASAP. Failure means misery and unhappiness on the family and professional level.

I am looking at speaking only at this point, because I do not have the time and energy to commit to learning to read and write. Yes, I always scorned the foreigners who wanted to take the easy route, even thinking that they were lazy and unmotivated, by not wanting to learn characters. Yet after four months and about one hundred characters, I am still unable to communicate and realize that learning characters is not helping me at this early stage and frankly it is very inefficient. Also, I am not certain the effort to learn to read will ever pay off anyway since I do not imagine my job will ever require these skills. Finally I figure if I decide to learn to read and write later, I will be in the same boat as Chinese school kids kids who speak at a basic level already before learning these skills. The learning curve seems just too big at this point if I decide to learn all three skills, although I agree that eventually I will learn faster if I put in the groundwork. But at this point I would rather remember a hundred homonyms than a thousand characters.

I am listening to talk radio daily to get the sound of the language. I try to speak as much as possible daily. I also have sporadic sessions with a language tutor. But for the most part, I am learning on my own. I use a flashcard program to memorize pinyin words and meanings. I am working through pimsleur mandarin program and the textbook integrated chinese.

I am in need of some advice for this who have taken this road on what works best. what's the fastest way to learn to speak? What other tools do you recommend?

Thanks in advice for the collective wisdom.

[kdavid]

First, you need to get the basics down, in particular pinyin and tones, before you'll be considered fluent. Pronunciation takes time. Flawless grammar and a large vocabulary will all be for naught if people can't understand what you're saying.

Second, read this post from Sinosplice on language power struggles. Essentially, until your Mandarin level is higher than the English level of those with whom you're conversing, everything will default to English.

Third, I recommend you check out this ebook I wrote. Inside, you'll find the blueprint to fluency in months. While it sounds impossible, if you really dedicate yourself to following through with the contents, you'll see results in a short time.

Lastly, remember that learning any language is a life-long process. In order to become an articulate, well-spoken speaker of Mandarin, you'll need to develop reading and writing skills. Developing these skills will help you become a better speaker. In addition, if you're dedicating your life to China and Chinese culture, even with great oral Mandarin, you'll still be considered just a "tourist" if you don't also master the written language.

Good luck!

[neverending]

Wow - I think that business-meeting language is no small goal. This is well beyond the basic social goals that many quick learners give themselves. The biggest problem with business meetings is that there is rarely time to accommodate your misapprehensions. If your goal is to reach this level in a few months, then I'm not sure it's doable, even if you can spend 60 hours a week learning. But I'll try to give my own advice anyway:

Listening:

You've forgotten to mention the 4th skill - listening! In a conversation, I'd rate listening as more important than speaking - especially in a business meeting context, where you'll be listening a lot more than talking, and you can't ask people to repeat things too many times. Indeed, from my own experience in language learning, listening is the skill that requires the greatest attention - taking up to 50% of my total learning time. Additionally, I find that listening often improves speaking to a degree.

How to learn listening? Firstly, forget about the radio show. While it doesn't hurt, it's definitely not the most time efficient way to listen. "Passive" listening to material well above your level just doesn't work. You need to be listening to a vast quantity of level-appropriate material as often as possible, giving it your full, active attention. Finding the correct difficulty of material for listening is tricky. As a general rule, if you understand almost everything first time, it's too easy, and if you can't understand the gist of the audio after many listens without a transcript, it's too difficult. To find listening material, use graded readers with audio, integrated courses, and later on, audiobooks, tv/radio shows and films.

To give an example, here are several techniques I use to learn listening skills (this works for any language - not just Chinese):

• Buy a book/associated unabridged audiobook (or a graded reader with audio to begin with.) Read a chapter of the book. Flashcard all new words. Listen to the audio repeatedly until I can follow the meaning of every sentence. Repeat, repeat, repeat, until eventually I can listen to the audio first, and *then* read the text to confirm the meaning.
  
• Listen to a podcast every day from CSLPod.com, flashcard all new, *useful* words.
  
• Listen to a lesson from an integrated course (I personally find this the least useful, as integrated courses tend to have very short, simple dialogues, whereas for listening you need a large quantity of novel material.)
  
• Watch a tv show
  

I personally recommend listening to the same material again and again until you totally understand it, and flashcarding every word I come across, but people tend to be quite divided on whether this is best practice, so do whatever you feel is best for you. The difficulty with my approach is that I tend to learn quite a lot of weird words that don't come up every day, and you'll probably want a more efficient method.

