Estimates for achieving intermediate fluency in Mandarin Chinese range up to spending years and around 4000 total hours (2,200h classroom hours, 1,800 outside). I did it in 1500 hours total and less than a year.[1]
There is a lot of disagreement on language proficiency estimates. They are unreliable and inaccurate. My rough best estimates:
Mean: 2,200h classroom + ~1800h outside -> 50% pass ILR 3 -> true average level is ~ILR 2+
My journey: 150h classroom + 1350h outside -> 50/50 shot at passing ILR 3 exam -> true average level ILR 2+
Detailed walkthrough: One of our best sources, the US Department of State, sadly has a lot of content under NDAs, including exams. That said, they estimate that reaching "General Professional Fluency" (ILR 3) takes 2,200 classroom hours over 88 weeks. This is 2,200/88 = 25 hours a week. Diplomats describe studying a language at the DOS as "the hardest thing you will do in your life". Classroom hours do not include the heavy homework and content consumption. For them, this is not a 25h part-time breeze. It is life.
What the program sounds like, it takes more like 45h a week for 88 weeks (3096h). Add some private language practice, travelling, and content consumption, and studying for the actual exam (which seems brutal). Now, getting to ILR3 fluency seems like taking well above 4000 hours, all included.
This is being good on paper. These kinds of language proficiency levels tend to fall short in real-life. In fact, they fall short even on paper: Only some 50% pass the ILR3 test after the 88 weeks. In additio, tests are a mediocre proxy for actual communication ability. My sense from reading online is that the diplomats at ILR3 on paper have only truly mastered something like ILR2.
Similarly, I spent some 1,500 hours total, including everything like classroom hours, tutoring hours, content consumption, and conversations. On paper, I would guess I am at ILR3, but that is probably an overestimate. So call it ILR2+.
To be fair, also take generously take some time off that 4000-hour estimate: Call it usually takes 3000 hours to get to a similarly strong ILR2+ level / on-paper ILR3. Hence the 3000h vs 1500h comparison.
This is my rough outline of the core estimate. I do not really care enough to get into more detail or studying for passing tests. I just enjoy learning the language and using it. ↩︎
Over the last 365 days, I studied Mandarin for fun. With anki, tutors, and traveling accelerating my learning, I ended up getting to the level of comfortable conversational fluency. My Mandarin isn't perfect nor perfectly fluent, but I can now handle everything up to technical conversations in the area of my PhD.
For serious language learners, I also jotted down a longer list of methodds: isaak.net/mandarinmethods
Humble Beginnings — 筚路蓝缕
Month 1: Last September, I was deep into my math undergrad. It was pretty dry. I was looking for some fun non-math side project.[1] I flirted with French, Russian, archery, parkour, and Japanese. But those didn’t ignite my passion. I happened to watch a snippet of the anime Demon Slayer in an obscure Chinese fan dub. Ironically, this caught my attention. I also had lots of Chinese friends, so why not learn a little Mandarin? Oh my, I had no idea how obsessed I'd end up with this "little" side project.
Berkeley had a breakneck-speed Mandarin beginner class. I loved it. Within a week, we learned pinyin. We learned the tones. We learned to read. We learned to write. Then started talking immediately, every single day. Talking in horribly horribly broken Chinese, but nevertheless having conversations.[2] I learned the very most important survival vocabulary, like: I am Isaak and Yes, I live in America and Sorry, no, I’m not a basketball player for the Golden State Warriors.
I had virtually no math background, so I spent a lot of my time studying math from absolute scratch. It was brutal. It was rewarding. It also was very dry. Many months of many proofs, many \[ and some forgotten \], many months of many ∴ and many more □. ↩︎
Between running from Chinese class to discrete math classes, I’d be staring into the orange California sunset sky, and mumbling random Demon Slayer anime phrases to myself in Chinese, like "Lightning Breath - First Slash and Lightning" (雷之呼吸，一之型，霹雳一闪!). Oops... ↩︎
The beginning was by far the hardest time, and many tuned out or dropped out. But I had lots of fun. I played a lot. I wrote a horrible poem about humanity colonizing Mars. My Chinese was absolute crap, but I was improving fast. Chinese is my fifth language, and I had a few tricks up my sleeve:
Intense Self-Study — 自强不息
Month 3: Spaced repetition is a superweapon. The spaced repetition app Anki is the core reason why I was able to study Chinese efficiently. Alongside Anki, I adopted other methods to learn faster.
Frequency-based learning. Comprehensible input. Reading lots as soon as I could, especially graded readers. Buying a calligraphy pen-brush and learned how to write the 600 Chinese characters. FSRS. Creating a 100,000-card Anki megadeck. For all the nitty-gritty language learning tips, check out my methods post.
Early on, I started watching anime dubs like Boruto or Scissor Seven. I really enjoyed myself despite barely understanding anything. Every few minutes I collected a new word to study. The content I watched in those early days felt like colorful images with funny sounds which occasionally made sense.
On day 70 I reached a vocabulary of 1050, of which 460 characters.[1]
I don’t study for tests and never took one. Yet, note that in the major Chinese system to track language progress, the fourth tier out of six (old HSK4) requires a vocabulary of roughly 1200. ↩︎
The other superweapon I implemented was personalized tutoring. My first month studying Chinese was mostly in a 20-people class. But then, I took Bloom's Two-Sigma effect to heart and got myself lots of 1-1 tutoring. The more time I spent on tutoring, the more it accelerated my studies.[1]
Bloom’s Two-Sigma effect is the phenomenon of tutored students vastly outperforming students in normal classes. ↩︎
There’s legends like Tamu spending dozens of hours with tutors, but I’d mostly spend up to six hours a week. More would start to detract from my main focus, which were still my math studies. My default for working with tutors was to lead a "normal" conversation. I had two strict rules for conversations with tutors: 1. Only Chinese, no English. 2. Correct every single mistake I make.
