How many years will it take me to be fluent in Chinese

[qxw671]

I study Chinese on my own for roughly 10 hours a day. Every day I would get a piece of paper and write down 15 characters from a list of 3000 most commonly used characters. I would keep writing these characters over and over again for about two hours. Afterwards, I would read a children book. Whenever I come across a character or word that I don't understand I would look it up in the dictionary. Once I can read the book on my own and understand all of it. I would reward myself by watching a Chinese show on pptv. I would also pause whenever I see a word that I don't understand and write it down on a word doc.

I have been doing this for about a year now and so far I can watch most Chinese shows and understand 60-70% of it. I can read most children books and understand 90% of it. If I keep this up, how many more years before I'll be fluent in mandarin Chinese?

[WestTexas]

seems like you aren't practicing speaking much. Looks like mostly reading. You'll never be fluent if you just read and don't speak. Also 'fluent' is a vague term. Maybe you should consult the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages and give a level. Then people can give you a better answer.

[WestTexas]

I can read most children books and understand 90% of it.

IMO it's time to upgrade to newspapers and websites

[roddy]

Who are you, where do you live, how old are you, how do you have 10 hours of free times every day, why are you learning Chinese, and welcome to the forum.

At the current rate it'll take you a million years to be fluent, as you aren't speaking at all. But I'm pretty sure we can sort you out if we know a bit more about your circumstances...

[kaluosi]

Really pleased I found this forum.

I've been learning Mandarin since beginning of 2007. I did GCSE in June 2008 and got an A star and then did the A level exam with oral in June 2010 and managed to get an A.

I'm not Chinese and don't know anyone who is, but got help from tutors and their student friends.

The plan is to go to China for 6 months to a year, starting in the spring of next year, to help me develop my listening skills and spoken fluency. However, our 4 year old daughter starts at a very good school in south London in September 2012 but I'm in two minds about taking her out of school and not being able to get her back into the same school/a good school on our return. I'm also not sure if spending six months to a year in China would lift my Chinese to a professional level.

We went to China in 2009 and I got on pretty well when speaking the language. I can read the news in Chinese on the BBC website, and when I open a newspaper I can understand 90% of 90% of the stories and read aloud. One of the students I practiced gave favourable feedback. I used to watch some of the Chinese dramas on PCNE (Can't LioveWithout Her, Royal Embroidery Workshop) following the Chinese subtitles to help me understand. However, being able to read and write Chinese doesn't mean much if you have relatively underdeveloped listening and speaking skills.

Is there any way that I could meaningfully develop my spoken skills in the UK? There's some sort of immersion course at SOAS (£10k or something!) which I've looked at but wonder if it would be effective.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

[qxw671]

I was born in China, moved to the U.S. when I was 5 years old. My parents came from a poor family so they never got any education when they were young. At home, we generally speak our native dialect. I recently graduated from college so I have a lot of free time to study. As for why I'm learning Chinese, it's actually a long story that I don't want to go into details. I think my speaking skill is actually quite good. Growing up I would watch a lot of Chinese shows and just repeat what I hear. I also have some close Chinese friends that I would speak mandarin with, whether it's on qq or in person. However, I feel that I'm really lacking in vocabulary, that's why I have been reading a lot. For example, I can say "有时候我觉得一个人整天练习中文很孤独和无聊" with no American accent at all but if you were to ask me to write that down. I would only know how to write 有，我觉得一个人，中文， and 和.

[renzhe]

So you're conversational on a limited number of topics and are trying to expand your vocabulary and improve reading/writing?

It will very much depend on how immersive your environment is. When you get past the intermediate stage, you need lots of volume and things that constantly keep you out of your comfort range. An extended stay (a year) in China could do wonders for you.Use something like Anki or Skritter to help you with memorising characters. In my experience, it takes about 2 years to learn the most common 3000 characters, but you need to keep reading daily for a long time to solidify them after that.

[chineserelics]

qxw671,

Impressive dedication, that will help a lot, and what will help even more is your passion which is driving your dedication. If you've kept this up for a year already then it obviously means you can see the value in keeping it up and so will continue doing so.

As for being fluent, fluent is a vague term. I am fluent when I speak with my fiancé, when I go to meetings at work and with my clients, but if you ask me to suddenly start talking about rocket science, engineering or something like that then I am hopeless because I don't have the vocabulary for that. I guess you could define fluent as the ability to think in the language, as opposed to having to first translate in your head and then speak it out, and the ability to speak smoothly and coherently. It took me about 3 years of deep immersion to get to that level. If you study as hard you do and have the immersion then within 3 years you'll be at a much higher level than me.

Coming to China will help a lot. You could view the studying that you're doing now as building a very solid base, and for the conversational ability you will develop very little the way you are studying right now, however if you move to China for 6 months this foundation will accelerate the development of your conversational ability. In fact, I imagine after just several weeks you would be speaking pretty awesomely.

I do have one issue you might want to be aware of. What is driving you to study Chinese so hard? I'm guessing a lot of it's pure passion and love for the language, that's good. If you think it's going to help you get a job in the future then think about what you want to do. I'm starting to meet a lot of foreigners in China who have learnt the language really well and then come to China expecting to find a job based purely on their language ability, but don't realise that the language alone isn't going to get them anywhere. An extra skill is needed, which compliments the language. Sometimes like being an engineer, or a logistics expert etc. and fluent in Chinese will help you find awesome jobs, whereas speaking Chinese alone will leave you in competition with hundreds of millions of other people.