My wife was not crazy about the girlfriend part.

I incorporated a bit of the advice. One thing I did was take it easy. The only CPod I listened to was the Saturday show (which I enjoy every Saturday morning before going to class).

No, I am not Aric, but we probably do have some similar interests in music.

I also took the advice of another poster who mentioned learning Hanzi. For the last few months my attitude was “i only want to learn to speak the language”. Recently it has broadened into speaking, reading, writing, etc. They are fascinating and fun to learn. Like a secret code.

It was interesting to note the completely contradictory advice I was given. One person said to just take it easy, enjoy the trip up the mountain instead of focusing on the peak. Someone else said to have a firm goal. As someone else commented about having the goal of speaking like a native in 3 years, I agree, probably unrealistic. Except for John P. My goal is to spend the rest of my life discovering the language, hoping that I will become fluent enough to speak to natives without sounding silly.
I agree that learning Chinese has given me a new respect for those who learn English.

Goals. We plan on adopting from China. Due to some unforseen circumstances we don’t know when that will be but hopefully sooner than later. For the divinely inspired please pray this will happen!

Enough for now. Time to spend time with my non-Chinese wife.
Feel free to stop by my blog sometime.

Chapter 2 has a good outline of how to conduct brief conversations with even strangers (it may just be a question about a word or two in the beginning!). The lady who works at the donut shop, the waiters in the Chinese restaurants, etc. all respond to the approach in the booklet. I’ve learned interesting things about the language and about people I wouldn’t have learned otherwise.

Maybe those things are the ‘payoff’ for learning to speak Chinese, instead of the 100% fluency and perfect grammar. The important thing for most of us is connecting with people, not passing a test.

“A jigsaw puzzle would not be fun if it was be finished immediately”

oh ist das schön gesagt!
that’s it, exactly.

Any foreign language is sometimes frustrating. But Chinese seems special to me, like a game, a jigsaw puzzle. As if Jane Siberry’s song “Calling all angels” was just about learning Chinese…

“if you could only crack the code
You’d finally understand what this all means.
Oh but if you could, do you think you would
Have traded all the pain and suffering?
Oh, but then you would’ve missed the beauty of the light upon this earth
[…]
We’re trying, we’re hoping but we’re not sure… ”

well… a bit too solemn… But Henning hits the nail right on the head (as we say in Germany).

Studying a language does something good for the brain that I find difficult to describe. You become much more aware of, and sympathetic to the problems non-native speaker have with English. You gain a certain mental flexibility that mono-linguals don’t have. You become much more aware of your own language, its idiosyncrasies, and how arbitrary some of it’s conventions are.

If I stopped my study now and never learned another word of Chinese, I would not consider my time to have been wasted.

Henning is exactly right in comparing learning a language to putting together a puzzle. With a really big puzzle, you will be very slow in putting the pieces together. But as you progress, you will very slowly find that your progress in fitting the pieces together accelerates. With Mandarin, you should expect to spent much longer in the elementary stages than in European languages, because it has so few connections to English. But once you are through these stages, you might find that you actually progress quicker than you expect, because of the simplicity of its grammar and “build-up” nature of its vocabulary.

I also think you should take full advantage of the embarrassment of riches that Fu Da-Wei talks about. You need to see words in a LOT of contexts before you possess them. So don’t just rehash old lessons. Find new ones at the same level. You will find words you already know, but in different contexts. You will probably also encounter new words of course. And you will retain them better because they are not embedded in a thicket of other new words, as they would be in more advanced lessons. Learning new lessons will keep your interest up. You will know it is time to move on when acquire a new lesson at a given level and you find it so easy that its boring.

Learning a language outside the country can actually have its advantages. Your friend who goes to the country without any knowledge of the language and tries to learn by swimming in the native speaker ocean will likely acquire a mass of bad habits that he may never be able to get rid of. You however, can take your time and do it right. You can perfect your pronunciation and learn to understand and imitate all the material that is now so readily available. And when you finally do go to the country, the solid base that you have acquired may allow you to quickly catch up to and surpass your friend.

As mentioned above, I’d recommend looking over past lessons you found difficult at the time, listening to them, and suddenly discovering ‘Hey, I understood every word of that!’ This works superbly well when you’ve just listened to a NEW lesson and understood every word, especially in the Elementary level, but it’s still very encouraging to listen to lessons from the past and remind yourself that, yes, you [I]do[/I] know some Mandarin, however much of a newbie you are.

Oh, and kidding or no, getting a girlfriend who speaks your target language is really, really effective. I call this the ‘Les’ strategy, after a friend of mine who picked up pretty decent French, Russian, and Japanese in sequence just by moving to France/Russia/Japan for a year each and getting a French/Russian/Japanese girlfriend. I’m not speaking for the morality of it, of course (since he lost interest in each respective girlfriend surprisingly quickly afterwards), but very effective.

Practice with your own level but take a handful of lessons one level above your head for the puzzle-decryption mode. Only then you feel the exitement when you piece together the first units of meanings from the Dialogue. As you proceed those isolated islandes of understanding will blend into a coherent flow of information .

For me that is a lot more rewarding than most other hobbies.

Maybe expand this section to make it more goal-specific such as “Become a Professor in Chinese Linguistics within 2 years”. When one has realistic goals identified, one is more likely to realize those goals.