I interviewed a guy who learned to speak utterly phenomenal Chinese within 1 year while living in the UK. Here's how he did it

Open Forum
81

“Except the YouTube video is an unscripted conversational interview conducted by a native speaker”
The problem of SLA-related YT videos (or podcasts) is in general that the topics, Q&As. etc. are more or less clear right from the start. So the recurring questions are:

  • Could you introduce yourself?
  • Why did you want to learn this or that?
  • Which tools and methods did you use?
    etc.

In contrast, a “real test” for oral fluency is in a bar, café or restaurant with some background noise: So you go to a bar, etc. with some native speakers and have a fast-paced, free-flowing conversation about any topic that might come up.

If language learners can handle this test with ease (humor, irony, and word plays included), for 30-60 min or more, then they have a high level of oral fluency in my book.

Compared to this scenario, the YT videos regarding SLA are more like “partial fluency”, such as in an exam situation, a job interview, etc., which can be prepared and repeated (over and over again).

Also, a common “problem” with language teachers is their very clear, correct, and somewhat slow pronunciation. Native speakers are usually not like this: they are extremely fast, sloppy, etc.

In short, the “bar, etc. test” is a completely different beast when it comes to assessing oral fluency: it’s fast, sloppy, noisy, and unpredictible :slight_smile:

Ok, that’s it for today.
Now we’re looking forward to the arrival of the podcast with the SLA method mix to end all other SLA method mixes :slight_smile:

Have a nice day
Peter

82

Ill look more into this “English and Chinese grammar have almost nothing in common except some very superficial similarities, subject, object, verb etc. Chinese grammar is not at all easy to master. But it is quite easy to be able to string a sentence together and be more or less undestood. As someone once said, Chinese is easy to speak badly.” I have chinese interesting and it always comes in conversation even with non language learners (in america) at least. It has prestige and difficulty and all the lot. But good to know and thank you I will continue investigating chinese from a linguistic pov.

83

Now we’re looking forward to the arrival of the podcast with the SLA method mix to end all other SLA method mixes :slight_smile:

  • Yup & and after that podcast I have another interview coming out in two weeks which I’ve recorded by a world leading professor who pioneered a method to help all learners achieve a near native level accent in any language.

Exciting times for language learners!

84

Dude you’ve moved the goalposts a little, as there are a bunch of things we’ve been discussing, not whether the guys is good. FYI I can tell that the guy is epic. Here in Western Canada there are tons of Chinese people (probably at least 1 in 10). I know what a Chinese conversation sounds like. Also here in Canada there are tons and tons and tons of immigrant children who go from zero English to perfectly spoken Canadian. I have seen this myself in elementary, middle and high school. This is the benefit of immersion. It is clear and unambiguous that immersion works. Will did it. So did millions of other children in Canada who were immigrants from countries whose first language is distinct from English. This is true for their parents too. Some of them have workable English and some sound almost native. That is a directly equivalent experience to Will in Chinese and less so but still similar when I learned Spanish myself.

I also experienced over and over seeing people whose English was halting. I myself have the experience of learning other languages and being halting while learning it.

It is patently not true to say you cannot tell the difference between a poor Chinese speaker and an advanced Chinese speaker. It might be true that if he were speaking fluent gibberish that sounds Chinese like we might not be able to tell the difference between that and fluent advanced Chinese but I seriously doubt it.

IMO the guy clearly is epic. He has Chinese mannerisms. His “ummm” sounds Chinese. He moves his body like a Chinese person and he laughs like a Chinese person. He seems to have picked up the character perfectly.

But honestly whether you’re right here and there is not the point: you seem to be looking for validation of everything you say instead of a discussion. Here on this forum this is a gathering of language enthusiasts. That includes people who are struggling with their first L2 and those who have figured out methods to learn other languages on their own like Will has done.

FYI I also have cobbled a method together (as has Peter and several others in this thread).

IMO all languages share common threads in how difficult they are. There are combinations of factors that make a language difficult and there are different challenges with each one of them but there are overlaps. My method is similar to Will’s in that I have decided to mostly ignore writing systems because IMO writing systems add an unneccessary level of complexity. My method will work for any language. Will’s method (from what he described in Rita’s interview - watched it all) will mostly work for any language. But if he takes out the immersion it won’t work as well for grammar heavy languages. He himself admits that in that he is afraid of Spanish. I think he is mistaken in that immersion will give him what he’s missing. But if he doesn’t do the immersion he wouldn’t be able to. In the case of grammar heavy languages that also have cases immersion will also work but I believe it would take longer than in Chinese because of the combinatoric explosion nature of the case endings.

