For the past year or so, the number of U.S. news items related to learning Mandarin has exploded. Just today, I read an article announcing the opening of another Confucius Institute, this time in Southern California at UCLA. The Confucius Institutes are vehicles for promoting Chinese culture, and serve as Mandarin learning centers, a la the British Council with its English programs.
In this week’s International Edition of Newsweek, Asia scholar Stephen Noerper writes in his piece “Over a Billion Served,” that the Chinese government predicts that 100 million people worldwide will be studying Mandarin as a second language by 2010. The U.S. Department of Education has set the goal of having 5% of all students in the U.S. enrolled in Mandarin language programs within the next two years.
What nobody is really talking about* is whether or not these people will actually be able to learn to speak Mandarin with any degree of fluency. For anyone who has been thinking “Gee, I’d like to learn Mandarin,” I think you ought to know something about learning Mandarin: getting fluent in Mandarin is extremely difficult, and very few non-Chinese people are able to become functional speakers and writers of Mandarin.
(Warning: Horn tooting follows) As an American who speaks, reads, and writes fluent Mandarin, I always encourage people who want to learn Mandarin to remain dedicated to the task. Matter of fact, over the past eighteen years, I’ve spent a good many hours offering advice and coaching to would-be Sinophiles who want to learn to speak the language of the Middle Kingdom.
Some language learners DO learn to speak and write Mandarin fluently. I worked with a group of missionaries way back when, and I’d say 20% of them were really fluent after a year or so in the country. But these were missionaries, guys and gals who devoted their lives to language (and scripture) study. The other 80% either gave up or achieved marginal functionality in the language. So yes, some people are able to get fluent enough in a few years to be able to interpret, translate, conduct business, etc.
Still, the fact of the matter is, the percentage of Mandarin students who are able stick with their learning program, overcoming the stress, frustration, and constant headaches involved in becoming fully, functionally fluent in Chinese is lower than the Navy Seal training graduation rate. I’d venture to guess that there are plenty of Navy Seals who can handle starvation and sleep deprivation but who would ring the bell after a few months of learning Mandarin.
Why is learning Mandarin so difficult? Check out this article by David Moser on www.pinyin.info for a humorous primer on why learning Mandarin is so tough. Mr. Moser’s article deals with some of the technical problems inherent in learning Mandarin. To add my own two cents, there are some very practical problems for native English speakers who want to learn Mandarin, namely:
1. You won’t really get fluent in Mandarin if you don’t live in Taiwan or China for at least six months to a year.
2. You can’t get fluent in Mandarin unless it is your all-encompassing mission in life to do so. Most people don’t have that kind of time or desire.
3. Even if you get somewhat fluent, you will probably always sound like a foreigner, and Chinese people will laugh at you and correct you all the day long. Are you prepared to deal with this somewhat disconcerting cultural difference? Note: I don’t think that Chinese people realize how hurtful it is to laugh at a foreigner who mispronounces a word or phrase in Mandarin. For them, the situation is humorous, but not really in a “you’re an idiot” sort of way. The problem, of course, is that even if you approach this situation objectively, there is something cutting about someone laughing at you or publicly correcting you that is difficult to digest without some difficulty.
4 . You’ll probably never learn to write by hand very well. You’ll have to get by with using a phonemic alphabet called BoPoMoFo to type, and your writing will always seem foreign.
For a more comprehensive report on the difficulties involved in learning Mandarin, see my article in Taiwanease Magazine entitled “Why You Shouldn’t Learn Mandarin.” (Note: The link takes you to a .pdf download. My article begins on page 4, and is written under my pen name, Steven D. Quinn).
I don’t want to discourage people who want to learn Mandarin, I just want them to know what they are getting into. Ergo, if you are thinking of sending your kid or your next China-based product manager off to weekend Mandarin classes, hoping that they’ll learn enough to “get by” after six months or a year of classes, I think you’re dreaming.