Using a tutor:

Having a language tutor is great, but you should know how to get the best out of him/her. Don't let him/her waste time going over topics that you can learn at home - vocabulary, grammar, etc, can all be learned at home. Use your tutor as a knowledge base, whom you can ask for answers you can't get elsewhere. Always keep a notebook of things you don't understand during the week, so you can get through them efficiently during your lessons. Only ever speak Chinese in lessons, even if that means you have to do a lot of miming at first!

Use him/her to:

• answer questions you can't find easy answers for
  
• correct your pronunciation (this is extremely important at the beginning, so make sure your tutor is very picky with you)
  
• have conversation practice, where she/he corrects your errors
  

Speaking:

Once you can express very basic sentences without being misunderstood (by people who aren't your tutor), you can start to practice speaking more fully. Skype language exchanges, more paid tutors, waitresses in restaurants, etc - you need to spend as much time talking as possible. Full stop. If you want to be conversational, you simply can't avoid having conversations as much as possible!

On Characters:

Eventually you will *have* to learn characters, simply because, beyond a certain level, it is impossible to find learning materials that don't use characters. You can postpone it if you want, but I'm doubtful you can get to business level Chinese without them.

My own suggestion is to learn to write the first couple hundred of characters, so you know how the stroke system works. This will help you distinguish similar looking characters. Then, simply learn to recognise the rest of the characters, because this takes far less time than learning to write them. Except on forms, you'll probably never have occasion to write any Chinese on paper, and you can use pinyin typing systems online.

Time Learning:

How much time to spend learning? How much time do you have? If you're trying to learn quickly, you should be spending many hours a day learning - I'd suggest a minimum of 2 hours listening per day (but distributed into small sessions throughout the day to let your brain recover/absorb.), and another 2 hours on vocab/reading/grammar, etc... More is better, but vary what you do, because your brain is likely to "burn-out" and stop absorbing new material after you spend more than 20 minutes on one difficult task. So switch listening/vocab/doing your "real" work as much as possible.

At the end of the day, you may end up with very little time for anything else, but if learning Chinese is really that urgent for you, there is absolutely no substitute for time invested. Advanced fluency is often said to take over 3000 hours of solid study to achieve, meaning that with only 1 hour a day of concentrated practice, it would take over 8 years to achieve that level.

Vocabulary:

Flashcards/SRS are good! I use memrise.com for convenience personally, but Anki is also great. Just don't rely on them as a metric for how much you've learned. They're a great supplement to everything else you do, but no replacement for practicing the core skills. For the greatest efficiency, don't learn words before you're ready to hear/use them in conversation. Learn the core words first.

At a certain point, you'll have to acquire business vocabulary. At this point, for expediency, I suspect you'll probably need to hire a specialist tutor, but maybe someone else has a better proposition.

Resources:

A good course that focuses on spoken Chinese is the FSI standard chinese course, which you can find all for free, here: http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php?page=Chinese. It's all in audio, with an accompanying textbook. Don't be put off by its age - a lot of people still consider it one of the best courses.

Chinese Breeze graded readers - if you can stand to learn a few hundred characters, these come with audio, and I personally found them a highly effective way to improve my listening when I was starting out. There are other readers that come with pinyin, if you want, but I don't think they are as cost effective/enjoyable.

CSLPod.com, ChinesePod.com, PopUpChinese.com - learn Chinese from online podcasts. Great for listening. For time/cost efficiency my favourite is CSLPod, simply because the lessons are entirely in Chinese, and the audio/transcripts are free.

Memrise.com, Anki - best flashcard resources

Pleco - smartphone dictionary, with optical character recognition - very useful for reading characters without performing dictionary lookups.

Beyond this, I've moved into native material. Chinese-forums.com has a wealth of information on things like where to find level-appropriate tv-shows, comics, books, games, and vocabulary lists for these.

[feihong]

You need to adjust your expectations. If you are only at a basic level now, I doubt you'll reach business level in anything less than a year (and even then, it's a stretch). It sounds like you're already putting in a lot of time, but if speed is essential then you should enroll yourself in an actual language course, or at least see a tutor more often than "sporadically". Also, I believe you really can't achieve business fluency without knowing how to read, because the act of reading is what accelerates vocabulary acquisition at the advanced level. (Picking up new vocabulary only from listening becomes very inefficient after a certain point.)

Don't compare yourself to Chinese school kids. An average Chinese school kid, even one that doesn't yet know how to write, knows a shocking number of words.

[gato]

http://www.chinese-f...endent-student/

Learning Chinese – advice for the new and independent student

http://www.chinese-f...-for-beginners/

Some advice for beginners

I am at a bumbling basic level after four months here, but need to be at a business meeting-conversation level ASAP.

