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My math was off. It is 550 hours. That is much more reasonable. Do you think it is still possible to be fluent in speaking? The reading and writing part surpri

• mdorazio 10y ago
  Not in a normal sense. I know the DoD has immersive programs for training interpreters and SIGINT people to language proficiency as quickly as possible, but I don't think 550 hours is nearly enough for Mandarin. Even assuming 12 hours a day of full immersion, you're looking at fluency in 45 days. This is only feasible if you've already had a lot of exposure to the language. For example, many people outside the US are exposed to English movies, TV shows, ads, and grade school language programs growing up, which makes it easier to later learn English seriously. If you're not a Chinese American, this situation is unlikely for Mandarin. Yes, most other writing systems, including English, use phonetic alphabets. If you learn the set of letters, you can at least sound out any word, and make a good guess at spelling something you know how to say. Chinese is a logographic writing system. There are thousands of "letters" that you have to learn individually, and there are generally only hints in the logograms about pronunciation or meaning, so you're basically memorizing how to read and write every single word individually. If you don't know how to write the character, you can't "sound it out" like you can in English. You're just stuck. This also leads to frustrations in even using dictionaries to look up word meanings.