Anyhow long story short: sure, yes you have discovered someone who is great but Chinese isn’t really special. Any polyglot can tell you that.

85

@michilini: Can we at least agree that if you don’t speak/ understand language x then your opinion on a particular learner’s spoken proficiency is not meaningful and you should ask a native speaker or a learner who has reached some level of proficiency?

No. We can’t agree that the fallacy of argument from authority is valid.
Chinese language learning is still language learning. A polyglot could assess with some degree of accuracy if a speaker sounds native after listening to other natives. Also being exposed to a language frequently will give you some idea. I have been surrounded by Chinese speakers my whole life. I can tell if it sounds authentic. Can I tell the level more accurately than “sounds Chinese to me” of course not. But it’s not true to say that giving an opinion on a particular learner’s spoken profiency is only reserved for native speakers or speakers.

And honestly if that’s what you think: you dont want comments from non-chinese speakers then say that in your posts. This is a public forum. Expect comments otherwise and dont’ get butthurt when they disagree with your opinions.

86

Someone has to set the top of the bell curve right? But at the end of the day to achieve native fluency in speaking it requires many things (semi in order imho):

  • A desire to be a member of that culture.
  • Near native comprehension.
  • Tens of thousands of words in explicit memory.
  • Mastery of grammar.
  • Mastery of phonetics.
  • Mastery of idioms, collocations, native usage of words.
  • Knowledge of the culture

Any gap in these will result in one not “sounding native”, and all require active effort to accomplish. None are by accident, and some may be impossible for some people. This is why “hours of active effort using an effective, blended method” is a much better measure than months or years for time to fluency. Yes, someone can do ineffective things forever and never make any progress.

But an effective method also takes time, and these times are pretty well understood by organizations that specialize in getting people “proficient” in an L2. This is where FSI and CEFR come up often as does 500 - 2.000 hours. That is 500 - 2.000 hours of active effort, using an effective method, and spread optimally between everything I listed.

A person putting the in reps in a year? Good for them! 1,5 years? Great! 10? Awesome. The key is that they put in the time, and they had the opportunity to do so. That is certainly uncommon.

Are these things “harder” if they are more distant to our native “culture” (and language)? Well they certainly take more time. Does this make any specific language special? Not to me at least.

I think one of the worst things we can do is get a chip on our shoulders about how our TL is the hardest to learn. It seems like a toxic mindset to boost our own egos. Are we wanting to become (insert culture here) or have people tell us how awesome we are because we are learning (insert language here) and that is so difficult?

I feel everyone feels so strongly about this ITT, because it is uncommon that someone someone puts in the work in every area needed to achieve elusive “near native” level in “1,5 years”. But that to me speaks to a perfect blend of sound methods applied effectively from an individual that had the circumstances allowing them to do so. – Kudos to them! But now I am going to go and do my own thing, because I am not interested in becoming Chinese.

I am not certain where to put this, so now it is a P.S. –
Another factor to consider is that our brains only have so much computing power to sort all of this out. It is like a muscle. We can overwork it and stop gaining benefit and we need to rest it occasionally. This is why even if a person has 16 hours a day for a month to put in, they are unlikely to make that same progress as someone that puts in 4 hours a day for 4 months. Don’t cram study – it is not an effectively learning strategy.

87

You make some great points.

“you seem to be looking for validation of everything you say instead of a discussion.”

Apologies if that’s how it came across. Sometimes my passion for languages and excitement got the better of me.

Anyway I value all your input, it helps me make my Imlearningmandarin podcasts and blogs better :slight_smile:

Pretty sure Will can’t be compared to children immigrants though as he’s an adult. But that’s a whole other can of worms…

Also Chinese is special in the sense that it takes longer to learn for english native speakers than almost all other languages according to all estimates.

88

Don’t get me wrong: Will is clearly epic.

What I’m hoping is that immersion isn’t the secret sauce.

If it is, then it’s less helpful than if the rest of what he does are the most important parts.

For me, I have already solved listening comprehension. I’m pretty certain my method will work for any language for listening comprehension.

I haven’t cracked speaking perfect grammar yet (though my pronunciation is very good). I hope it’s not immersion and that it is in fact the sentences vs single words component that does it.

Anyhow. In spite of the bickering, thanks for the discussion. Keep it going.

89

xxdb,

I have a question for you. In the case of Will, do you think studying phonetics helped his listening experience (than an average joe who does not include it in his language learning process)and he derived more benefits from it because his subconscious mind could parse words better so he was consciously well aware of individual sounds present in a word, in the end, he could produce them better?