Have you been studying full-time during the four months? "Business conversational" may be a very high standard, depending on what you mean. It could mean "fluent", which probably would at least a year of full time study to achieve. You have to realistic, especially if your career and family is riding on it, and learn to prioritize.

What subject area is the business? Maybe we can point to some subject area resources.

Yeah, comparing yourself to Chinese 6-year olds isn't fair. They have private tutors teaching them Chinese at least 14 hours a day, and it probably took them 5 years to reach where they are.

[jkhsu]

I am at a bumbling basic level after four months here, but need to be at a business meeting-conversation level ASAP. Failure means misery and unhappiness on the family and professional level.

Can you provide more specifics on these business meetings and what is expected of you in terms of conversation and comprehension? Most people hire interpreters in those scenarios, even if they are conversational already. As others have said, business level Chinese is in the advanced and fluent category. You certainly don't want to have any misunderstandings in business meetings.

The only time (that I can think of) when you need to be conversational in a business meeting is if your business requires that you communicate in Chinese to others (e.g. you are a Chinese teacher or you are a salesman selling to Chinese customers).

[thechamp]

Erm, to jkhsu, it strikes me as odd that you'd be on a forum for people learning and enjoying the study of chinese, and be advocating not learning chinese?! I think we can assume that the guy really wants to learn to speak and understand chinese.

My advice on that front would be this: don't ignore the characters, and do textbook work with normal textbook series (NPCR/Boya) until you get to what they call the 'lower intermediate' level. Then it's probably safe to start on the business Chinese textbooks. I'd recommend 'A Business Trip to China' which has two levels - shang and xia. It's by Xiaojun Wang and comes with a cd too.

The reason for keeping up with characters and not skipping this stuff is that you'll find it incredibly hard to internalize grammar patterns without reading, and it's extremely difficult to even find things written in pinyin beyond the very early stages of chinese learning materials. You'll end up learning a lot of words but not many ways to actually 'say' things - you just won't have the grammatical machinery.

The reason for doing the normal textbooks at first is that at low levels 'business chinese' is just 'chinese'. Basic chinese that you have to learn. However, around the intermediate levels these books start to teach a lot more shumianyu (literary/writerly chinese) and that won't improve your 'conversational business chinese'. Personally, I like all the literature so I get a kick out of it....but if your goal is 'conversational business chinese' doing 1-3 of NPCR and then those books will get you there. You could do that in about a year full time.

Also, jkhsu, really? really!?

[xiaotao]

Maybe getting your tutor to specifically do a recording of precisely what you want to say or understand in your line or work would be helpful.

[Silent]

I am looking at speaking only at this point, because I do not have the time and energy to commit to learning to read and write.

Off course everyone is different, but I feel that reading skills really have added value to make sense in a sea of homonyms. And if you learn the pronunciation (pinyin) together with reading you pretty much have writing (typing) too.

To me 4 months and 100 characters seem a very sad result assuming you really put an effort in it. That's less then a character a day! How much time do you put into your flashcarding? How often do you skip? Then the mention of sporadic sessions with a language tutor and the general impression from your post..... I may be very wrong but I strongly get the feeling that you've a motivation/commitment issue. So my guess would be that you need a more structural approach.

Start doing your flashcards routinely daily, say 10 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes in the evening.

Take a textbook and study seriously at least half an hour daily.

Take some beginner level audio and loop it sentence by sentence till you understand it.

Have a tutorsession at least two or three times a week to get speaking practice and record/listen back those sessions

If I'm right about the commitment the only way to achieve this is by using a strict routine. schedule it at fixed times as much as possible. Make it a daily routine! If needed block your agenda to do so.

[icebear]

Erm, to jkhsu, it strikes me as odd that you'd be on a forum for people learning and enjoying the study of chinese, and be advocating not learning chinese?! I think we can assume that the guy really wants to learn to speak and understand chinese.

To be fair, jkhsu didn't tell the guy not to study Chinese, but rather expressed some skepticism that a) he could achieve that level of Chinese so quickly, and b) that he even needed to.

I agree (apparently most others do as well) that setting the goal of business fluent ASAP when only at the bumbling stage is a bad idea. Determine the amount of time you have available and are willing to energetically commit to studying each day and then use that to set some realistic goals for the next few months.

Do not neglect characters; keep in mind that newspapers are a good source of practicing comprehension related to business topics. I'm very skeptical of the possibility of reaching a high-functional/fluent level without any ability to read native material.

