Comments on: How long have you studied Chinese? 290 years or 58 992 hours!

By: How long do you have to study Chinese to make it useful? | Hacking Chinese | Hacking Chinese

Fri, 25 Aug 2023 12:09:49 +0000

[…] As we have seen, to give a simple answer to this question, we need to make assumptions about what you want to use it for. It’s incredibly difficult to answer questions like this based on solid data, because there isn’t any. There are too many variables in play, so we simply can’t say “it takes X years to be able to do Y”. And even if we could, years is clearly not the right unit to use here. […]

By: Chinese handwriting: 36 samples from beginners to native speaker | Hacking Chinese

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 11:25:56 +0000

[…] with beginners at the start and native speakers at the very end. Counting study time in years can be very misleading, but since there is no better way of sorting the samples, I chose to do that […]

By: Guus

Guus — Mon, 25 Jun 2018 11:00:52 +0000

I have long had the same suspicion, that learning a language is really much more about real time input than anything else. Talent has a place, but might just make progress happen 20% faster.
It’s often said that kids learn their mother tongue without any effort. That’s not true – they’re exercising all day long with rhymes, songs, talking and being occasionally corrected.
That’s why almost everyone manages to learn their mother tongue.

By: Elizabeth Braun

Elizabeth Braun — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 20:27:59 +0000

I missed your survey, sadly. However, just as a fun exception, I just ‘filled it in’ now.

I’ve being working with Chinese for a few months shy of 20 years. I guesstimated the number of just class time as 1000. When I then did a more realistic estimate, it worked out as almost 1800 hours of classes and homework. That excludes personal study outside of any class arrangement and preparing and teaching Chinese to others and related stuff.

I’m good at under estimating!!!:-)

By: David Lloyd-Jones

David Lloyd-Jones — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 03:28:23 +0000

Young lawyer has a heart attack and comes up before Saint Peter.

“Saint Peter, Saint Peter, what am I doing here? I’m only 38 years old!”

“That’s funny,” sez the Door Keep. “According to your billed hours, you’re 117.”

-dlj.

By: ArtFD

ArtFD — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 20:53:28 +0000

I’ve learned a few things over the years, especially from practicing medicine, that leads me to drastically discount people’s self-reports on virtually anything and even to discount eye witness reports of unusual events. Centuries ago I was a college freshman and hoped to optimize my studying efforts. I kept a daily diary of activities over a 7-day span, eating, sleeping, studying, etc. to document my behavior somewhat. I was startled to find I was only spending a few hours a week studying outside of class. This was much less than I guessed before I started the diary. I think a better measure of one’s efforts in learning a language would be to note achievement benchmarks: how many words you know, in the senses of being able to speak them, able to distinguish one near-homophone from another, being able to understand a novel utterance in the words & grammar you already know, being able to recognize a character, being able to write a character after hearing it spoken, and ultimately being able to write dictated speech. There’s no quick way to summarize that. I can speak better than I can hear, which is better than I can understand spoken, and far far better than I can write characters. My gut feeling is that for all the effort and time I have so far put in (2 semesters of college Mandarin), I have very little to show for it. My putting the same effort into learning Spanish, for example, would have produced quite different results. Strangely enough, I enjoy the process of learning Mandarin far more than I have in the previous languages I’ve studied: French, German and Russian. So I will endeavor to persevere.