Speaking fluently in Chinese

Well KennyK, I have been there and done that. However, I had to leave Taiwan after just two and half years and I continue to do daily battle with the language when it comes to speaking fluency. While in Taiwan, those who found themselves a Chinese 'special friend' seemed to advance in their spoken Mandarin much faster than I did working like a slave on my own. The meaning of 'special friend' is up to you to define. This is just one way that I have seen work. Have you been to Chia Yi yet?

aeflow, I know exactly what you mean. And I did "Google" and "Wikipedia" auditory processing disorder. The scary thing is that I am a little disorganized and forgetful :-( On the other hand (optimistically) both of us did learn other European languages well with a high level of comprehension ability. I can easily understand Romanian television having only lived there for 2 years under circumstances similar to my China experience. So, that brings me back to Chinese being difficult. Would be great to hear from Advanced Chinese learners to know if they also feel that listening comprehension has been as difficult to master for them as it is for you and me. 龙飞

KennyK, yes moving to a remote part of china definitely helps (in one right now)! But the problem is in many of the places where english is not common the mandarin also tends to be 不标准. That being said I have had great luck with finding many people who have been studying english for about 10 years, so have excellent vocab knowledge but still can't put a sentence together! (excellent teachers, as the conversation tends to stay in chinese and if you don't know a word you can just ask them, lol). I also have a freind who has been studying chinese for 10 years and refuses to speak to any foreigner who has been in china more than two years in english!! 双LOL!! I have never been to Taiwan so I have no idea about the situation there, therefore making any coments of mine useless, but it was fun to write! I will just stay in my isolated area until I'm confident enough in chinese to take on the english speaking areas.

Hi guys, Wanted to chime in...I think by far the best thing you can do is memorize dialogues. Seriously! Just pick a Chinesepod lesson and memorize the heck out of it, till you can say it backwards, forwards pull out bits and pieces...try to learn 1-2 sentences everyday...repeat it out loud to yourself walking down the street, workingout, doing stuff at the house....then when you actually have a conversation you will have some really potent conversation firepower ready to go... Its a lot of work no doubt, but in my opinion combining this with actual reallife conversation practice should skyrocket your results very very quickly I never attended formal Chinese classes, although I did save money, quit my job and moved to China where I had a Chinese teacher who was the town news reporter sit me down and teach me from scratch...I studied with him for a year...and although these werent 'formal classes' no doubt this was better than formal classes. Then I studied a bunch with the grandfather who I have fond memories of... but he was (still is!) a prickly, strict MF'er, and he made me memorize dialogues (duihua) and I resisted at first but then once I started noticing the benefit I of course a big slice of humble pie and thanked him profusely for being so strict with me and my studying. because Id be in a conversation, and out of the blue Id bust out the most wicked sounding phrases, much better than the waiguoren crap I was spewing out all the time...and its sound good cuz its exactly how a chinese would say it...but its a real biaatch to get yourself to be fluent like that....you have to recite it over and over... now I know most of us dont have that luxury of dropping everything and moving to northern China (Dandong) where there are few foreigners and lots of Chinese willing to speak Chinese to you all day... but we can all memorize dialogues....and also, realize certain topics are going to be very difficult to become fluent in...like legal matters, politics...after you build a strong base in Chinese, you need to pick a field you are interested in (if you want to study further) my two cents! but seriously, this memorizing passages stuff really does work wonders!!! ahhh I wish I was still in China

This is a great discussion with invaluable feedback. I hope more people add their opinions.

I still remember stuff my first Chinese teacher taught me and these were (basic) dialogues memorized by rote. There's also a Chinese teacher I had 2 years ago here, whose French was excellent after only 9 months though he did have pretty reasonable English which is how we initially communicated. He complained about his girlfriend, (also Chinese) whose French was truly amazing but after 5 years he found here vocab was lagging because she was so lazy !? Point is, as much as love the fun and broad range of topics covered in CPod, brute force or at least heavy repetition without much intellectualizing does have clear benefits. Having nearly completed the 8-weeks practice program with heavy duty daily preparation including extended vocab and lots of rehearsing of preset patterns, I can only confirm this helps enormously (I feel so strongly about this that I renewed for 6 months :-) Bottom line, yes, we sometimes need to resort to old-fashioned, boring techniques, something CPod implicitely acknowledges when launching The Fix recently.