[renzhe]

The fastest way to learn to speak fast is probably having a pen handy and speaking to native speakers correcting you until you faint. You'll develop gaping holes in your knowledge which will take lots of fixing later, but it will improve your level significantly. You'll need willing, patient and knowledgeable partners, so I suggest paid tutors, every spare minute you can muster.

In this particular case, it might be best to simply record hours of business meetings, then analyse them in detail with a tutor later, noting all the relevant vocabulary (relevant for you and your business!) and repeating phrases, and re-enacting conversations.

Honestly, I don't think that it's doable. Many talented people chase Mandarin fluency for many years. But you can give it a good run and see where it gets you.

[thechamp]

Icebear, no, he didn't express skepticism that the OP could learn Chinese 'so' quickly. The OP doesn't even mention a timeframe! He just says ASAP....I think the soonest possible would be about a year of full time study.

Sorry if my earlier post sounds aggressive, it's just that I think the Why Do I Need to learn Chinese? attitude is kind of annoying and I've heard it a lot. Usually from people who studied 'business' at university and think their brand of 'business acumen' is in huge demand in China.

[jkhsu]

Erm, to jkhsu, it strikes me as odd that you'd be on a forum for people learning and enjoying the study of chinese, and be advocating not learning chinese?! I think we can assume that the guy really wants to learn to speak and understand chinese.

First of all, thanks icebear for your response. Just to clarify, I'm not asking the OP to not learn Chinese. I'm wondering in what context and in what scenario will he be "required" to speak non-fluent Chinese in a business meeting. Even if I had a BA in Chinese, I'd still hire a professional business translator to confirm that there are no misunderstandings between myself and my clients, customers, and/or partners before I sign a contract.

Don't get me wrong, I totally hope the OP continues to learn Chinese until he is fluent. I just want to set his expectations straight, especially if he is not even planning to learn Characters. There are those who have spent a good part of their lives becoming business translators. There is a reason why they are needed.

[thechamp]

Even if I had a BA in Chinese, I'd still hire a professional business translator to confirm that there are no misunderstandings between myself and my clients, customers, and/or partners before I sign a contract

Rubbish. Absolute rubbish.

In the politest possible manner - that's utter b0llocks. I know two people with BAs in Chinese, neither of whom now use translators at work, both of whom work for multinational well respected companies. Both of them were also doing 'business translation' work straight after their BAs in Chinese, when they were 22, after 4 years of Chinese.

I don't want to be rude but what you're saying is nonsense and perpetuates an absurd idea that Chinese is pretty much unlearnable by foreigners, which isn't true. Depending on what the OP wants from Chinese I think it's completely possible to learn a 'business fluent' level of chinese in around a year....if he focused on relevant vocab. Have you ever seen a contract!? The vocabulary and terms used don't change that much. They're no where near as challenging as a newspaper article because the content remains roughly the same

[jkhsu]

@thechamp: Yes, I've seen a contract and I ran a business in China. I've also been learning Chinese for many years including 2 years of college level Chinese. Perhaps I'm conservative when it comes to business meetings and contracts, but that's how I work. I don't really care to continue this particular discussion with you. More power to you and the OP for learning Chinese. I don't think we're in dispute about that part.

[WestTexas]

I think the idea of someone learning Chinese to a 'business meeting' level in one year is completely ridiculous. There are plenty of full-time students who have been here for several years who aren't at that level. I have studied Chinese for 4.5 years total (not full-time), been in China for 2.5 years, and I still don't think I'm at that level.

In my experience the Chinese companies who are employing westerners hire westerners for their technical or business skills, not for their Chinese abilities, and so I think jkhsu probably knows what he is talking about when he is skeptical of the distinct need to pick up 'business-meeting' Chinese so quickly. I also question why it is so essential that the OP learn business meeting skills as quickly as possible. Presumably his company already has workers who speak English and Chinese, as he can still do his job without knowing 'conversational' Chinese, so I'm not sure how it could be so urgent for him to pick it up.

[thechamp]

I'm beginning to feel a bit like Benny Lewis here....but I think yeah you could get to a pretty decent level of Chinese, in a very specific area - like an industry - in a year. Bear in mind the UK foreign office and the American equivalent suggest it takes two years to be considered 'working fluent' in Chinese and I'd suggest that a diplomat probably needs a more subtle understanding of the language than a businessman - like a sales representative or a new business guy. I myself am not at that kind of level after more than a year, but I've been studying different books and various sources. If you set yourself a very specific area I think you could get pretty good in that area

Also, yes, no-one is going to hire you for speaking chinese....in the same way that if someone goes to France and walks into and office and says 'hey i speak french, gimme job' no-one is going to employ them for that ability. I'm not suggesting that happens or anyone I know has done something similar in china.

