Job Discussion Forums

[highland52]

I plan on teaching in China (for better or worse) for 3 yrs.
Please tell me that I am setting an obtainable goal when I hope to speak fluent Chinese Mandarin within the set time frame.
Is this possible?
Please note: I'm pumped for this, don't hurt me feelings, just tell me the truth.

Highland52

[arioch36]

Possible? Yes, but extremely doubtful. No one I know has come close, not while being a teacher.
Have you already studied Chinese? If your true goal is to become fluent in Chinese, I would suggest just studying the language for the first year. Every province has many colleges that offer Chinese classes. Tuition at many is fairly cheap, unless you go to a "famous school", Lots of time to learn the culture of the language. After studying intensively for a year you'll be in a good position to become a teacher, but still make good progress on your Chinese

[mcl sonya]

Learning to *speak* fluent Mandarin, I would say, should be more than doable in three years if you study and concentrate and make chinese friends (maybe a girlfriend..). I mean, of course, there are people who go abroad and do nothing but speak English and hang out with English speakers, and so never learn any other languages, but if you try... You'll be immersed in the language, so I don't see how you can not learn to patter at least a bit if you're even just passively open to it. I've met tons of Mormon missionaries from Idaho and Utah who, after four months of language training, spoke amazing Chinese... to my shame, more sophisticated Chinese than myself, a native Mandarin speaker growing up in the States and surrounded by it from birth, complete with the Beijing accent and its harder retroflex consonants. If you've been to Utah and Idaho, you'll know these people had probably never heard Chinese before in their lives... and yet they learn to speak it beautifully after four months, so obviously it can be done.

I knew someone who taught English in Taiwan for a year, then taught in HK for 9 months, while taking language courses, and now speaks more or less fluent Mandarin and Cantonese. Granted, this person was natively bilingual in Portuguese, and supposedly being bilingual helps when learning other languages, but it sounds like three years in one place should be more than plenty of time if you're making an effort like he obviously did.

Another encouraging story: I have an Israeli friend who went to Spain for four months with a Spanish text book and an outrageous amount of openness, making countless female friends. Granted, Spanish is pretty close to English and not so hard for us, but it isn't so close to Hebrew, and when we first arrived he couldn't say anything. I taught him words like, "Hola," and, "Quiero." He's really good at figuring out the logic of things, I mean he always wants to know the why of something, which I think helped, and he speaks pretty decent Spanish now.

Chinese should be even easier, because they don't have verb conjugations, much less irregular ones, and tense agreements, etc., like Spanish and English. There is no verb morphology. Instead of tense, it's an aspect language, I mean you use one/two syllable markers to say if something is done, is being done, etc., instead of messing with the verb, and a lot of things are understood by context. And there's nothing that's really hard to pronounce about it, besides the tones (maybe... but most people I've known catch onto them pretty quickly). There aren't any difficult consonant clusters, and besides the retroflex consonants in the Beijing accent (but who says you have to learn that? I personally find it weird and ugly sounding), the consonants are pretty easy to pronounce for an English speaker. Really, it's because spoken Mandarin is so easy that written Mandarin is so hard. Plus, once you start speaking Mandarin, I think you'll find it to be a lot of fun. You're allowed a lot of wiggle room and you can throw in random sounds like "ah" and "mah" everywhere, and repeat syllables and be ridiculously cute in a non-corny way that just could never happen in English. And I think you'll find that Chinese people get really excited when they meet someone who's learning Chinese, and will be really helpful and nice to you and more than happy to explain things.

[bjorn]

Slightly off-topic, but Mormons seem to have an uncanny ability to pick up languages. I've met many over the years in the Pacific and found all to be be keen, willing, and able to pick up the local language, even though it may only be spoken by 20,000 people in the world. Mind you they have that extra bit of incentive some of us lack .
I'm a firm believer of "where there's a will, there's a way." If you want it bad enough, I'm sure you'll manage, Personally I'd get my head around quantum physics before Mandarin, but I'm sure its doable. I agree immersion is the key. The five diffrent ways of pronouncing a sound or set of vowels is what gets most people.

[soapdodger]

Five different ways of pronouncing a sound? Now that's interesting.....

[highland52]

I thought it was only 3. This is not a good start.

Hihjland52

[johnslat]

Dear highland52.
Don't despair - English isn't all that easy, either.


Vowel a e i o u y ea ou ei ai .
� Bar X X X
� Parallel X X
� Men X X X X
� Lake X X X X X
� Like X X X X
� Mill X X X X X
� Deep X X X X
� Bold X X
� Low X X
� Alone X X X
� True
oo Moose X X X
- Answer X X X X
Total 5 5 3 5 3 4 8 5 5 2 .

[MGreen]

I'm not sure if anyone can answer this question for you. Its really up to you and the type of learner you are.

If you can get a teaching contract with 12 hours (or less) and enroll in a full time language program (the whole 3 years), its possible. I'm working with someone who is doing just that- but he's worn out and he's only been here since August. However, I work with a fellow who is on his 5th year and his Mandarin is atrocious given the length of time he's lived here.

[eslstudies]

Kevin Rudd, Australia's new PM, studied Chinese at university before working as a diplomat in Beijing. The Chinese premier, as well as my wife, have pronounced him fluent.
In 3 years, given a range of other factors, it is possible.
Literacy is a different matter.

[Insubordination]

My Chinese students also commented that K.Rudd was fluent and were really impressed.

The best thing you can do is live in a Mandarin-speaking home where nobody speaks English and it isn't an option to fall back on (a homestay?). You learn pretty damn quickly to ask for what you need.

[wildchild]

eslstudies,

good point about literacy being a different matter. Do you think that many language learners who are primarily interested in speaking achieve minimal progress due to the writing system? Or do they teach it as foreign language with a phonetic writing system?

When I was receiving tutoring in Arabic, I mainly wanted to speak it so I took notes in IPA.

[mcl sonya]

hm.. I'm not ESL studies, but, when you learn Mandarin you learn the characters as well as a Chinese phonetic alphabet (pinyin or zuyinfuhao). I guess you can learn only the pinyin, but you're not really considered fluent unless you can read and write. In any case, when I was in Chinese school, I found it easier to remember vocabulary words by practicing writing the characters over and over.

Five ways of pronouncing something-- some dialects/accents have more or less tones, but it's the four tones of standard mandarin, where the pitch pattern of your voice changes during a syllable, and a neutral tone. The famous example is the four ways of saying "ma," where changing the tone changes the meaning. But the tones are really distinct from one another... the hard part in listening comprehension might be tone sandhi, where the tones change..

[ntropy]

Is it possible to speak fluent Mandarin? Last I heard, there were over one billion people who can do just that.

[Stephen Jones]

885 million according to wikipedia.

[arioch36]