At the start, this tutoring was excruciatingly slow. But it was very worth it. After the chat, I’d ask them to send me a summary of my key mistakes and newly learned vocabulary. It’d add that to my Anki.
I made lots of mistakes. I still do. Tutoring gives me a tight and fast feedback loop on fixing my mistakes.
Traveling — 学以致用
Month 4: Winter break was approaching. I knew all the Chinese I needed to know to travel. (No, sorry, I’m not LeBron James.) I figured out tourist visas, and just went for it. After Christmas in chafing-lips-freezing-cold Austria, I found myself wandering around fogged-up-glasses-humid Taipei.[1]
Winter in Taiwan was actually comfortable. Summer in Shanghai was crazy. ↩︎
Too humid to see, too humid to sweat, too cool to break a sweat 😎
I usually like to travel alone, and then figure out things on the spot. I’d walk around with airpods in, sugar-shocked from eating too many sugar gourds, explaining to my tutor in great detail what tasty novel things I ate at the night market. When not on a tutoring call, I’d sit in cafes and study, wander around markets, or talk to locals.
Being a foreigner with passable Mandarin is... amusing. When meditating in a small Buddhist temple town in middle-of-nowhere rural Sichuan, I was a local celebrity. 300 primary schooler filed past me, who definitely hadn't seen an Austrian-African foreigner speaking Mandarin. They totally lost it. It was fun, but also tiring. Eventually I preferred to be in the cities, where being a foreigner wasn’t a miracle.
At least, I got a good taste of why being famous must be great for exactly three minutes, and then quite frankly horrible forever after. Not again. I’m okay, thanks.
In total, I was in Mainland China three times this year, for a total of two months.[1] It goes without saying that every journey gave me an enormous boost in my learning pace. The first time travelling got me from broken to comfortable in all day-to-day situations. Every time I travelled I learned roughly 1000 new words/characters. Every time immensely boosted my fluent expression and listening ability.
I ended up going to China again fairly soon, in Spring break. This time I went with an adventure-hungry Austrian friend who was also learning Chinese, and we pushed each other to get better and better. In total, I’m lucky to have spent almost 2 months of this year traveling and working remote, most of that time in Shanghai. ↩︎
The Marathon — 持之以恒
Month 6: My Chinese still had far to go. Apart from the study sprints while traveling, I tried to keep up a consistently high pace back at home. Chinese wasn’t my focus then — math and neuro were. Chinese was consistently the largest side project, clocking some 15 hours a week.
Consistency was the most important part to keep a high pace of progress. Here’s what a typical focused day might’ve looked like:
- Wake up, 1 hour of Anki
- Do my main thing for 8-9 hours (math undergrad, neuro grad school, …)
- 1 hour tutoring call before dinner some days
- 1 hour of Chinese content before sleep, e.g. anime dubs or books
It was quite literally the marathon. Here’s my habitually doing Anki on a treadmill:
Some 7 months from start, I reached 5,000 known words/characters. The old highest level (HSK6) also required a vocabulary of 5,000 (different) words. So this was an epic goal to hit.[1]
Again, I wasn't taking studying for tests — I was studying for myself. But to compare, the (old) HSK6 requiring a vocabulary of 5,000 words and characters. Most of HSK6 is business vocabulary that's not useful to me. My goal was to pass my “personal HSK6”: 5,000 words which showed up commonly in the content I watched and loved. ↩︎
Immersion is best done while traveling. Still, I started to immerse myself as well as I could at home. My devices would be in Chinese. I started taking some notes primarily in Mandarin. I had lots of social support throughout too: I was lucky to be able to build new relationships entirely in Chinese. For example, my grad school supervisor, a Tsinghua graduate now at MIT, was more than happy to teach me neuroscience in Chinese. I had tutors. I turned older relationships fully Chinese. This had me constantly speaking Mandarin day-to-day.
Month 12: Exactly 365 days after I started, I reached a vocabulary of 8000 words and characters.
8000 words and characters makes most content I encounter relatively understandable. My vocabulary is a weird personal mix: Basics including everything up to HSK5, anime vocabulary, biology, mathematics, and random everyday stuff from travelling.
Vocabulary is only one part of fluency. It's important to keep eyes on the goal: The goal of any language is to communicate effectively. Prompted for feedback on my progress, my usually reserved tutor recently commented: “This was the fastest learning pace from zero to advanced conversational fluency I have ever seen."
That's kind, but being fluent feels like it’ll always be an overstatement. Especially for Chinese. I’m definitely not Fluent™. I sometimes still get my tones wrong. Full-speed native speech is sometimes still tough. Local dialects remain a complete mystery to me.
I’d say I’m comfortable with Chinese. I can comfortably travel in any Mandarin-speaking place. I can comfortably hold long conversations. I can comfortably watch most content. I can comfortably build relationships entirely in Mandarin.
The goal? I want to reach a level where the legendary Three-Body Problem will be comfortably readable.
Curious about more? Check out my methods post: isaak.net/mandarinmethods