How much is it possible to learn in one year?

[Median]

Good day.

I'm doing a project at my school which involves traveling to China next year for some weeks, and I'm planning (Well, I must kind of) to learn chinese through self-study, alone, in my home. How much is it possible to learn in a year when it comes to chinese? I heard it's a hard language to master and that you will need to know around 5000 words to reach the level of an educated native.

I'll be happy if it's possible to reach a basic fluency at least.

I will probably be spending every day studying after I've acquired some material (recommendations are appreciated, otherwise I'll just search around).

Thanks!

[thechamp]

So, exactly how long is string?! ; )

Get the New Practical Chinese Reader and Hanyu Kouyu Jiaocheng. They're both pretty good for starting out. Although both have some slightly bizarre vocabulary in the earlier books. I also used a book called hanyu kouyu sucheng, but three textbook series is probably not really necessary

[icebear]

I'll second that NPCR is good material for at least the first few volumes, and there are videos/audio on YouTube (search for "NPCR 17" for chapter 17, for example). I'd also suggest following the Popup Chinese free podcasts (or ChinesePod if you are interested in paying, for some extra content), which can sync with your MP3 player automatically and you can listen to them during your commute or gym time to get more exposure to the sound of the language. Others here strongly recommend graded readers like Chinese Breeze, which are reading material suited to those with limited vocabulary. Anki or Skritter will help with retaining all the vocabulary you learn. Depending on how quickly you internalize vocabulary, after 6-9 months you might (might) be capable of following a basic amount of Chinese TV, which you can find plenty on via YouTube (searching for the show name - see other threads here for suggestions) - starting media viewing too early might be very frustrating and time consuming, however. (A further search for any of these will give much more detail on each).

Regarding what is possible in a year; I'd suggest setting a daily time that is fixed for studying which you can commit to 5-7 days per week (say an hour in the morning before doing anything else). Try to learn (including, but not limited to, adding to your SRS flashcards) at least 3 words per day... at this rate you'll know around a thousand after a year, and if you've learned them well (with lots of context) you would be able to survive in basic situations in Chinese and have simple conversations. Many serious language students average around 10 words per day (or more!) over extended periods of time, which amounts to over 3000 words per year - if you've learned that much well, you can have pretty robust conversations and follow a reasonable amount of non-technical television and reading. I think the latter goal is lofty for a new learner (that pace might set you up for burnout in 6 months), but it is possible if you are motivate and disciplined... the lower goal is extremely feasible in my opinion.

Good luck.

[Median]

I appreciate the answer and I'll look into it.

[thechamp]

I didn't realize the NPCR was on youtube. Well spotted!

[imron]

I second what icebear says above. Pick a reasonably easy to achieve target, e.g. 5 new words a day, and just make sure you do it *every* day. Before you know it you'll have amassed a reasonably large vocabulary. The reason to pick an easy to achieve target is that it doesn't require as much effort per day, and this makes it easier to make it part of your daily routine.

[jkhsu]

I'm planning (Well, I must kind of) to learn chinese through self-study, alone, in my home. How much is it possible to learn in a year when it comes to chinese?

You can get pretty far in reading, vocab acquisition, and listening (if you watch a lot of TV shows, listen to podcasts, etc.). However, I highly recommend that you get a native speaker tutor to help you with pronunciation and speaking. You can do this remotely via Skype, etc. I think an hour a week is probably enough. If you can't afford the whole year, then do this at least for the first couple of months. If there are Chinese language meetups in your area, join them. Try to put yourself in situations where you can practice speaking and listening to real people. While it may not work for everyone, I found language exchange partners really helpful (I found mine through craigslist at the time).

[icebear]

Agreed with jkhsu - I'd suggest giving a few tutors with good ratings on italki.com a try. Very cheap per hour, and as said above, you only need a hour every week or so to ensure your pronunciation is reasonable. More time would be needed to develop speed in speaking and response, but that will also come relatively quickly once in China, granted that you've listened to a lot of native content (podcasts, videos on YouTube) during your year of study.

[Caster]

chinese is kind of language changed from pictures. so firstly you'd better take some time to study the old chinese, the original picture of chinese character, that will make you a better understanding and have more interests in it.

do you know how the word autumn? in chinese it is 秋, and the earliest 秋 is a picture contains locust，fire, and crops. it means that set fire on locust to protect crops and that's what exactly people did in the autumn at that time.

and secondly, you should know that you don't need to know 5000 words in chinese. you need to know the characters, because the words are made of characters. and even a chinese can't know more than 4000 characters, so just learn 1000 characters which are often used, like verb 走、跳、跑, noun 茶、杯、壶 , adj. 美、丑、靓etc

and thirdly, you may discover that chinese a character often has two or three parts. just like the 跑, you can see 足 in that left of it , 跑means run, and 足in the left tell you that it's concerned with feet, just like 跳jump, 踢kick。and the other part of the character means the similar pronunciation of it. learn in this way so you can soon refer to chinese dictionary to help yourself to learn more characters.

