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!