I agree with everyone's suggestions above for learning how to speak a new language. However, I was wondering if someone had suggestions for improving comprehension in Chinese. I'm at the intermediate/high intermediate level but i feel that my comprehension has always lagged far behind my speaking and reading level. This seems to be a Chinese issue because of the large number of homophones; i didn't have this problem when learning other languages. In fact, usually comprehension came first when learning other European languages such as German or Romanian. Has anyone found an efficient way to improve comprehension? It is frustrating to be able to speak but not be able to respond to someone talking to you or constantly having to ask that person to 再说一遍！

KK, First off, you’re in an excellent position. From what you’ve described you have a very strong background in the language. This is what will ultimately carry you in your journey. I know this for a fact because my issue is on the opposite side of spectrum. I’ve become fluent through my wife and other friends who only speak Chinese. Well… my wife speaks English, my friends not so much. Anyway, I find myself backtracking constantly in order to make grammer/vocab adjustments. Being able to speak freely w/o the hassle of a language exchange most definitely helped in becoming fluent however, w/o the gram/vocab background I seem to have been stunted. I’m now playing a very slow game called “Catch up”. I won’t even get started on characters. You however, have been blessed, or worked extremely hard to gather these very important fundamentals of the language. “Catching up” conversationally speaking is right around the corner. Isolating yourself with people who will only speak Chinese to you is not a bad idea. Finding a partner would be even better. I’ve never traveled to a country were Chinese was primarily spoken but, understand your experience. It reminds me of the college student who spent 4 years studying a foreign language and mastered reading/writing/grammar w/o mastering the conversational side (my story). Within a short time of being completely immersed in the abroad experience I realized how important the fundamentals really were. My fluency increased almost immediately. Having said all of that! , my advice to you is to stay the path and keep your head up. Enjoy this stage of learning and when you get your break (whether it’s a partner of free time to travel) take it! You’ll see all your hard work paid off. On another note, learning a language is not all about the language; it’s the culture and history as well. Your experience in Taiwan will truly round out your language learning experience. Take it easy, -Jing lu

我自己學中文的狀況是與你的倒過來的。 我從開始學中文的時候， 學説對話比較容易。 可能是因爲我是演員，爲了演一些戲劇中的來自外國的人物我學過了外國的口音， 所以對我，模仿比較容易， 但是對話的時候，聼懂別人說的話對我是比較難一點的一件事情，而且學中文這麽長時間我還有聼不懂的地方， 有時候我必須來問，“你可不可以再説一遍？” 我了解這是一個很令人尷尬的時刻，但是如果你要你的中文水平快快的提高的話，不要怕丟臉。 千里之行始於足下， 你四面八方都有說中文的人，你應該不讓你的交流脫離本體。 我覺得堅持你想要說國語就好了。 可能你覺得你的中文帶很大的外國口音或者說得慢到臺灣人受不了跟你說。 可能你太在乎人家會來批評你或者嘲弄你吧？ 當然見仁見智，可是，依我看來那個可是，Robertk　說得對。 每天都用一些時間記住正宗的中文對話，當然不要用我寫的文章當你的模範，因爲我是外國人，你可以用Chinesepod.com 地豐富的資源。 嚴格的要求你自己一天記住一部分， 然後把那句話練得很順利。 過了一段時間呢，你的中文流利度會有長足的進步！ 但是依我看來，最好找個跟你說中國話的夥伴吧。

小胡你真寫得好. Kenny, 夥伴說不定是女朋友. 特別朋友也就是說一位愛喝茶酒的老人或會下棋孤單的青年-等等.

It seems Man2toe is talking about a boyfriend/girlfriend. Undoubtedly that helps, but the problems remains - perhaps she wants to learn English. KennyK is right, however, the only possible way to progress is through practice. That's the linguistic part. As to the rest...

