Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[stone1519]

China has more than 300 million people have studied English since 1980. But how many of them have actually achieved any real degree of fluency in English?
A: 5% B: 2% C: 1% D: Less than 1%
And the answer for Chinese English Learner is this: less than 1%.
What�s wrong with Chinese English learners?
How can we solve this problem?
From a foreigner point of view, what do Chinese English learners need to learn when it comes to English?

[RedRose]

[ClarissaMach]

But considering how different Chinese/Mandarim are different from English, it's easy to understand why it's so hard for Chinese to learn it. I'm mean, Portuguese (my native language) is very different from English, too, but at least we use the same alphabet - by the way, we use an alphabet... as far as I my concerned, the Chinese/Mandarim languages don't even have a thing such as an alphabet, isn't it?

I'm always very impressed when I see the Chinese and Arab participants of this forum writing in English, cause it must be really hard on them to do so... you see, even though my native language isn't that different from English, it took me 10 years (I began to study English when I was 14) to be able to easily read a book or newspaper, to watch a movie withouth titles, and to write well enough to be understood (I still commit lots of mistakes when writting, but at least I manage to express my ideas - well, I hope so....).
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Stormy Weather.

[RedRose]

we don't use alphabet in our native language: Chinese. but English-learning started getting easy to me since my online friend told me how to learn it in an efficient way, I tried it, and it worked well!!

To take the Catalan girl's advice, I kept watching english movies and TV as much as possible, listening to english redio such as BBC, I kept my brain and ears in an English envirnonment.... and finally, I got my way!!

in this respect, I mean, language-learning is not a matter of the struture of language, it's just the matter of method.

[ClarissaMach]

Do you really think so? I still believe that it must be harder to learn a language too much different from ours...

For example, there's no challenge to a Portuguese native speaker in learning Spanish. The two languages are very similar. You see, I've never studied Spanish, but I can easylly understand what the Spanish speakers say and what they write.

It took me almost ten years to be able to watch BBC and understand every single word. On the other hand, it was not necessary studying Spanish to understand everything which is talked of on CNNE (Spanish version of American news channel CNN).

I wish I could learn Chinese... the language has gained an enourmous consideration in Brazil. But when I discovered it would be necessary to memorize at least 3,000 symbols to read a newspaper, I gave up... well, I still didn't give up, but I'm about to!

I'm already 24. Do you think I still have chance to learn Chinese good enough to speak without too many mistakes? I'll begin to study Spanish next semester (I want to learn how to speak and how to write), but I might give it up for Chinese.


How many years did you need to learn English?
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Stormy Weather.

[RedRose]