I’d first find out whether or not your student has a burning desire to speak fluent Mandarin, and is willing to stick with the program until he is indeed fluent enough to function in a Mandarin-speaking society. Otherwise, you’d be better off sending him to a modern Chinese history course, taught in English.
*To give credit to Mr. Noerper, he does mention in his article that “…the language is hard, with more than 2,500 characters generally employed in daily writing and a complex tonal speaking system.” These are good points, but they are only the tip of the linguistic iceberg.
If any of my readers wants specific advice about what you can realistically expect out of U.S.-based Mandarin classes, please feel free to e-mail me.
17 Comments
October 13, 2007 at 12:24 am
I found your take on this interesting, since i am a teacher of English as a second/foreign language and an adult learner of a foreign language (French) myself.
Linguists have long held the belief that there is a critical period for language acquisition, and this period ends around puberty. Thus, learning a foreign language after puberty is often extremely difficult for anyone (regardless of the language and its perceived difficulty).
While i understand that your article is really addressing adult learners, you do throw the following in there:
(emphasis mine)
I completely agree that the product manager is unlikely to be able to get by with weekend classes, but you might be surprised by the kid.
I think it’s important, too, to make the distinction between fluency (a level of language use that few adult learners — or children not raised in a bilingual environment — ever feel they have achieved) and communication ability (getting by, if you like). While nice to have, fluency is not necessary to live comfortably in a foreign country.
Just a thought
October 14, 2007 at 12:57 pm
Thanks for the comment.
Sure, kids learn languages more easily than adults do. The point I’m making with this piece is that Mandarin is so far removed from any foreign langauge a native English speaker is likely to have encountered (e.g. Spanish, French, German, Italian) that becoming fluent in Mandarin is on par with scaling a mountain by walking on your hands. When I wrote my own magazine piece on the difficult of learning Mandarin, I was trying to dispel the thought that so many people have these days along the lines of “Chinese is going to be the next big language. I’ll send my kids to Mandarin classes.” If you sent English-speaking kids to Spanish classes, I could see them being able to converse in six months or a year. With Mandarin, it will take much longer, if it ever happens.
I completely agree with the distinction you draw being being able to use a foreign language order a dinner with a server or tell a cab driver where to go and actually being able to have a long conversation with either person. In the case of Mandarin, I doubt there are more than twenty or thirty thousand native English speakers on the planet who are truly fluent.
December 20, 2007 at 4:30 pm
I would like to see a continuation of the topic
December 21, 2007 at 6:07 pm
Maximus,
I’ve written a draft of a follow up article. My blessing is also my curse–I’ve got so many writing, training and consulting projects going that it is hard to update the blog as regularly as I’d like. I’ll try and polish the follow up piece over the weekend and post it next week.
You might also let me know what you are specifically interested in–I’ll try and address that area with the piece.
September 2, 2008 at 5:50 am
[...] Learning Chinese – How Difficult is it? (Truett Black of The Lingua Franca) [...]
September 13, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Dear Sir,
I am considering going to Shanghai to enroll in a mandarin immersion program for six months next year. I wonder if this will just be a waste of time or if it is possible to become at least conversationally proficient in such a short period. Any feedback would be great.
Thanks
-Vanessa
September 13, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Hi Vanessa,
The answer to your question depends on many variables, such as number of course hours, the way the curriculum is designed, how much conversation practice you’ll get, how “social” you are personally, whether you’ll be in situations where you can only rely on Mandarin, materials studied, etc.
Personally, I took a semester of Mandarin at university and then moved to Taiwan with the John DeFrancis texts in my suitcase. I studied an hour each morning, carried a vocabulary notebook with me as I went about my business each day, was a madman about asking people to help me figure out words they’d spoken that I didn’t understand, and pretty much spoken Chinese all day.
In six months, I was able to hold a conversation, though I didn’t yet have sufficient vocabulary to be able to discuss most topics in depth. I had to used circumlocution (“talking around”) to get my point across.