Also, of course there are lots of students who've been in China for several years and still can't speak at an advanced level. That doesn't mean it can't be done though. There are lots of people who are not very committed studying because it's a laugh living in china on the cheap.

I just think it's a shame to tell someone who seems to want to learn Chinese that it's too hard and it might not be worthwhile

[wedge]

Put me in the skeptical camp as well. Even if the definition of "business meeting-conversation level" is 10 minutes of small talk about how was your trip and how has business been going lately, that implies a very solid upper-intermediate level of Chinese.

This thread reminds of this previous thread about someone trying to get to business-level Mandarin in a year:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/22663-immersion-advice-14-months/

[wedge]

Looking back, I realize that the OP never specified a timeframe, only "ASAP". If ASAP is 2+ years, I say it's possible. But if someone is studying Chinese for that long, he/she should definitely be learning characters.

[Shandongren]

Wow - you guys are great; thanks for your helpful tips and opinions. Maybe I'll clarify some things:

-I am juggling a new job in a new culture and industry, so the first four months were a sink-or-swim time for me, where learning Chinese was relegated to a distant third or fourth place in terms of priority, behind performing at my job, keeping my wife from jumping out of a window, understanding the cultural nuances and hierarchies, and meeting people with my signature 'i'm a foreigner who doesn't speak a word of your language but i have a good attitude' smile. I actually think being able to write 100 new characters is pretty good in this time; and things have mellowed out a bit, so now I am able to focus on language

-ASAP means as soon as humanly possible; hopefully within one year to be at least basic conversational and know what's going on, give me 2-3 years to be relatively fluent; I guess timelines are irrelevant, but I need to be improving daily, which I don't feel I am

-I speak four languages already so this is my fifth; yet I am having an incredibly difficult time getting my hands around Mandarin. I just can't seem to find a good approach; I honestly thought it would be easier. Humbling and depressing, but I believe it can be done with the right approach; thank you for all of your suggestions.

-someone in my business (raw materials) who had spent 2 years studying Mandarin at a school told me the time he used learning characters, etc. was a complete waste of time, as he never uses it at his job, he can't read and write well anyway, and his listening/speaking skills are half of what they'd be if he just focused on verbal communication; I saw his point and I think he's right. I will always use translators when doing anything sophisticated in Chinese (contracts, etc.), unless I spent 4 years of full time study learning to read and write, which I think is not the best use of time (my wife would agree ;) ). I have to be realistic; I don't have free time to learn reading and writing at the moment; and the longer I can't speak, the less of a real employee I am here (more like a trophy or token white guy; at least that's how I feel, although this isn't really the case, since I have technical skills that make me unique in the organization and don't really require Chinese). The opportunity cost is just too great. My goal is to be able to BS person to person with Chinese people, understand what is going on around me (without catching every single word), be able to discuss business concepts (not talking about technical specs but prices, shipment times, etc., not sophisticated stuff), and generally make a human connection and be part of the community here as much as possible. I see foreigners come in with translators all the time, and I think it is impossible to be part of this community if you don't speak the language at least a little bit to joke around or get to the real point or know what's going on around you. I feel like an idiot when people need to speak English to me because I don't understand, and although they're polite about it, it annoys everyone to have to switch to a foreign language just for my benefit. I'll always be a second class citizen here, unless I can speak to someone directly; this ability will take me to a completely different level. Hence the ASAP requirement.

-the worst part is that I am a visual learner, who for whatever reason memorizes characters easier than pinyin words, so I have to use a method which is not the most natural for me (listening etc).

-I liked the suggestion about listening to the same audio sample over and over, making flashcards of the words; and the idea that I need to go through a basic grammar book (integrated chinese 1) first to get at least a base. I am memorizing random words, and it seems useless without a grammatical framework to plug it into. I can say 'immediately' and 'to invite' and 'intersection' but I can't use them at all so I wonder if it is all for naught.

Do you guys think memorizing random words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc.) that I find in character books (the books where they give a character and use it in some sentences, such as Chinese in a Flash) is a good idea, and this will 'click' once I understand the grammar? Or better to focus on the simple grammar first, simple sentences (I want to go eat today) and build up to sophisticated sentences/vocabulary later?

Thank you so much!

PS I would love to learn to read and write, and I hope that one day I will, but unfortunately it is sink-or-swim right now; so to all of you who can devote 2+ hours a day to Chinese, I envy you a bit!