Wang Yuanyuan
HOW long does it take for a foreigner to learn to talk fluently with local Chinese? The answer for Mark Kalisch is about six months.
The 41-year-old Australian man and his wife Bernadette, 42, made an incredible impression on their teachers at New Concept Mandarin in Shekou, Nanshan District, since starting in April.
“We really want to learn Chinese well so that we can have nice conversations with locals and enjoy real Chinese things and culture. After living in Hong Kong for about five years, we felt that as foreigners we’d missed out on a lot of things in China. And learning Chinese is a way to fill that gap,” said Mark.
Interestingly, when Mark, a former information technology director based in Hong Kong, and Bernadette first decided to take a long vacation after 22 years of working to study Chinese on the mainland, they were told by their foreign friends that Shenzhen was not the best place to go in terms of Chinese learning.
“They said that there were too many foreigners in Shenzhen, so opportunities for practicing Chinese were too few,” said Mark. But the couple eventually decided to go for Shenzhen. “It’s a nice and beautiful city and close to our friends in Hong Kong. Also we had very strict criteria for picking a school that could help us study Chinese, such as location, first impression, teaching methodology and quality of course materials. We did some research and visited some schools and finally decided to stay here, as the school seemed very impressive after our first meeting with Miss Becky Fu, the manager. We made the right choice,” said Mark.
Mark and his wife studied five hours a day at the beginning of their studies. “Five or six weeks later, we felt we’d gained a large amount of vocabulary, but had few chances to practice, so we lessened our classes to three hours a day and spent much more time wandering around the city to talk with locals, such as at supermarkets and newsstands. Now we can understand many of their conversations, even with their strong accents.”
The most difficult thing for Mark was pronunciation, as he found it difficult to recognize the tones, while Bernadette found the sentence structures hard because they were the complete opposite of English.
“I think our teachers are so patient. They just keep correcting us and helping us again and again as we’ve made so many mistakes. And they also made us some cards with big characters and words to help us memorize, which we found very effective,” said Mark.