getting fluent ASAP

[andrew1981]

Hey everyone,

So right now I am Beijing and am trying to get fluent ASAP, but am running into obstacles here. I personally find Beijing not a very good place to immerse yourself in the language because you are constantly surrounded by English speaking foreigners and locals who seem to be very interested in to talking to you to improve their English, especially the younger generation.

I was just wondering if anyone had any suggestions to get complete immersion, IE a city with little to no English speaking foreigners, but at the same time a city where they do not speak a local dialect far from Putonghua and have some good intensive Chinese schools.

Right now as the weather is getting much colder I would love to go south but I heard that the dialects down there are far off Putonghua.　Right now I am leaning towards Harbin, regardless of its tundra like climate. Is that good? Does anyone know any really good schools there besides that $9000 CET one? Does anyone know how to find a good homestay there? (IE not using me for my English)

Any suggestions would be welcome. Thanks alot!

[badr]

Hi there,

You should maybe try a homestay with Insight China ( http://www.insightchina.cn). I know two people that have gone through that and they seemed pleased with the results. There are 2 or 3 other companies based out of Beijing doing the same thing but they seemed a little pricier. Lotus study is one of them.

[roddy]

you are constantly surrounded by English speaking foreigners and locals who seem to be very interested in to talking to you to improve their English, especially the younger generation.

Only if you let yourself be, I think. The vast majority of Beijing is Chinese-speaking.

Harbin or some other city will give you less opportunities to speak English, but the main thing is to avoid the opportunities yourself. There have been quite a few topics on Harbin lately, with some good advice about the different schools.

Roddy

[dan ni er]

I wouldn't pay the hefty fees those homestay companies charge - I would just follow Roddy's advice and avoid those rather annoying chinese students who are obsessed with practising their English. There are plenty of Chinese that have no interest in learning English and are only to happy to speak Chinese with you....you just have to find them. I suggest going to Tianjin.

[笨笨德]

I had this problem when i first came to taiwan, everyone just wants to practise english with you... I now have 3 techniques to deal with it...

1) speak english with them for a bit, then start speaking in chinese, even if the other person continues to speak english, just answer back in chinese, if you are stubborn enough, like me, they will eventually start speaking in chinese... try to come to a natural unconscious agreement, im going to speak a little in english, and you are going to speak a little chinese.

2) this is slightly less unfair approach but it works. if someone speaks in english to you, speak back to them using a fast paced colloquial english. chances are the poor person wont understand a single word you said, or ask them a difficult question that is beyond their english ability, almost forcing them to revert back to chinese to continue the converstion

3) just be direct and tell the person you wish to practise your chinese, and would they mind speaking in chinese for a while.

oh i just remembered another, just reply, "對不對我是德國人我不會講英文"

but i think, giving a little back by speaking some english is a fair enough trade.

加油

[venture160]

While Beijing does have a large community of English speaking people, what was said above is obviously correct, its a huge city with millions of Chinese people who don't know how to speak a word of english. I find that if you are a FIRST TIME learner of Chinese in Beijing it can be extremely difficult because you are living in a new country and you surround yourself with foreign friends to make life easier. Thus, your Chinese does not really improve, and if you have Chinese friends they tend to speak english with you, maybe teaching you the occaisional slang word. I have been studying Chinese now for 6 months in Harbin here with the CET program, and it really does work to get you speaking Chinese 24 hours a day, in your classroom, and in your dorm. But that being said, Harbin is a little more difficult to make friends outside of the classroom because there is a lot of resistance to foreigners here by the Chinese because they often times think you are some sort of sleazy russian, and its simply not very cosmopolitan.(sorry if there are any Russians here, but its true in Harbin) Now that I have kicked my ass for 6 months here(CET will dramaticly improve your Chinese in a semester, the biggest improvement is the speed in which you can react and keep up in a conversation, you will no longer have to think about everything you say, it starts to become natural) I will actually be going to Beijing with IUP for a year or so, because I find that now that my Chinese is no longer at a rudimentary level, and my spoken Chinese is %75 of the time better than a Chinese persons spoken english, I speak Chinese with all of my Chinese friends in Harbin, all the the time. And I find that now that I am at that level of Chinese its even EASIER in Beijing to make Chinese friends because now you have moved out of the "foreign safety net" and have learned how to just start speaking. This is the main reason why I am going to Beijing, because I find it is simply easier to find Chinese who are more willing to make foreign friends, and if they only speak english to you, only speak chinese back to them, and unless you give in, the conversation will slowly move over to 100% Chinese, you just have to be persistant. Yea it does sound like you might be limiting your friends, but if you really want to learn Chinese its the best way to do it (that is spoken Chinese, written Chinese is totally different).

[Harvey]

But CET is ridiculously expensive!!!

[wushijiao]

I know people who have learned Chinese pretty well in big cities like Shanghai and Beijing. And I know people who have learned no Chinese in the middle of nowhere. But, on average, I think it's quite a bit easier to learn Chinese in more "off the beaten path" places, mainly because of the social dynamic venture 160 described.

Personally, I first started learning in Henan, and it wasn't long before my spoken Chinese was better than most Chinese people's spoken English (although a lot of times their passive knowledge of English was far greater than my Chinese. But of course that is irrelavant in communication). However, Chinese students in the big cities tend to have much better levels of spoken English than out in the middle of nowhere. In Shanghai, for example, many high schools now focus on communicative English, not just grammar. In rural Henan, by contrast, there were many students who had studied English for years without doing any significant amounts of listening and speaking.

The point is, when two people meet, if they are having more than a simple "where are you from" conversation, they will eventually speak the language the enables them to have the easiest and most complex converstation possible, in my opinion.

In any case, I think you have to know yourself. It's easy to say to youself, "I'll just dich the ex-pat scene". But there are a lot of interesting ex-pats. A lot of cool people. To some degree, you have to be a bit standoffish and cold towards other foreigners if you want to be hardcore about studying Chinese and becoming fluent. One of my friends eventually left Shanghai because he knew he couldn't not hang out with all his friends every weekend. He knew that to become fluent he had to go to a smaller place. So far, this seems to be working well for him. Of course, not all people are like this.

[trevelyan]

Assuming you don't mind chatting in Chinese, one effective approach is steering the conversation towards a topic where your partner can't express what they actually feel/think and continue speaking in English simultaneously.

So veer away from anything that might remotely creep into a textbook. This approach has the advantage that it avoids yet-another-conversation-about-your-family, and also leads to more genuine conversations: neither one of you will have the opportunity to express your thoughts on table tennis or baijiu. You're both likely to stumble into words you may not know as well, in which case both of you might benefit from figuring out the proper translation.

Mind you, this strategy presumes that your Chinese is actually better than their English. Most conversations are generally at the mercy of whichever party is more fluent.