We”ll come clean - last night we were enticed into a certain infamous western fast-food outlet. Nevertheless, to make up for our momentary lack of cultural appreciation I”m plowing all my time into learning Mandarin. I”ve got the books, the audio CDs, the computer software and, best of all, 1.3 billion Chinese people. Although I”m probably in the best situation for someone wishing to learn a language, it’’s still tough. I think I”ve got my head around the tones (to an extent) but it’’s clearly still early days.

I read somewhere that the average foreigner passes through 5 stages when learning Chinese. The first stage is where most western people are at, that is, unable to believe that spoken Chinese can possibly be a real language.

The second stage is the acceptance that there is logic behind the sounds and that, although alien to western ears, it is quite possible that it is a real language.

Stage three is the acquisition of basic vocabulary and where I consider myself to be. I know some key phrases, can build some very crude (short) sentences and pick out a few words when I hear people talk. However, my tones are all over the place, I cant understand the context of other peoples conversations and am mostly limited to specific phrases. Apparently there’’s not much you can do other than work hard, learn new vocabulary and practice your pronunciation.

Stage four is a bit more fun. One has the fundamental language skills needed to formulate sentences, interpret responses and to generally ”get around” without too much hassle. Nevertheless, tones are still a bit dodgy (although comprehensible) and more advanced conversation is still out of reach.

Stage five, like stage four, takes time and patience to reach. Tones have been corrected and one can discuss a whole range of topics. The occasional slipup occurs but, on the whole, the speaker is fairly fluent.

Stage six is total fluency. By this point you can probably speak better Mandarin than most native Chinese speakers. You can now congratulate yourself, return to your home country and most likely forget everything you”ve learnt within a month.

So there you have it, the rocky road to fluency. Ideally (and realistically) I”d like to think I can make it to stage four by the time I depart China but, who knows. If I practice hard everyday for the next 8 months maybe I can get closer to stage 5.

Categories: China
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