So no, I don’t think it will be a waste of time. You could get to the point where you could have many shallow conversations (e.g. talk about the weather, sports, people) and some deeper conversations about areas you’re interested in.
Honestly, at lot of this depends on how aggressive you are about opening your mouth and speaking, and about how well you listen and mimic the sounds around you. There is also a “natural gift” component here that very few people consider, i.e. some people are just more naturally blessed with language acquisition skills than others, and they will learn faster.
Finally, if you’re going to enroll in a Mandarin immersion program, it is best to be in China or Taiwan when you do it. Definitely preferable to being in a non-Chinese speaking country.
Good luck to you, and let me know if you need additional advice.
-True
November 10, 2008 at 1:27 am
It is difficult to learn Chinese but it can be done. It takes years. I started aged 39, thirteen years later I’m fluent in that I can converse for extended periods in Mandarin by listening carefully, reproducing the pronunciation of words I don’t understand and asking (in Mandarin) what the word means. I has been a long haul, and although a few days or a week or two here and there may have gone by without my getting down to a spot of study, I have by and large been on the case throughout the past decade and a third. The main problem is that I am English, and would far prefer to reside in England than in China/Taiwan. Fortunately, the Internet affords plenty of opportunities to listen to Mandarin, and there is no shortage of Chinese printed matter readily available in England. Of course there is little opportunity to converse using the language, but likewise no reason for doing so. This doesn’t stop me from speaking Mandarin however, and probably actually improves the quality of my speech, the reason being that more than 95 percent of the Mandarin I have ever spoken has been spoken along with a recording of a native speaking it. In consequence, I can practically recite the twelve main texts of ‘Taiwan Today : An Intermediate Course’ by heart. In my opinion, talk of the need to learn tones is counterproductive, the best way for English speaker Joe Bloggs (US JohnDoe) to get to speak Mnadarin well is to listen and repeat,listen and repeat, listen and repeat………………
December 8, 2008 at 3:48 am
Hello, I have applied for Chinese Studies at one of the universities of the UK (that is not my birth country). Now I am confused and wondering if I can learn this language in 4 years. I always thought I can pick up languages very easily as now I am fluent in 3 different ones and can speak 2 more at a lower level.
So do you think that studying Chinese at the university (3 years at the UK and 1 year spent in China) is a waste of time and you still will be unable to communicate or find a job concerned with the language?
Thank you in advance.
December 8, 2008 at 12:29 pm
Hello,
No! I don’t think what you suggest will be a waste of time. I just want you to understand that if you are a native speaker of English or some other Romance language and you’ve learned French, German, Spanish, Italian, or even Japanese, you’re going to find Chinese to be more difficult by half. There is no alphabet. You have to memorize 3,000 characters before you’ll be able to read the newspaper and understand the gist of what you are reading. There are four common tones which, if pronounced incorrectly nor not at all, will distort the meaning of what you’re trying to say or make you sound like a laughable amateur. There are very few commonalities between English and Chinese grammar. Chinese communication styles are very different from anything you’re used to.
If you understand all of these realities and are not daunted, then move ahead with faith and confidence. It is definitely possible to learn to speak, read, and write Chinese in a four year university program. What you’ll find, after four years, is that some of your classmates will be excellent and reading and writing but crap at speaking. Others will be good mimics and fluent conversationalists but won’t be much for reading and writing. A few of The Chosen will be skilled on all fronts.
When is the year in China? I hope it is Year 2, or Year 3 at the latest. You’ll get far more benefit out of subsequent study, and you’ll avoid reaching the point of marginal return on your efforts, if you can get over to China or Taiwan after a year or two of classroom work in the UK.
As for finding a job where you use Chinese every day, stay tuned. I’ll put something up on all of the possibilities soon, as I get many, many e-mails and requests for advice on careers using Chinese.
Best of luck to you!
