How many years have you been studying Chinese?

[Erbse]

This is not a poll! I get this question once in a while and I become more and more dissatisfied with my answer when talking to people who are not language learners.

I started learning Chinese in late summer 2006. That's 6 years. When I talk to other learners of Chinese I feel comfortable to say I'm learning for 6 years. When I talk to people who learn foreign languages ( not necessarily Chinese), 6 years is still an okay answer. I learn Chinese in my leisure time. When I started I learned it while doing a bachelor degree in computer sciences at the same time. Now I'm working full time in a non-language related job and the study of Chinese is something I do during my commute and at the weekends. Apart from that I sometimes I make breaks. This year in spring I started Russian and did not even do my Chinese SRS. No Chinese at all for 4 months.

I'm satisfied with the results. I feel that everything is all right with my progress, when compared to the amount of time I spend on learning.

However when I talk to people, who don't learn foreign languages, 6 years is to much. I immediately get a reply, that my Chinese must be enough to do about anything in Chinese (read newspaper, watch TV, ...). Awkward situation.

Here is my question, especially to those persons who have a similar learning history:

How do you answer the question?

Recently I began to state that I only learn a few hours at the weekend before answering the how many years question.

[icebear]

You could tone it down by saying you've been studying "on and off" or "its been a hobby" for 6 years. I'm in roughly the same boat, and usually saying the former...

[外国赤佬]

Two years (since I came to China, still here), HSK5.

I think you can get to a near-native level after about 4 years in China, if you spend all that time intensively studying and making a lot of friends. Watching movies and news, reading newspapers and books is also very important. Immersion is the key. Just like our teacher told us: ask any ordinary Chinese what does a particular 成语 mean, character by character, or what's the story behind it, he will have no idea, yet he can still use it perfectly, just by imitation. I'd really like to stress this point. Some of the Western professors of Chinese don't really understand some of seemingly very simple 口语 phrases, like 看你说的, simply because they didn't have enough exposure. Most of the Western 'scholars' would just learn Chinese in their home country, spend a year here (probably just inside the campus walls most of that time), then go back home, write some paper on the language, and voila, they're now a professor, but still nowhere near fluent.

[abcdefg]

I use the "off and on" answer, like @Icebear, above in # 2. Just recently learned how to say it in Chinese, since I get asked that question here a lot by locals.

间断，不是连续。

[Guest realmayo]

Two years (since I came to China, still here), HSK5.

I think you can get to a near-native level after about 4 years in China

Let us know in 2014

Back on topic: it's a good question -- I've been in a similar situation loads and got tired of making the same rather wordy explanation. Wish I'd known to deploy abcdefg's response. Instead I often just lied and said a couple of years or whatever was broadly consistent with my ability.

[xuefang]

Great topic! I've been thinking about the same question my self.

Chinese people usually ask me how long I have been in China and think that's also the same time I've been learning Chinese. I answer 2,5 years or more than two years, and don't correct them when they compliment how my Chinese is so good for someone who have studied it only for 2,5 years. I did study Chinese in Finland before I came her for 1,5 years, but it was very part-time, maximum of 4 hours of lessons per week.

If someone asks me directly how long I've been studying Chinese then I usually answer "About 4 years, 1,5 years in Finland and 2,5 years in China." I feel that I have the need to tell that I haven't been studying full-time for all those 4 years, and it does make a huge difference if you study part-time back home or full-time in China.

[li3wei1]

You could say 'the equivalent of . . .' and add whatever number of years seems reasonable for whatever skill level you're at.

[Tiana]

My answer: "Years..."

[OneEye]

I usually say that I studied on and off in the US for a few years, and have been studying full-time in Taiwan for a year.

And in response to 外國赤佬's comment about 成語, at least in Taiwan, I've found that people can nearly always explain the 成語 in detail. But then again, they spend a good part of their elementary school years learning/memorizing the stories behind them, and it may not be that way in China (太封建了吧!).

Edit: Recently, a friend of mine, whose Chinese is amazing, had this conversation with a cab driver:

司機：你國語講得很好！

朋友：喔，還好。

司機：你住台灣多久？

朋友：七年了。

司機：喔，沒錯。還好吧。

:mrgreen:

[Meng Lelan]

Fewer people ask me this over the years now that I am well into middle age and even when they ask I say I studied in university decades ago.

[WestTexas]

5 years. I have met people who are more fluent than me who have studied less (but they studied full time in China), and people who majored in Chinese who were worse than me (but generally they didn't do more than a year or two in China). In addition, some people are just better at languages.

