New Mission: Fluent Mandarin in 3 months!

The accent in Taiwan and mainland China is different also (to me it sounds like in Taiwan the sound is more nasal/higher pitched rather than from the throat like China) and the tones are slightly different for some words.

How exciting! I’ve always wanted to learn Mandarin, but I’m working on my start-up and have a family so I cannot travel at the moment. BUT, I contacted someone from Couchsurfing who speaks Mandarin and wants to learn Spanish. I can’t wait! It will be a wonderful exchange!

I’m duly impressed.  And I look forward to watching your success with the usual awe.  :)

Thanks a lot for the tips! I’ve used Pimsleur and here are my thoughts on it: http://fi3m.com/pimsleur-review

“How could they possibly know I spoke English?”
Unlike in Italy, skin colour is a dead give away here

Sadly there are cases of Poles/Italians etc. getting a reply in English, but it would be rare for many nationalities to be well travelled and not speak English, especially independent westerners who would think of English as a lingua franca to them, so this perhaps wouldn’t be a huge problem, although I imagine it’s annoying when it happens if you are passionate about learning the local language.

No problems at all. Stamp on the passport with no advance visa and I can stay for 90 days!

I hear that Mandarin is more common here in Taipei, but less common in the rest of the country. Obviously I wouldn’t know since right now it all sounds the same to me

Good Stuff Benny, listened to a few German lessons on the ol’ iPod this morning, forgot the feeling of learning some new words.

Cheers,

Andrew

The mission I’ve been waiting for since I started following your blog!

I’m really happy to hear your doing this mission, as you’ll be learning my native language. I’m sure you’ll make a lot of progress in a short amount of time and taking the C1 after the 3 months should be quite doable. After all, your well-equipped to take on the tones in this language since you’ve already had exposure to Thai and focus on accent-reduction in all your other languages; things that many other people ignore.

Although I’m originally from the Mainland and would be even more excited if you started there, Taiwan is a good choice to set up base, you’ll certainly free yourself from some of the inconveniences from the Mainland and keep distractions to a minimum.  

Looking forward to talking to you in Mandarin eventually : ) 祝你好运！

Had a wonderful experience on a flight from Shanghai to Dubai sitting next to a non-English speaking French girl who could speak perfect Chinese. She complained that, despite her protests, however many times she insisted that she couldn’t speak English, some locals refused to accept it and opted to communicate with her in English, rather than their native Chinese.

The looks we got from the other – predominantly Chinese – passengers on that flight as the two of us laowai merrily chatted away for hours in -prettydamngoodifidosaysomyself – Mandarin was just magic.

“Did you need to use a mnemonic to remember the plot to your favorite movie” – technically, the plot itself IS a mnemonic. Mnemonics are just stories that make things easier to remember. You definitely do not remember a movie ONLY from “rote” of seeing it a hundred times.

And people do this with telephone numbers too without realizing it, by sounding out clumps of letters into mini units that they recall by the sound – in many cases doing it unconsciously. This is another example where it’s just not true to say people do it by rote.

Anything learned efficiently and quickly uses mnemonics in one way or another, but it will be more efficient and more quick if a systematic version is used. Your “enough” example is not a stand alone case, but goes with “tough” and others – an association, even if one of the two was learned by inefficient rote.

I would agree with other critics that he should have included the pinyin, but his method involves learning only the characters, which apparently is a spillover from Japanese, where it’s more logical to learn that way due to different pronunciations of a single character, which isn’t an issue in Chinese.

This means that I am trying to learn the symbol and pronunciation in one go, and do indeed have to come up with my own stories. But this book is helping me a lot. So far so good!

Well as a great Q&A resource for you, check out http://chinese.stackexchange.com/. Good luck!

Hi Benny, I am one of your subscribers in Taipei. I agree with most of your ideas about learning and I really like your 3 month language mission concept. As for learning Chinese your will have  a struggle for sure but I wish you the best.  I know that you are on your mission and just want to speak with natives, but I will like to meet you and chat over coffee or maybe a slice of pizza. I speak very fluent Chinese at home, outside and at my job. Anyways I would like to meet you and say hi, and talk about language learning if you have anytime~!

Hey Benny!  This is so cool — I’m learning Mandarin in Beijing right now.  Not to spam your blog but I wrote a post about my goals in Mandarin and it includes a little graph about the number of characters you need and what percentage of fluent you’ll be.  At 100 characters it’s about 42% understanding, by 500 it’s 75% understanding and 1500 is 94% understanding… so the first ones you learn have the biggest jump!  After 3,000 characters you should be able to read a newspaper like USA Today in Mandarin which is written at a 7-8th grade level (if I remember correctly).