True
January 9, 2009 at 10:51 am
hey my name is dimitri iam taking mandarin class 2 times a week i grew up around mostly asians i study chiense for at least 6 hours a day by watching tvs shows listing to phrases online reading books and talking on the phone in mandarin, but girlfriend is also mandarin how long will i be fluent in
January 10, 2009 at 11:40 pm
Dimitri, you have to give me more information if you want me to help you.
Do you mean your girlfriend is Chinese? Do you speak Chinese or another language with her?
How long have you been studying?
You’re still going to have to get to China, Taiwan, or an area that is dominated by Chinese speakers and live there for 6 months to a year before you’ll really be fluent, and that’s if you’ve got a bit of talent for the language.
March 19, 2009 at 4:46 am
Hi,
My name is Mary. I am currently trying to study Mandarin with my husband. We take 2 classes a week online with a Chinese teacher from Wuhan, China. It is a internet based school. We have done probably 3o lessons so far so are still fairly new. And we have been doing this for the past year. We probably know about 400 words but making sentences is difficult. We are not learning how to write the characters. Just learning how to speak the pinyin. Outside of our class we probably review for an hour each day after work etc. My question is I am wondering how long it would take us to get really fluent? I would like to be able to converse in basic conversation (more than just asking where something is though!) in about a year. Is this a realistic goal with the pace we are going? My husband is from the french side of Canada so he speaks 2 languages already. Should it be alot easier for him to learn mandarin?
Anyfeed back would be great!
thanks
March 19, 2009 at 10:41 pm
Mary,
You’re not going to make much progress using an online course of study. You’ll have to get yourselves into a Chinese-speaking environment. Most people don’t want to hear that, but there really isn’t any way to get fluent in Mandarin unless you live abroad for a while. You can make progress in your home country to an extent, but all you’re really doing is building a foundation. You won’t experience a breakthrough until you’re overseas and completely surrounded for several hours a day by people who will only speak Chinese with you.
I suppose there may be a way to create or find such an environment where you are. You’ll know better than I will whether that’s possible or not given the demographics in your area.
I don’t know of any correlation between being bilingual in English and French and picking up Mandarin more easily. Sorry.
Best of luck to you.
True
March 31, 2009 at 12:32 am
As a Chinese-to-English translator who is self-taught in Mandarin, I can only say I agree entirely with the writer of this article and commend him for re-sounding this warning. You often read on the Net that Chinese is not so hard because the grammar is ‘simple.’ And indeed, it is quite easy to order a beer or drool ‘wo ai ni’ to a good-time girl in a Shanghai bar. Taking it beyond there, though, is another matter altogether. You just do not pick up this language. Mandarin mastery, or even maintenance, cannot be achieved without serious study or REGULAR STAYS IN A CHINESE-SPEAKING ENVIRONMENT. Absent this, and it is not worth it for most people.
I’d like to cover here a few points I think the writer could have said more about, coming at this as a linguist who works in several languages.
(1) The hardest thing with Chinese, I think, is aural comprehension. Compared with Japanese or Korean, which are no pushover either, Chinese is much more difficult in this area. This is due to the unfamiliarity of tones and homophones, the speed with which Chinese speak, the heavy use of dialect in all Chinese communities, which often blurs the already difficult distinctions between words, and not least to the complete lack of English loan words (in total contrast to Japanese and Korean) to fall back on when all else fails. You just cannot bluff it as you can with Spanish or Italian. Even after years of study, you will still find that entire sentences are just mumbo-jumbo to your ear because you have missed one key syllable.
(2) The pronunciation and the tones. Most people think the tones are the big problem, but in fact basic pronunciation is very hard as well, as Chinese (of all dialects) has many tricky consonants that do not exist in western languages (here Japanese is much easier). The basic pronunciation—being able to distinguish and reproduce ci, zi, ce, se, ze, she and shi for example—takes weeks of tape recorder work.
The tones are never fully mastered by a foreigner, though this is a similar problem to that of gender in French or Spanish—you build up a hard core of words with the right tones, and the rest sort of fall into place eventually. You will still fall over repeatedly, but after a couple of years it will stop being a problem. You do have to get pronunciation and tones basically right, though, or you simply will not communicate.
