Fluent in Mandarin in 3 Months?

"Able to speak or write a particular foreign 

language easily and accurately"

-Oxford English Dictionary

Different environments set the tone for popular topics. SOPA has been a hot topic among techies, free, speech advocates, and internet lovers. The ongoing Republican train wreck has been quite popular for Americans and politicos. For language learners (especially those studying Mandarin), recent bold claims by a Mr. Benny Lewis have ignited a firestorm of discussion around the web. Many have already taken sides in this debate, some proselytize complete failure, others wishing him luck, and still others look forward to him proving how easy his task really is.

What does Mr. Lewis plan to accomplish in three months? Well, he plans to acquire Fluency in Mandarin Chinese within 3 months.

According to his blog, Mr. Lewis is an Irishman who has spent the last nine years travelling the world learning languages. At the age of 21 he only spoke English, and now, according to his site, he speaks 8 languages. These include the following ( numbers represent FSI difficulty ranking with 3 being the hardest):

1. English- 0 because it is the native language.
2. French - 1
3. Italian - 1
4. Esperanto - The source I looked through lacked a classification but many cited it as a stepping stone to learning other languages. So, I will be completely fair and call it a 1 (even though I feel it should be a 1-)
5. Spanish - 1
6. Portuguese - 1
7. German - 1+
8. Irish - 2

Note that with the exception of Irish, these are all level one languages. According to the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), level 1 languages can all be learned within about 24 intensive weeks of study (level 2 take approximately 44 weeks). Nonetheless, it is impressive that he has gained some level of fluency in each of these.

However, as many of you know, Mandarin is no level one or two language. If Spanish, French, and German are common street thugs, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and Cantonese are the trained professionals. These languages have been mutilating peoples hopes and dreams of being fluent for so long that they are like mysterious master ninjas able to effortlessly end your ambitions with only a moments notice for you to honorably acknowledge your defeat. 

According to the FSI, level 3 languages take approximately 88 weeks to reach general proficiency. To be clear, that is 88 weeks of what amounts to full time studying of the language. What makes Mandarin such a nasty beast? First, it lacks commonality with English. Words for different items share only coincidental resemblance to English counterparts. Second, there are four tones in Mandarin. This has two results, first, words change meaning when said in the incorrect tone. Second, the language is littered with homophones so listening comprehension is greatly challenged. Third, and this is a biggie, the writing system lacks an alphabet.  You don't learn letters in Mandarin. Instead you learn hanzi. Hanzi are characters that possess independent meaning but can also be combined into compound words.

For example, the character 流means "to flow" and is pronounced liu with a rising tone. 利 means "benefit“ and is pronounced li with a falling tone. If you put the two together, do you know what it means? 流利 means fluent! It is really cool but very difficult to get a handle on characters. The difficulty of characters is further amplified by learning a multitude of similar but different characters. Take a look at the following to see what I mean:

报服，我找，或成，去丢，话活，玉主。。。The list goes on and on.

So, what is Mr. Benny's strategy? From what I can gather, it is a straightforward and solid approach. He plans to only speak Putonghua, read vociferously, and employ his other tricks he has learned over the past nine years.

However, one gets the impression that these tricks will not be enough as he has already adapted the standard definition of fluency.  His definition reduces reading literacy to 500 characters and the ability to navigate headlines and menus. Unfortunately for the unsuspecting Mr. Lewis, these are two extremely difficult things to do with the headlines often being the most difficult part of an article and menus containing cryptic cultural descriptions of dishes.

Speaking fluency is also reduced to conversational fluency (don't get me wrong, still a lofty and impressive challenge). If he manages this. it will be interesting to see. Given his high profile, I expect we will get to see something...

Despite my heavy skepticism of any chance of Mr. Lewis succeeding in this particular attempt. I certainly wish him luck. However, I feel it is irresponsible to mislead potential students of difficult languages and cause them to set unattainable goals. It smacks of "get rich quick", "lose 80 pounds in 20 days", and "attract any woman you desire" self-help claims. When they are unable to reach levels that you claimed are possible in a certain timeframe, they are more likely to burn out and give up rather than dig deeper and be patient.

The fact is some things take work, time, and dedication. Need proof? Go sit in on a Intro Mandarin class and return one year later. The students didn't quit coming because Chinese was too easy and they got bored...

Below you can watch one of the response videos to Mr. Lewis' claim.