In my experience, the only foreign learners who are really fluent tend to be:

(A)People who went to school here full time for several years

(B)People who have lived here 5+ years, are fairly extroverted, and use Chinese at their job

And some of the people of type (B) have fantastic listening and huge vocabularies, but strong accents and/or bad grammar.

[hanyu_xuesheng]

23 years, and not fluent. But when I am in Taiwan, I have no problems. It's a life-long, just for fun, study project. Or call it a hobby.

[muirm]

My situation is almost identical to the OP's, even down to the major! When someone asks me how long I've been studying, I usually say I started in college, then after graduating continued with self-study in my free time. It makes me feel better to emphasize that after college it's been mostly 自学。If they still aren't quite satisfied, I might then say what year I graduated in, and let them figure the years out if that's what they want.

[tooironic]

TBH this question really irks me, and it also happens to be one of the most commonly asked ones. Chinese people seemed obsessed with numbers, to the extent that if you ask them, for example, how often they go to the movies, many reply, "Um, about 2-3 times a month". In my head I'm thinking, wow, that's very specific, are they keeping a tally in their diary? My theory is that they are translating "often" here very literally in their heads as 频率是多少. Anyway, it's really a cultural difference as in Australia we don't usually use numbers to measure the frequency of something in conversation, but rather we use... err, words, I guess.

Anyway, If I were to calculate the number of years I've been learning Chinese it's around about 15, but I tend to just reply by saying "I started learning in primary school, about the same amount of time you've learnt English right?" After all, the exact number of years you've learnt a language doesn't mean that much since it's not as if every year you learnt the language at the same intensive pace.

[abcdefg]

#14 --

TBH this question really irks me, and it also happens to be one of the most commonly asked ones.

Understand what you mean. It feels like I'm being "graded" and the questioner is trying to decide if I deserve praise for learning so fast or rebuke for learning so slowly.

Had an acquaintance once in Kunming who always answered, "Only one week, but of course I'm a genius."

[Olle Linge]

I've studied for five years, whereof three were in Sweden and two in Taiwan. I usually just say that. I know that the number of years doesn't mean anything at all (I would say the number of hours matters most, but that's difficult to count), but I don't really see the point in explaining this unless the person asking the question really wants to know. I might bring it up if someone starts comparing by saying that his hor her English sucks even after 15 years, pointing out that it's unfair to compare one year of complete immersion with one year of going to English class twice a week.

I think we all want to give a good answer that truly reflects for how long we have studied, but since that's very hard (or impossible) to give, I've just decided not to bother. I say five years (or whatever) and don't really care if that means someone is overestimating or underestimating the number of hours I've studied or have been exposed to Chinese.

[anonymoose]

On a related note, people often ask me how long I've been in Shanghai. When I tell them, they say how good my chinese is for such a short time. Of course, I didn't mention the fact that I had also spent over a year in Dalian prior to that, as well as having learnt by myself for several years before coming to China.

[AdamD]

I've been learning for almost three years (formally for 1.5), and I hate telling people that because sometimes they want me to 'say something'. I can do it, but as my grammar is behind my word/character retention, my sentences are all over the place.

Usually I just say I'm not yet up to speaking or listening with confidence, which earns me weird looks from people who don't know what learning Chinese involves.

[laurenth]

This summer, I spent 2 weeks of holidays in China and got that question almost every day. As my "fluency" tends to vary a lot (does anyone else have that experience, btw?) according to the person with whom I'm talking, the subject matter of the conversation, the background noise, my mood or, for lack of a better explanation, the phases of the moon, I often gave different numbers, based on a quick, on-the-spot, self-assessment of what the less embarrassing answer could be.

I think many Chinese have a hard time believing someone could be learning their language from abroad: one day, I was asked "how long I'd been in China", I answered "about two weeks" and my interlocutor told me: "Oh, your level is already pretty good!".

PS: real answer: 4.5 years, from abroad, on and off for the first 2 years, then compulsively.

[li3wei1]

I had a friend in Taiwan who grew very tired of the common belief among the locals (this is years ago, things may have changed) that Chinese was very difficult to learn and non-ethnic Chinese people learning Chinese was a completely different ballgame from, say, Chinese people learning English. In other words, Chinese was so hard that only Chinese people could really learn it. One day she reported with glee that some kid had heard her speaking Chinese, and asked her 'Why did you learn Chinese?', to which she answered 'Because I was too stupid to learn English'. This gave her great satisfaction

Same friend, also tired of the question 'Will you teach me English?', would reply, 'Sure, will you do my laundry?'.