Anyway the post is here: http://almostfearless.com/2011/12/26/the-small-task-of-learning-mandarin/

I’ll be in Beijing for the next six months.  If you make it to the mainland, you should come visit!

哇，Benny,沒想到新年你學的第一種語言就是中文！讓我太驚訝啦！所以我決定用中文來留言一次，哈哈。
去年的年底偶然遇見你的博客，給了我許多啓發和動力，也讓我新的一年有了一個充滿朝氣的開始，真誠的說聲謝謝！
每次看到你身上的熱誠，都會讓我覺得生活中充滿精彩與驚喜。
祝你好運！當然，我絕對相信你的實力哦

Ahhh yes.  I’ve been waiting for the day you’d finally try this.  I won’t be back to Taiwan for a few months, so that should give you all the time you need to catch up.  I had no trouble getting people to speak Chinese to me but I am curious where you are staying in Taipei that is devoid of foreigners.  Might even make a point to camp out there when I get back!

Thanks!

this is funny

I’m sorry, but I don’t believe this does work for everyone….
I mean, it may have worked for you but I’m sure not everyone can pick up another language that easily and I say this from experience. I speak 3 languages currently; Portuguese, Spanish and American English. I was born in Portugal but raised here in America. The only reason that I do speak Portuguese is because of my family and the years they’ve spent speaking to me in Portuguese so I’d learn it as well as English. Spanish came easy because it’s not too different from Portuguese, and again I spent years learning how to properly speak it with friends. I’ve spent about 3 years now  trying to learn Finnish and I can’t do it. I’ve tried learning German as well in the past year and I can’t learn it either.  Some people have the knack for it while others do not. And just because you say the phrase you think you’re saying in a different language doesn’t mean you’re really speaking the language. I say this because of the years I’ve spent trying to learn Finnish. It’s all in the way things are pronounce, many Europeans can pronounce just about any European language because it just about comes from the same thing. But Americans can’t do that….well they can if they start at 5 years old but not when they’re older. They will always have that thick American accent that a lot of Europeans will not understand and they have a really hard time pronouncing certain works that come out so messed up that a Native won’t understand. But…this is just my opinion.

My daughter started in a Chinese / English bilingual school in
August 2008, aged 6 nearly 7 (with barely any knowledge of Chinese), where Chinese was
the medium of instruction for 70% of the day (about 27 hours per week).
By December (despite an autumn vacation of a week inbetween with no chinese) she pretty much understood
everything said to her (granted, strong contextual understanding) and
could read simple children’s books (think Dr. Seuss) in traditional chinese characters and write simple
sentences with aid of online dictionaries. She only had a tutor out of
school for an hour a week.
She was highly motivated and determined, and is naturally very
talented in Chinese, and has the ability to remember a character after
just one exposure to it. By May 2011 aged 9, she wrote the HSK level 4 exam,
which is intermediate level for adults with about 2-3 hours preparation
in total and aced it. She may be an exception in how far she got in
such a short period, but there were enough other kids in the school who
also achieve a near native level in remarkably short periods of time.
I’m assuming you will be spending far more time than my
daughter in his endeavour, plus you’re already talented in languages and
have a “meta cognition patterns” for putting it all together. I think
the hardest bit would be reading at any kind of speed. But if you wants to just read menus rather than the newspaper, you’ll probably be
OK.Good luck

Yes. It basically means good luck

The reasons the Chinese language is difficult are that it has tones and a different way of writing. Its grammar is pretty straightforward without conjugations like European languages. I think these difficulties should not be exaggerated. If we know the techniques of how to pronounce words with their right tones and of how to write Chinese characters, it will be very interesting especially because Chinese characters are evolutionised pictures of things and their combinations. Break a leg, Benny

I’ll be watching with baited breath. Good luck!

I like your blog and have a great experince of it.I am fully satisfied of your services and some of my friends are also use your services they are also fully satisfied with you and your services.We make plan again to visit India and use your services again.your blog is very everything like person . ajmer, jaipur,thanks

Well, I don’t know if you can do it or not, but I certainly respect what you said at the end of your video.  Aim for something really high.  I think that’s a great idea.  I’m definitely rooting for you.  You’ll certainly get a lot further aiming for a high goal than you would settling for a low one.

I did want to mention one small point about the reading.  You mention that without learning how to read,  you’d be illiterate, which is obviously true.  I read and write Japanese, and it’s my opinion that, with Asian languages, the main utility you get from the writing system is not the ability to read.  It’s the ability to speak.  Because the characters from one word also appear in other words,  the more characters you know, the greater your vocabulary will be, which ultimately helps you to speak better.  I wrote a whole article about it on my site, so check there if you want to know a bit more.  But the bottom line is, you should invest as much time in the writing system as possible.

Good luck with this project.  I’ll be following you.