Speaking from personal experience, living in a more remote area is a massive benefit to your speaking ability. People here are really, really patient with foreigner Chinese and quite happy to talk to us and help us learn. After a year and a half in northwestern China I have a number of non-English speaking friends (I don't have any Chinese friends that speak to me primarily in English) and am comfortable having an hour conversation or more in Mandarin (though typically my conversations are much shorter, or I might spend several hours with a group of people). Local people, especially older ones, speak dialect that is often difficult to understand, but students (I teach at a university) speak perfectly clear putonghua. Nobody wants to speak English here. Even many if not most English students would rather speak to us in Chinese if they can. Actually I find students to be the best source of language practice, and friends. Especially students in other departments, who can probably say something in English if you don't understand it but otherwise have no interest in speaking English. There is another foreign teacher here who has made considerably faster progress than me in spoken Chinese, and literally spends something like 3-6 hours a day in Chinese conversation, after 2 years of study. You do have to put the effort in, of course; other teachers here can speak almost no Chinese after years in China, including a teacher who was the only foreigner in a city for six months. Also what Lantian says about activities is true. I play guitar and very quickly found a rock band here, and made some early friends that way despite my bad Chinese at the time. Another teacher joined a soccer team, and a female teacher goes out to bars and gets into conversation 100% of the time, through no effort of her own.

Being a newbie I can't say much about learning Chinese yet but I would try to go a place where people don't speak much English. I speak Italian fluently and to get to that level I lived a year in Sicily in a shared appartment with fellow students who were all Italian. I also got a "special friend" and after 3 difficult first months something just clicked and Italian became the first language in my head. Do you understand what I mean? When you stop thinking in your native language (for me it's Danish) what you're going to say and then translate it into the foreign language. Of course doing that is not always possible but in my experience taking classes is only going to get you to a certain point. I certainly could communicate before going but to understand the variations in the language properly and choosing the right one for the right situation I had to go there.

Sorry for being self-promoting here, but I once wrote about how I handled your exact problem when I lived in Hangzhou: http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2007/05/13/how-i-learned-chinese-part-2 Short version: I actively sought out people who were not likely to speak English and who would be motivated to talk to me. It worked.

I'd like to add that for foreigners that come to China on corporate expat assignments, it is easy to get stuck in the expat bubble = difficult to find a good way to practice Chinese with locals. I found the following useful: 1. Speaking to taxi drivers. Practically none speak English and some are quite talkative (although not all). 2. Hire an ayi that doesn't speak English. You will need to have a spouse that is also willing to practice Chinese with the ayi. 3. Hire a driver that doesn't speak English. Not only will this improve your Chinese, a non-English speaking driver is less costly. 4. Do as much shopping and bargaining as possible in local markets. You will get much exposure on purchasing, numbers, bargaining but can be limiting if you just keep to the basics. Try to engage in conversation and expand on topics like: expand on doubt of the quality of the product, tell the vendor that he/she is trying to cheat you/sell substandard product (in a joking kind of way), ask THEM where they are from (they usually aren't originally from the largest cities), etc. Just some ideas. 龙飞

Hi LongFei, Not to dampen your ideas any, but in general here's why I think they are not actually "that" effective. They all include a component of having to complete something. When this is involved, then both participants usually will resort to anything, ie. sign-language, guessing, and bits of language to get the thing done. There is not enough consistent input to really gear up the acquisition. 1. Speaking to taxi drivers. Practically none speak English and some are quite talkative (although not all). ---These conversations are fun, and good for just getting oneself to talk and listen, but the engagements are usually too random and infrequent to pick up much vocabulary or really retain after the conversation. Unless you pick up the same couple/few drivers each day, day after day. 2. Hire an ayi that doesn't speak English. You will need to have a spouse that is also willing to practice Chinese with the ayi. --This depends a lot on the ayi, but lots of times one is not home when she is, and you want her to do her stuff, not just chat. Plus there's not too much to talk to her about. In contrast, kids with a nanny, have an opportunity to be with her all day, to play, have many little interactions over a day, over a long stretch of time. 3. Hire a driver that doesn't speak English. Not only will this improve your Chinese, a non-English speaking driver is less costly. --This can be a good idea, but it bumps up against a similar issue in English-Chinese language exchange. He wants to improve his English to get a better job, and often you'll run out of stuff to talk about when your language skills are at the lower ends. Plus I've found that after a short while, you want the driver to just drive, and you're preoccupied with the cell phone, newspaper or whoever else is in the car with you. 4. Do as much shopping and bargaining as possible in local markets. --This is again, a bit too random, but great for working up confidence and getting emotion from the language. If you can find a few consistent sellers to engage in day after day, week after week, then it can really work well.

