Reply #1 DArtagnan's post
Used to be I would recommend Beijing but no longer as every foreigner goes there to learn Mandarin. At the programs there, you can meet so many foreigners and locals who speak such good English that your Mandarin will never improve. Plus university students bugging you to teach them English really does not help you as it wastes your time.
For example, friends who attend the Foreign Language Institute in Beijing took at least 6 months to achieve the same level of Mandarin that I achieved in 3 months also in Beijing. In my school, 95% of my classmates could not speak English and because I am Asian, the local students never bothered to ask me to teach them English.
Hence I would recommend you go to a 2nd tier city like Dalian, Qingdao, Chengdu or Kunming where there are not so many foreigners.
Ideally if you have time, 6 months of intensive learning is enough to get decent fluency. If you don't have time, then 3 months or so until you can achieve a decent listen capability then return to HK and find yourself a Mandarin tutor. There are a lot of very good Mandarin tutors in HK and they are great for expanding on the foundation you would have picked up in China. | |
