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Can Westerners become fluent in Chinese?


david1978

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It's a silly question really. 'Westerners' have been to the moon, memorized phone books, built cathedrals and raised children. A language is hardly going to be more difficult.

Whether or not it's worth the effort . . . ah, now there's something to ponder :P

I think you'd need to post a sound sample to be convincing

Meh. Similarly I've seen plenty of people who can bluff with some well-pronounced native-like utterances but collapse as soon as they get out of a narrow range of familiar situations.

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Well, it's all relative. I mean, would you be able to talk fluently about quantum field theory, even in English?

raised children

Somehow this seems to be one of the few things that anyone can do, no matter how bad they are at anything else.

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Well, the US Department of State seems to have a different opinion. But that is neither here nor there.

I do have actual proof about the acceptability of my pronunciation, however -- my doctoral dissertation was about foreign accent in Mandarin, and the experimental portion had native speakers listen to ten samples of speech in Mandarin and rate them on various aspects of their perceived personal characteristics. Part of this was giving their guess as to the origin of the speaker. My voice appeared on the stimulus recording and was identified as being Chinese, though not by all raters. (The native speaker on the stimulus recording was mis-identified as being non-Chinese by some, as well.)

If you want to be REALLY depressed about all your achievements in Chinese study, and you're in China, look up the Canadian director of the Shanghai Foreign Studies University interpreter training program. FLAWLESS Mandarin AND Cantonese, no accent, handwriting like a native -- and he started in his teens. He's somewhat famous among interpreters. He's the first English-A, Chinese-B in AIIC. Nice guy, though. Very helpful and willing to practice with aspiring interpreters as long as they are serious.

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I was going to ask to close this silly thread, finally. Methinks the whole concern about fluency and accents is one of the worst things keeping people from opening their mouth and speaking their minds in a foreign tongue... Now, that makes me think that maybe we should require politicians to speak in a foreign language, so they might shut up, however. Hmm...

The way the thread has developed, keep it going. I'm pretty sure, if god wanted an HSK, he'd simply send a substitute and say it's all really him, anyways.

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