Comments on: I Want to Move to Taiwan, but I Don’t Speak Mandarin

By: Sean Lin

Sean Lin — Wed, 29 Jun 2016 16:38:04 +0000

Actually 媽 means “mother” Horse is 馬

By: Philip

Philip — Mon, 07 Dec 2015 06:13:45 +0000

Hi Luke,
Your article is excellent and i am moving to Taipei to start work as an english teacher at the end of December, Has you are any of your friends studied at a school that you can recommend. The only suitable school( i need night classes because my job will be 9am-6pm) i can find is Taiwan Mandarin institute. Do you know anything about their classes?

By: Daniel @ Path Finder City

Daniel @ Path Finder City — Sat, 14 Nov 2015 06:33:45 +0000

Hey Luke, first time reader and commenter here.

Love this post! I am always amazed at how well some Westerners speak in Mandarin… some even with perfect tonality. If they can do it – I betcha you can do it too! Just fill in the missing puzzle piece one piece at a time.

You’re an online marketer as well – what projects do you do?

-Daniel

By: Joella

Joella — Tue, 10 Nov 2015 17:43:59 +0000

I actually had a kind of different experience when living in Beijing. I agree that it is hard- I personally only learned stuff for basic conversations- but I found learning very satisfying. My husband put in more time and learned a lot more- which was really useful for travelling around. But I found Chinese people almost always understood me, even when I used the wrong tone. In fact, we frequently marvelled at how people could work out what we said even if we used some of the wrong tones (or just no tone as the case may have been). I also met a lot of Europeans/Americans who spoke near fluent or even fluent Mandarin. They had studied for several years but definitely not 10 years. I wonder if that’s because Beijing is more likely to attract people who studied Mandarin at university either back home or one of the Beijing universities? I have also never been to Taiwan so I wonder if the accent had anything to do with you not always being understood. It’s very interesting to see how we’ve had different experiences with Mandarin.

By: Charlie on Travel

Charlie on Travel — Wed, 04 Nov 2015 20:45:33 +0000

In reply to Travelsito. For sure! I mean, Luke and I lived in Taiwan for a year but learning Mandarin was tough, especially when you're trying to fit it around work and other things. People learn at different paces as well and that's makes a difference. It's difficult to ever put a time frame on it!

By: Travelsito

Travelsito — Mon, 02 Nov 2015 10:30:10 +0000

I suppose one could learn Mandarin in time, if you move there, right? Nice post, Charlie.

By: Anthony Metivier

Anthony Metivier — Sat, 31 Oct 2015 22:12:16 +0000

In reply to Luke.

Great – thanks for this link! It’s very useful for a project I’m working on. :)

By: Luke

Luke — Fri, 30 Oct 2015 17:16:32 +0000

In reply to Anthony Metivier.

Hi Anthony,
Thanks for reading the article. I’m sorry, I looked everywhere but I couldn’t find the original article which I referenced. But I did find another article making a similar point which says that for an English speaker Spanish is a category 1 language, meaning it should take roughly 600 hours to learn, but Mandarin Chinese is a category 5 language, the hardest for English speakers, requiring roughly 2,200 hours of study (making it close to three and a half times more difficult than Spanish). Here’s the link: http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty

By: Anthony Metivier

Anthony Metivier — Fri, 30 Oct 2015 12:01:35 +0000

Love the point that difficulty is relative to the learner.

Do you happen to have a link or citation to that relative position scale that you mentioned? That would be great to read. :)