You're right, Lantian, they aren't the most effective but for those Chinese learners that are under time and family pressures to meet or exceed top-line and bottom-line budgets, grow businesses, network, keep the bosses at home happy (both the spouse and the salary boss in the home country), spend time with the children, etc, etc, there is only very little time and energy left for learning a language like Chinese. I guess my suggestions are aimed at using whatever snippets of free time are still available to get some self-enforced Chinese practice time under one's belt. Between cell phone calls!

John, thanks for the link. Your story was inspiring. It made me feel better to know that you also had to struggle to learn Chinese. It has given me hope!

longfei, Your first comment in this thread really hit home. I also find listening comprehension to be the most difficult thing in learning Chinese, the most discouraging aspect. For many European languages it isn't a problem at all. Knowing (Mexican) Spanish at an advanced level (for reading and listening comprehension, though not conversational ability), I decided as an experiment to do a basic review of Portuguese grammar for a couple of weeks and then found I could read and mostly understand newspaper articles (the written languages are fairly close to one another). And then when I tuned into Brazilian Portuguese newscasts on the Internet for the first time I found to my surprise that listening comprehension at an upper intermediate level was obtained almost immediately, within a few weeks at most, despite the spoken languages of Spanish and Portuguese having very different sounds. The contrast with Chinese couldn't have been greater. Mind you, European Portuguese seems a fair bit more difficult for listening comprehension than the Brazilian dialect, I'm not sure why. So what is it about Chinese? Maybe it's the homonyms, or maybe we both suffer from a mild case of "auditory processing disorder" (you can Google it). Some interesting observations: If I cheat and read a Chinese-language transcript of an audio segment first, and then listen to the audio, then listening comprehension improves a great deal. Less obviously, if I cheat and listen to or read an *English*-language translation first, so that I know the context and anticipate what Chinese words to listen for, and then listen to the Chinese-language audio, that can also greatly improve listening comprehension. What I mean, specifically, is that I can pick words out of the Chinese audio stream that I would have missed if I'd listened to it cold, without any such preparation. Perhaps the latter observation could be used in some way as a crutch on the road to better listening comprehension. Maybe it would be useful to sit in a Chinese audience listening to an English-speaking speaker on stage, whose speech in English is being simultaneously interpreted into Chinese by an interpreter. International news newscasts can be useful here too, if you've already read or listened to the top news stories in English first. In both cases, you know the context ahead of time and anticipate what to listen for.

ACTIVITIES - Join in some local activities that are on-going and that you have a strong interest in. For example, tennis, golf, tai chi, etc. The key though is to find this activity thru some local, not related to English source. You must also determine that most of the participants have a low level of English. And during the activity just keep answering back in Chinese. The activity should go on for some length of time so that you get familiar with people and they will be patient with your speaking, plus everyone is actually focused on the activity and not you or English. Do not be afraid to 'drop out' of the activity if there are a couple or several participants that it is too easy to fall into English with. You sound like you have enough background in vocab, comprehension, etc., I bet that after about 3-5 months in this activity, twice a week, couple or hours or so, you'll start spewing Chinese all over the place!!! Keep us posted. :) BTW, longfei, I think the same approach works for comprehension. Especially if post activity one has enough interest to read other materials on the subject and stay engaged. Am I just stating the obvious? What do others think?