Yesterday I went through that mimicmethod guy website that Peter shared. I went through all the unrounded and rounded vowels that existed in German and practiced them. Spent a couple of hours on it.

Before the night I watched a movie in German and looked for certain rounded and unround vowel sounds while the actors were speaking.

To my great surprise, my subconscious mind was deciphering more words so your hypothesis seems to be correct if phonetics helps with listening or enhances it. The difference was immense.

90

@xxdb, yes unfortunately, “Make [patient] Swedish friends,” is not exactly the most extensible advice no matter how effective it might be for learning Swedish :).

91

@asad, my take is any way to make us “aware” of differences in sounds that we do not hear on our own is immensely useful. We usually only notice differences in things when they are +/-10%. Whether it is IPA, a helpful friend, or a tutor, anything that can make us aware that things exist when we don’t hear ourselves can make it much easier to notice in the future.

92

Well I’m interested in your comments but not really in your assessment of his level of spoken Chinese.

Yes I continue to think polyglots who don’t speak any Chinese aren’t in any way qualified to comment on a person’s level of spoken Chinese. It seems mildly surprising that this even needs saying since it’s so obviously true.

93

@Asadasad100101 xxdb,
I have a question for you. In the case of Will, do you think studying phonetics helped his listening experience (than an average joe who does not include it in his language learning process)and he derived more benefits from it because his subconscious mind could parse words better so he was consciously well aware of individual sounds present in a word, in the end, he could produce them better?

I speculate that the answer is yes. What I can say is that I had a similar experience at the beginning with Russian for months as I did with my brief one month experiment with a handful of mandarin words.

That is: I couldn’t actually tell what I was hearing. The sounds seemed blurred somehow so I couldn’t identify the individual vowels or consonants.
I would say with Russian it was maybe 1/3 or so of the consonants were subtly wierd combined with the unexpected clusters of consonants. It took several months before they settled in. The result was that my acquisition of Russian vocabulary was seriously degraded compared to Spanish or French for those initial months. I dropped from 50-100 words per day down to 20-30.

When I tried an experiment with Mandarin earlier in the year it was worse. 60-70% of the words I couldn’t tell what I was hearing AT ALL. I kind of recognized the existence of tones because I did an experiment with mandarin years ago where I spent a couple months trying to learn tones but I could not make out many of the consonants or even vowels. Like I said it was worse than Russian. I managed about 9-10 words a day for the month and it did not improve.

So… to answer your question: some 8 or 9 months after starting Russian I noticed I started to be able to learn new words faster. I also noticed that the wierd consonant clusters were no longer so wierd. Unconsciously I had picked them up over repeated exposure over and over. I was able also to make the wierd consonant sounds. With that in mind I think it would be highly beneficial to do the IPA early in the game and this part is crucial: try to babble the sounds to yourself. That way you build up muscle memory and link the abstract “meaning” of the sound to what your mouth is doing and also to what you’re hearing.

I believe with hindsight that the mental representation of a word is composed not just of how it sounds but also how it feels in your mouth. Therefore having that mental representation of the feeling will help match it faster when you hear it. So I think that your hypothesis has a decent chance of being correct.

94

And to me it’s “mildly surprising” that you have made your mind up in so many areas and are not open to discussing them because you think you already know.

You have also moved the goalposts again. It’s quite possible to distinguish between fluent Chinese and non-fluent Chinese even if you are not a polyglot. It isn’t of course possible to determine the accuracy of the speech. But I can definitely tell that Will sounds authentic even though I’m not quite a polyglot (I only have 4 languages) and I can’t speak Chinese.
So I disagree with you in broad sweep if not in the specific “you can’t assess the precise level” statement you appear to be making.

Anyhow, regardless, if you post in the public forum you’re going to get comments and assessments. You’re free to disagree.
As are we with your assessments.

95

It’s quite possible to distinguish between fluent Chinese and non-fluent Chinese even if you are not a polyglot.

Yeah I agree with this. I just think you can’t tell the difference between different people who are fluent which is the skill that would be useful here since Will is obviously fluent. The question before the house is not “is he fluent?” but “how fluent is he?”

That can only be answered by native speakers, and, to a lesser extent foreign speakers of Chinese.

Anyhow, regardless, if you post in the public forum you’re going to get comments and assessments. You’re free to disagree.
As are we with your assessments.

Wait, what? When did I ever complain that you disagreed with my assessment?