(3) Learning to read is, predictably, an enormous job of work, but this is not primarily due to the characters. Characters are actually not that hard to read, for reasons I do not have space to go into; but if you doubt this, try turning a chunk of Chinese text into pinyin using one of the online converter sites and see how easy it is to understand. If you have intermediate Chinese, you will soon be wishing to have the characters back, because they eliminate the ambiguity.
What makes Chinese infernally difficult to read is, believe it or not, the ‘simplicity’ of its grammar. In Chinese, everything that can be abbreviated is, and sentences often seem pared down to piles of words without any markers of grammatical function—no articles, no subject sometimes, no tense, no plural, no conjunctions. It or them? Will or would? A or the? Because of or in spite of? Sometimes it is not clear. It can even be hard to distinguish nouns and verbs. Plus, the Chinese love long, long sentences. Unless you can read between the lines, you will have difficulty in fully understanding most text, and will not be able to read quickly for years (about five to ten).
(4) Writing. But let me end this thoroughly disheartening essay on a bright note. Once upon a time, up till about ten years ago in fact, writing Chinese was beyond the hope of any normal foreigner. Handwriting competently still is, though it can be fun trying, but something wonderful happened a few years back. Predictive IME fonts and other software tools mean you can now just type in lines of pinyin and up pops the Mandarin, for the most part with the right characters. Even I can fix the errors. In short, foreigners can now write Mandarin fairly easily, for the first time in three thousand years. You can email in Chinese, and with the well-chosen help of Google translator, you can blog and comment comprehensibly in Chinese too.
These are seminal steps forward, but, be under no illusion, Mandarin is never going to be a lingua franca. Even within China it is not always a lingua franca—I know of a Hong Kong woman and a Sichuan girl who prefer to use English to communicate. Study it, but do so mainly to better understand what will probably be top dog nation in our lifetimes. Don’t expect much more than that, unless you are a sinophile.
June 8, 2009 at 1:25 pm
I’m curious as to what a good strategy would be for an individual like myself:
Moved to the USA when very young (Taiwanese), with easy accessibility to fluent speakers and writers, and conversant (but not “fluent”) in Mandarin.
I’ve never really bothered to pick up writing in Chinese and haven’t had any sort of structured study in verbal communication (in Mandarin, or for that matter, in Taiwanese). In terms of verbal communication I’m not that daunted, given the network of native speakers I can surround myself with at any given time. I’m looking for a good place to start with writing, without all the repetition of tones, grammar, and miscellaneous tidbits that are already second nature.
Additionally, what did you do to build peripheral vocabulary? I can hold a conversation fairly well, but once in awhile find myself reaching either for: (1) words that are slipping my memory but I know when someone directs them back at me; or (2) words I absolutely don’t know. What sort of practice would you recommend to focus on to extend and build peripheral vocab? I’d like to work towards building “true” verbal fluency as well as work towards a solid foundation in writing.
I do have a vested interest in learning this, so motivation is pretty sky-high. Any recommendations as to where to begin would be pretty helpful.
July 3, 2009 at 10:25 pm
Sorry for my late reply, manifestus.
1-Start with Reading and Writing Chinese by William McNaughton. You might also pick up a set of flashcards (or use the digital equivalent) to help you learn stroke orders. You might then graduate to the elementary school texts, which have writing workbooks. That’s if you want to learn to write like a native does.
Personally, I never learned to write much using a pen and paper, but I type a great deal of correspondence in Chinese on a regular basis. I never really need to write using a pen, so I never learned.
2-There is no way to pick up peripheral vocabulary other than to converse with native speakers, write down what you don’t understand, and then use it in another conversation. I filled 6 notebooks with vocabulary the first year I lived in Taiwan. I reviewed the words constantly, and I remembered them because I’d been exposed to them first in a specific context.
Chinese is a gorgeous language. Best of luck to you in your endeavors.