fourthly, you must remember there are two kind of chinese, simple chinese and traditional chinese. the only difference between them is in the character, the traditional one is more complexed in characters than the simple one. part of them are the same, but most of them aren't. my advice is learn them at the same time, cuz simple character is changed from the traditional one, and most of chinese use simple chinese characters but the people who live in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan use the traditional chinese characters. if you just learn in one way, you will be confused when you see that other kind of characters in the future, so study them at the same time, it won't take you too much time.

at last, most chinese people don't speak mandarin in their daily lives, but it doesn't mean that they can speak mandarin, just like to use their local chinese language. so make sure what you're learning is mandarin, that's the standard chinese.

good luck and email me whatever you want to know about chinese:

chinesegentleman@gmail.com

[Demonic_Duck]

chinese is kind of language changed from pictures. so firstly you'd better take some time to study the old chinese, the original picture of chinese character, that will make you a better understanding and have more interests in it.

Disagree. Learning a few of the old forms for characters and the evolution into their current forms may help somewhat, but spending any great amount of time on it is just more stuff to learn. You'd be better off spending time learning the current versions of the radicals, which give hints as to the meaning of characters (as in your example of 跑).

and secondly, you should know that you don't need to know 5000 words in chinese. you need to know the characters, because the words are made of characters. and even a chinese can't know more than 4000 characters, so just learn 1000 characters which are often used, like verb 走、跳、跑, noun 茶、杯、壶 , adj. 美、丑、靓etc

Also disagree with this. Knowing the characters individually doesn't necessarily mean you know the word. It might be elementary with examples like 飞 + 机 = 飞机, but knowing that 太 means "too" or "very" will never help you to guess that 太太 means "wife". And that's even a really simple example, don't even get started on chengyu and other idiomatic phrases.

[anonymoose]

On the contrary, I think with chengyu, knowing the meaning of the individual characters helps a lot with actually grasping the deeper meaning of the chengyu.

[Median]

Thanks everyone! I might not be able to get a hold of a native speaker (I would prefer here in my town) but I do know one teacher that's quite good at mandarin, seeing as she's been living and teaching english in China for quite some while. She also acts as a chinese teacher at our local school, so that might be of some help.

[icebear]

Fully agree with Demonic_Duck... learning archaic forms or texts my be interesting to some, but is in no way necessary (or even encouraged). This would be like telling someone that if they want to study modern English they should start with Shakespeare. It might be a huge motivator for a small number of people, but most would find it discouraging.

[Caster]

I agree with Demonic_Duck, maybe that's too hard for a new guy to learn so much unnecessary things and it isn't efficient indeed.

[Demonic_Duck]

On the contrary, I think with chengyu, knowing the meaning of the individual characters helps a lot with actually grasping the deeper meaning of the chengyu.

I'm not saying learning individual characters won't help - in a great many cases it will. I'm just saying that learning individual characters in isolation is not a good way to learn Chinese.

[amandagmu]

Knowing every character in chengyu 成语 does *not* always help. Knowing characters for 四个字 phrases, ok, yes, I would agree (乱七八糟 would be somewhat easy to guess). But you can't tell me that you think it's easy for someone to automatically derive the meaning of something like 守株待兔 just from knowing each character. You either have to memorize the translation or know the story of the farmer and hare. (That's the deeper meaning, of course, but to those of us who do not have the time or interest in hearing every little tidbit of every 成语 story this can be frustrating.)

[amandagmu]

As for learning Chinese: I recommend the podcasts for practicing listening comprehension and pronunciation. I started learning before ChinesePod and Pop-Up Chinese, in a formal class environment, but one of the greatest things my teacher made me do from early on was pinyin with tones (without characters) for effective pronunciation. She gave me her set of audio clips the first week and I spent the next month repeating the words and phrases each day for a few minutes (sometimes while out jogging).

The last thing you want in Chinese is to have bad pronunciation of basic pinyin. I am not referring to tones here, I just mean basic pronunciation using the romanized alphabet. When most of us start speaking Chinese we're virtually incapable of producing correct tones within a full sentence. My first time to mainland China, after taking beginner's Chinese and doing what I said above, I found that as long as I had the pronunciation correct and could produce a very basic sentence, most of the time people could understand what I was trying to say, even with my poor tones. This was not the case for people who had bad pronunciation from the beginning.

Oh, and a great technique for learning tones and rhythm for me is to repeat short, commonly-used phrases immediately after a native Chinese speaker has said them. (Still works!)

[xyz123abc]

:o Are you saying learning characters is not a good idea?. Because that is what I am doing at the momment! Learning characters and two or three words (and maybe a 4 char phrase) which contain them.

[amandagmu]

Eh? Where did I say that?

But, maybe you aren't talking to me. Unclear.

[xyz123abc]

I'm just saying that learning individual characters in isolation is not a good way to learn Chinese.

Demonicduck. That was a hard slap I need to get a textbook!