96

Yeah I agree with this. I just think you can’t tell the difference between different people who are fluent which is the skill that would be useful here since Will is obviously fluent. The question before the house is not “is he fluent?” but “how fluent is he?”

While I think this question is largely correct and it is indeed impossible for a non-speaker to determine precisely how fluent is he it depends on the metrics.
For example:
Does his body language look Chinese? Will’s does. Down to the way he rocks up and down.
Does the umm and ohs look Chinese? Will’s does. His hmmmmm in particular sounds Chinese.
Does his laugh sound Chinese? Will’s does.
Does Will have the rhythm of Chinese? Yes he does.
Does Will have the tonality of Chinese? Yes he does
If you close your eyes does it sound like he’s a Chinese person? Yes
Does he have the “flow” that you would expect without getting stuck on words? Yes

Now to the stuff you can’t assess:
Does Will have a grasp of advanced vocabulary? I don’t know. He could be using childish vocabulary.
Does Will have advanced grammar? I don’t know. I can only go by the way Rita was reacting.

That can only be answered by native speakers, and, to a lesser extent foreign speakers of Chinese.
So yes it is possible probably to fake the top 5 or so markers of “does this seem authentic” but I do think it is possible to get a sense of how Chinese he sounds if not necessarily the vocabulary count or grammar perfectiveness.

End result: I partially agree but partially disagree.

97

“It is clear and unambiguous that immersion works. Will did it. So did millions of other children in Canada who were immigrants from countries whose first language is distinct from English. This is true for their parents too.” (@xxdb)
Yes, immersion works, but it’s not as straightforward and unambiguous as many think it is.

Let me give you two examples:

  1. My Hungarian brother-in-law
    He’s been living most of his adult life in Germany, not in his home country (the Hungarian part of Serbia).

He’s able to do everything in daily life in Germany, but

  • he still has deficits in reading / writing more complicated (non-academic) texts in German and
  • his pronunciation still sounds foreign even after tens of thousands of hours of full immersion and constant social interactions in Germany (I’m talking of several decades here).
    However, his cultural identity is 100 per cent Hungarian. That is: it’s neither Serbian (which he also speaks and understands) nor German. So he doesn’t want to become “fully Germanized” or have a perfect German accent. But, of course, he doesn’t want to leave Germany and go back to Hungary or Serbia either :slight_smile:
  1. Adult immigrants and their children in Germany
    I’ve also worked as a private tutor in math, French, English, and German for more than 10 years. And my clients were not only Germans, but also many immigrant famlies with a Polish, Turkish, Italian, Croatian / Serbian, Greek, Afghan, etc. background.

Their kids (either if they were born in Germany or came here at a younger age) were almost all 100 per cent fluent in German. However, they had often difficulties reading / writing more or less complicated German texts, esp. when they were at the “Gymnasium” (the most challenging type of school in Germany).

From the more than one hundred parents with a migration background I had to deal with, none had a native-like German pronunciation. In other words, any German native speaker could tell within seconds that their pronunciation was somehow foreign (sometimes more, sometimes less).

However, most of them, after having lived and worked for many years or even decades in Germany, could converse in German with me more or less effortlessly. But they still made more mistakes than German native speakers, i.e. a wrong / missing word, a wrong collocation, an odd syntactic pattern, etc. here and there.

In short:
The vast majority of those adults were good communicators who could do whatever they wanted in daily life in Germany, but none of them were native-like.

In my opinion, this is also what advanced language learners should strive for: to become good communicators with a more or less pleasant pronunciation, but not necessarily “native-like” (in all the dimensions Toby mentioned in one of his last comments).
Striving for such perfection is usually not a good investment of a learner’s time, because the law of diminishing returns applies here.

That being said, esp. when it comes to the semantic subtleties involved in the tens of thousands of collocations that native speakers have under their belts, even advanced language learners on a C1 / C1-C2 level are often no match for educated native speakers.
The latter simply have an unfair advantage in this domain…

PS -
When is a “native-like” proficiency level attainable for adult language learners? My hypothesis is threefold:

  • They strive for perfection (= a personality trait).
  • They have a more flexible cultural identity (= a personality trait).
  • Their family doesn’t live in a foreign language bubble, which often seems to be the case in many immigrant families (= a micro-cultural characteristic).
98

“I have a question for you. In the case of Will, do you think studying phonetics helped his listening experience (than an average joe who does not include it in his language learning process)and he derived more benefits from it because his subconscious mind could parse words better so he was consciously well aware of individual sounds present in a word, in the end, he could produce them better?“

Simple answer: yes. Chinese is a tonal language. Learners from tone tonal language backgrounds are not accustomed to listening out for tones. Tonal information is just not important in English in the same way so from childhood our brains ignore it. Imagine how strange english speaking children would sound if their brains thought tonal information was important.

