Crash Course

My young, clever French student Xiao Lu will be leaving for Taiwan for work soon, he is so desperate to master this language quickly that he set up a "Mandarin crash course" schedule with me last week.

Xiao Lu wants to achieve his goal in just one month (in total, 14 hours of lessons), which is : to be able to communicate by speaking and to be able to read Chinese characters (which he is learning from the lessons in Traditional version!!) ... Furthermore, he told me that he is a very lazy person ---- what a challenge!!

Xiao Lu wants to learn Mandarin in the manner of learning other Western languages, that is to learn to read and write at the same time.. my experience tells me it is almost impossible to make good progress unless he would be a full time student, studying very hard each day. With such a short period of time, we should focus on Conversational Mandarin (that is, to use Pinyin only!!), so when he is in Taiwan, at least he can"survive" with his limited Mandarin.. As for characters, it should be a later step!

We teach foreigners Pinyin (phonetic writing) from the very begining because our characters don't come with spelling like other languages. Pinyin enable us to have a clear vision of the phonetic spelling, so people start speaking Mandarin very quickly... As for Chinese characters, they are made up of strokes (some quite complicated), which can be difficult to remember for the beginners, especially for western speakers. So, if you want to learn Mandarin fast, speak first, then write!

Generally speaking, people study for about 30 hours (using Pinyin) to get up to a "survival level", and then I would suggest that they learn Chinese characters.. I believe this way of learning the best as when you are able to speak some Mandarin, you are more confident and find it more interesting to learn the characters.. Initially, working on both speaking and writing at the same time will slow the speed of learning, and very often, the students are too busy (or lazy) to do the practising, so they tend to give up learning after too much struggling..

Xiao Lu does not follow my advise, he wants to grasp everything at the same time!! I suggested to him to buy the flash cards, hopefully he will carry some in his bag and will keep learning everyday..

I can foresee tough situations for him in the upcoming lessons, God bless him..