Four weeks seems ludicrously short too. I'm curious about this because my sister is ludicrously good at languages (learned to speak ridiculously early, became f

Four weeks seems ludicrously short too. I'm curious about this because my sister is ludicrously good at languages (learned to speak ridiculously early, became fluent in Hungarian in less than six months etc.) but I'm not sure you'd necessarily distinguish between me and her after just four weeks of classes in most languages. Also Mandarin is a tonal language so could be totally different cognitively from non-tonal languages. It depends too on what you are testing - I know after my first month learning Mandarin, I'd have got full marks on a test with pinyin but done terribly on any sort of aural test. Very different skills.