Excellent post. As an aside, I'd like to take a chance to torpedo the whole "Chinese is difficult" thing. Chinese is no dfficult than any other language. At the end of the day, it's just a language, not string theory. Much is made about the difficulty of the writing system from people who have never learned it or weren't intelligent enough to learn it. All characters are a combination of 216 basic parts. This doesn't mean you memorize 216 building blocks and you now know every character, but it does make the writing system an organic hole, as opposed to the sea of gobbledygook most non-Chinese speakers make it out to be.
The biggest hurdle is building vocabulary. But anyone can do that in the span of a year. Use flashcards. Eventually you reach a point of critical mass, where even brand new words now are easily retained, because you have an intuitive feel for the language.
Warning: You will have to work hard and be proactive in the beginning if you want to learn this language. Doing the homework the teacher gave you is a joke, that won't be enough. You need to be curious, to read up on everything, look up things compulsively in a dictionary, try to game a chick who doesn't speak English. I did that three years ago and not only was it fucking awesome, but she's to become my wife next week. You're going to really have to enjoy studying and learning it as an intellectual challenge. Otherwise, you'll get discouraged and fail.
There is no reason any talented and dedicated individual cannot become conversational in Mandarin in under a year, assuming one can tolerate their lack of culture and spiritual bankruptcy, but that is a very different topic, and this post was about business.
The biggest hurdle is building vocabulary. But anyone can do that in the span of a year. Use flashcards. Eventually you reach a point of critical mass, where even brand new words now are easily retained, because you have an intuitive feel for the language.
Warning: You will have to work hard and be proactive in the beginning if you want to learn this language. Doing the homework the teacher gave you is a joke, that won't be enough. You need to be curious, to read up on everything, look up things compulsively in a dictionary, try to game a chick who doesn't speak English. I did that three years ago and not only was it fucking awesome, but she's to become my wife next week. You're going to really have to enjoy studying and learning it as an intellectual challenge. Otherwise, you'll get discouraged and fail.
There is no reason any talented and dedicated individual cannot become conversational in Mandarin in under a year, assuming one can tolerate their lack of culture and spiritual bankruptcy, but that is a very different topic, and this post was about business.
AB ANTIQUO, AB AETERNO