Any halfway decent teacher knows reading is the way to fluency when learning a foreign language. My English teacher was superb. He encouraged me to read a lot (not that I needed much encouragement). I didn’t get around to Atlas until I was in my mid-20s, but I could have read it, and understood it, by my late teens.
I taught English as a side job back in college. I would say that the key to fluency is to first build up your vocabulary. The best way is through reading, but any way that you can continuously come into contact with the language – conversations, television, whatever – works. Of course the idea is that you continuously read things that are slightly more difficult than you are used to. Like weight lifting, you won’t get very far by trying to bench two hundred pounds from the get go.
Anyway, regarding learning a foreign language, obviously there are many factors. One of the most important would be the age at which you start. You sound like you began learning at a relatively early age. Personally I began learning English when I was 12, and I would say it took me until about 15 to be fully fluent, and another year to be above average compared to my American peers. If I had begun at 8, it probably would have taken half the time. Another major factor is your mother tongue. Someone whose native language is European based obviously would have a much easier time learning English because of the similar linguistic structure. Chinese on the other hand is completely and utterly different from English, making it difficult to cross over.
For an average natively educated Chinese, his exposure to English begin at around middle school. A few hours a week in school, with teacher who themselves are not fluent English speakers. Mostly they just pick up simple vocabularies and basic grammar. By college, the very motivated can read technical texts like a textbook and have simple conversations, but they are far from fluent. As far as Atlas Shrugged goes, the very length of the novel would discourage most from actually reading it in English.
I agree. The amount of reading I did as a teenager helped my English tremendously. The main things it teaches you are vocabulary and a sense for how people normally say things; with enough experience reading books you will *know* whether this expression or this word is right. Sure, you can learn the same thing by living here in the U.S., but it’s definitely not needed.
I would go as far as to say that if you read a lot as a kid in general, you would learn foreign languages faster. Reading trains you to articulate your thoughts, which is fundamentally the point of all languages. Obviously you do not need to live in the US to learn English. It just speeds up the process tremendously, if only because you are constantly forced to use it.
The main thing is that Chinese languages are so very different from English that it makes the earlier stages of learning it a *lot* harder than if you start from a language that has the same alphabet and similar words.
This is true. Although I would say that it is much easier for a non-speaker to learn English than it is to learn Chinese. Chinese is simply a far older and denser language, which consequently loads a lot more meanings and culture onto each character. It is less literal and precise but far more metaphorical and descriptive, as well as having a much freer grammatical structure. To me, English has always been a better language to think in, while Chinese a better language to express in. In many ways, this is also reflected in the respective cultures.
Speaking a language is another thing entirely, and I would say it is of secondary importance compared to being able to read/write and listen. I mean, when I first started speaking English in a more dedicated fashion (as opposed to maybe once every month or so for a few minutes) I wasn’t very good at it, because you need to learn how to form a *lot* of syllables properly and that takes practice. However, at that point I was already way beyond most native English speaker’s grasp of the language when it came to reading and writing and vocabulary.
I’d say that learning to speak a language is, if not more important, at least more practical. Generally learning a foreign language begin naturally with listening, followed by speaking, reading, and finally writing. That also the rank from the easiest to the most difficult for most students.
One of the most important would be the age at which you start. You sound like you began learning at a relatively early age. Personally I began learning English when I was 12, and I would say it took me until about 15 to be fully fluent, and another year to be above average compared to my American peers.
I started when I was 11 or 12. But didn’t get to my good teacher until I was 14. from then on it went very quickly.
I’m 40 now. I’ve been thinking about learning Italian. I want to try a course in CD or DVD and see whether I can achieve fluency in a year. Seeing as my native language is Spanish, a Romance language closely related to Italian, I think my chances are good. I’ll let you know how it goes. If it works, I think I’ll learn Latin, too.
I’d say that learning to speak a language is, if not more important, at least more practical. Generally learning a foreign language begin naturally with listening, followed by speaking, reading, and finally writing. That also the rank from the easiest to the most difficult for most students.
Well, the main thing is that you can learn how to read and write without anyone else around you who shares the language. So for a student in China whose peers are as (non-) fluent as he is, it would be far easier to learn English by reading it than by trying to speak the language with others (because there likely wouldn’t be very many who are accessible to him). I think it makes more sense for someone studying a new language to focus on speaking last, so going for reading/listening -> writing -> speaking.
At first, the most important thing is to absorb as much of the language as possible, and you do not do that by speaking with others, the information density is an order of magnitude lower compared what reading something gives you, so it seems far better to focus on reading and listening first, then start writing (because that will teach you how to practically apply grammar and sentence structure rules) and lastly start speaking the language. Once you can do everything but speak, all you really need to do is learn how to pronounce the strange sounds, the rest is all known already.
And yeah, the thinking in English is really important. Especially in certain topics, because I exclusively encountered it in English, it is almost impossible for me to think in my native language about them. Like philosophy, or romantic situations. From the moment I became interested in those things I mainly encountered it in English, so that’s the only way I know how to fully express myself, I can only do so very awkwardly in Dutch, after thinking for ages of what to say. But yeah, having several topics like that makes a huge difference in how quickly you learn a language.