Imagine the first time the child encounters the word pineapple is when their mum shouts at her husband to prevent the pineapple rolling off the table and falling on the child below. She shouts: “look out, the pineapple!” stressing the word “pineapple” with a downward exclamation pitch contour similar to the Chinese fourth tone.

The child’s brain assigns the word “pinapple” with a fixed downwards exclamatory pitch contour and decides the word should always be pronounced in this way no matter the context. The parents decide not to buy pineapples again for safety reasons so the child doesn’t encounter the word again. One day it goes to school and asks a friend: “do you like pineapples!!!” pronouncing pineapples with the same tone as that used by the mother.

So it’s absolutely vital to retrain the brain to direct its attention towards tonal information, i.e. the pitch contour of each syllable. And this is necessary not only for effective output but also for effective input. Chinese has many homophones so if you don’t pay attention to tones it will make it much harder to parse the information and distinguish similar sounding sounds.

As for studying APA this may have had benefits too. Many learners have issues distinguishing certain Chinese sounds. such as Zh and J, X and Sh etc. Getting these distinctions sorted out early on is an excellent idea.

99

“While I think this question is largely correct and it is indeed impossible for a non-speaker to determine precisely how fluent is he it depends on the metrics.”

Well not really. The reason you bring up Oriental Pearl and other YouTubers is because they probably sound very Chinese to you too. But native speakers and advanced learners are just much more sensetive than you to pronunciation differences that are basically invisible to the untrained ear.

I’m trained to hear tone mistakes so I can avoid making them myself to the highest extent possible. If you haven’t studied Chinese you haven’t gone through this training so you’re unable to tell whether someone’s tones are good or not. The differences between proficient speakers who make many tone mistakes vs speakers who hardly make any are completely lost on you. This is just one example among many.

I don’t mean to sound disrespectful but I’m a big believer in the concept of staying in my lane.

100

@xxdb / Michilini
I agree with both of you :slight_smile:
That is: Even as non-Chinese speakers, we can say something about Will’s “outward appearance” (see xxdb’s comments), but we aren’t able to judge the “quality” of his speech:

  • Are all his tones acceptable?
  • Does he use the typical collocations / idioms correctly?
  • Are his syntactical structures simplistic or more complicated?
  • Are his language registers (slang, informal, neutral, etc.) appropriate to the social situation and his communication partners (which includes social distance, levels of politeness, etc.)?
    etc.

In short, as non-Chinese speakers we’re not able to determine the “degree of Will’s awesomeness”. And frankly, I find it uninteresting to discuss whether his spoken Mandarin is 77.8, 89.3, or 95.63 percent on the “native-like awesomeness scale.” :slight_smile:

The same applies for comparisons such as:

  • OrientalPearl is more or less awesome (i.e. native-like) than Will in Chinese,
  • Dogen is more or less awesome than Matt in Japanese."
    etc.

On the other hand, I find it interesting when educated native speakers “nitpick” the speech of advanced language learners because that’s another learning opportunity. See, for example, the assessment of Matt’s Japanese by Kaz: Helping an American guy Matt vs. Japan perfect his Japanese intonation - YouTube

However, I couldn’t agree more with Kaz’ comment under that YT video:
“Seriously, though, I’ve been repeating this over and over again. There are so many dialects in Japan. I think it’s okay to have foreign dialects of the Japanese language.” (Kaz)

This applies to every L2 being spoken: having a native-like pronunciation is a nice-to-have, not a must-have. But the pursuit of such perfection is usually not worth the time!

More interesting in this context is the question of how Will’s approach can be “generalized” (= adaptation to other L2s / replication / quantification).

There are three aspects that I like in particular so far:

  1. His early focus on phonetics

  2. His deliberate practice feedback loop:

  • output early plus input → get more or less instant corrections from native speakers during the whole language learning journey → use Anki with sentences that are relevant to conversations and own interests.
  • Rinse and repeat with a strict focus on the oral dimension, i.e. without getting distracted by learning the Chinese characters, reading and writing a lot.
  1. His enormous amount of self-talk.

I think this approach can be used even when language learners don’t receive constant feedback from their TL pals (but this “immersion aspect” and Will’s consistency over many months are probably the most important factors for his oral success).