Nothing but Chinese for six days now
by chris
The Monkey Kings have decided that, for the full month of July, we shall be speaking entirely (stay tuned for the exceptions) in Chinese. If we are speaking with my wife, the Chinese English tutors and other Chinese coworkers, with each other and almost everyone else, we will be speaking only in Chinese. The only exceptions are the obvious ones: with our students and with people who don’t know Chinese.
It hasn’t been as hard so far as I expected. We are in class 25 hours a week, we watch a little tv, read newspapers and books and listen to music in English, and when we simply can’t express something, we’ll speak in English (just for a word here or there, of course). So we are around enough English that we are not desperate to speak it. But I know how these processes go: there is a honeymoon stage, a period where it is really annoying and you wonder why you did it in the first place, and then a time when it gets to feel more natural. That is the culture shock curve or circle or pie chart (however you present it), and I’ll bet this will be the same.
This month is a great opportunity for us to drastically improve our Chinese fluency, and I think mine has improved already. I ask people to correct me when I make mistakes, and hopefully being corrected will help me avoid picking up any bad habits. That said, I don’t trust many Chinese people to correct me very often. The culture prohibits it as rude. People are loath to do anything that could be perceived as rude, even if they are your friends and you say you are fine with it. They are like Canadians that way. I have been in this situation before. To people learning a language, I recommend finding someone you trust to practice with, someone you trust to correct you frequently in your speaking. You only need one or two people like that and a little discipline. You will lose your bad habits.
July is not just a chance to improve fluency but a chance to cement all the grammatical constructions (word order is my biggest weakness in learning a language) and vocabulary I learn this month. So I should be reading my exercise book more… on top of work, preparing speeches, starting our company, writing my book and going to the gym. I’m busier than I’ve been since December. It feels great!
July 14th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Congratulations on moving in this direction, guys! I’ll be arriving in Shanghai in about 6 weeks; I hope I can check out Suzhou soon (I have a friend studying in the other half of 上有天堂下有蘇杭).
Some linguistics research suggests that, in learning a foreign language, “massive input good, early input bad” (see here for explanation and here for a method which also incorporates spaced repetition software). On my blog I write a little bit about this, and I am currently experimenting with “All Chinese All the Time”, a variation on AllJapaneseAllTheTime.com’s method.
When I first lived in Taiwan, I had just started learning Mandarin. While the immersive environment helped, being forced to speak early on lead me to ‘learn’ many mistakes. I spoke ‘functional’ chinese, but as few people corrected me as long as they could understand, I developed many bad habits that took a long time to get rid of, and it slowed my progress towards speaking like a native.
Lately I’ve been experimenting with massive input. I’ve been listening to Chinese music since 2005, but now I listen to it exclusively. I exclusively watch Chinese telivision (Taiwanese tv dramas), and I am currently reading two Chinese books. I do read in English a lot, either to take care of business, or to take in China blogs written by expatriates. If I’m not listening to music, I try to have Chinese radio (I stream internet radio) playing in the background, even as I sleep. I find all of this interesting, and listening to everything but talk/news radio fun, so it sticks. I do active review for writing characters and some of the vocabulary I acquire.
This 加伙 humbly suggests that the Monkey Kings consider increasing their active and passive Chinese input for the benefits it will have to both comprehension and expression. 加油!
文王