Glad you liked the article! I agree with you: comparing with others is almost never a good idea. Other people are not you, they don’t have your background, your study situation, your motivation, and so on, so why compare with them? Compare with yourself! Also, saying that one ought to reach such and such a level after so and so many month or years is obviously problematic. One of my strengths, I think, is that I almost never compare with other people, only with myself.

I used to feel ashamed as how little I was able to speak, since I first started learning Chinese three years ago. But the thing is, if you don’t speak in a regular basis of course you won’t improve your speaking abilities!!!

The things is, I wasn’t been really diligent with my studies at first, and well… life happens!! Beside language learning life has its own difficulties, so to me, as long as I still enjoy the process it’s worth it.

Thanks for such insightful content, it’s always helpful to read or to listen to you c:

I think/hope I cleared that up in my previous response! The shallow pool and scuba diving to shipwrecks was not meant to map to any scale of Chinese proficiency, the idea was simply to say that doing lots of A (splashing around in shallow water) might not lead to B (swimming, diving), and so sticking to classroom content might not prepare you for what you really want to use Chinese for.

I’m not sure if I’m misreading your comment or if you’re misreading mine, but it seems we’re saying the same thing! The point of this article is to say that if you stick to what your curriculum tells you to do, you will be quite limited in your ability to do things in the real world, such as asking where the toilet is, chat with shopkeepers and deal with authentic interactions in general. They are not completely separate things, but my advice here is to not confine yourself to the classroom, unless good grades is the only thing you’re after.

As for professors who can’t speak Chinese well, I think that is sometimes because they either focused very heavily on the written language (this is very common at universities in the west in general, maybe elsewhere too) or because they started learning long enough ago that access to the spoken language was more limited. In most cases, I think it’s a matter of priority: if their goal is to study Chinese history, tones are probably not at the top of the list of things to master. Then again, if that’s the case, they probably shouldn’t teach language classes either.

Watch these two Harvard professors sing a song they made to remember the order of the dynasties.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJis9TSw1rE
“knee chang ba”
“Chang zhou Chin Han, Sway Tang Song”

That’s a great question! I didn’t mean it as an analogy for how ambitious your learning is, though, more that some types of practice don’t take you closer to certain types of goals. For example, if you stick to dry-land swimming or stay in water so shallow don’t need to or can’t swim there, you won’t get good at swimming. Maybe that’s a better way of phrasing it? The point is not that your goals need to be very loft, but that textbooks rarely prepare you for anything in the real world. I would say that the fact that you can study several textbooks without learning to say “Where’s the bathroom?” (or understand the reply) is a good example of what I’m after here. So yes, I agree with you completely!

Is it, though? How many Chinese learners have goals that lofty?
One thing I learned from my studies has been that most pedagogues are scholars, and they assume anyone else studying Chinese has the same goal as them: to go all the way to classical Chinese and study poetry and philosophers in the original. How many learners have this as the goal?
And thus, you can learn several textbooks of material and still don’t know how to say “where’s the bathroom?”
If you raise the issue you are contemptuously told off to “get a tourist phrasebook, this is Chinese learning.”
I assert that most learners are like myself, we want to learn Chinese so we can live and work in China.
There are few or no textbooks for us. Who cares if we can’t read at a university level? It’s assumed that’s what we want.
If I can read menus, the gas bill and all the characters in use on Taobao that’s fine.