Is It Possible to Become Fluent in Chinese in Just 9 Weeks??

[LevelUP]

Every year, about 36,000 students come to the Missionary Training Center to learn various languages before they leave on missions around the world to spread the Mormon faith.

This Missionary Training Center is essentially a boot camp where students spend pretty much their entire day doing nothing but learning language.  They only have up to 9 weeks or less to learn a language from scratch, then they are sent off to live in a foreign country for up to 2 years.

The questions I have are how they learn languages so fast, and can this method be applied outside the Missionary Training Center?
https://www.npr.org/2014/06/07/319805068...ssionaries

Note: 
This thread is for only talking about language learning and not for talking about religion or other unrelated things.

[ss20ts]

Honestly, I don't know how well you could learn and become fluent in a language in 9 weeks. It's one thing to learn a few phrases, but to be actually fluent in 9 weeks? That just doesn't seem realistic for the vast majority of the population. Your brain can only absorb so much material in a day and it needs sleep to process and store the information it learned that day.

ETA: I'm all for changing how we learn foreign languages! I really do not like the memorizing index cards which is how I was taught in high school and college decades ago. I didn't really learning anything. When I took Spanish at UMPI, I didn't learn the same way. I had to write essays and a paper along with a verbal assignment. Definitely wasn't easy. I don't think I really learned or retained much. I also completed the course in a few weeks. I'm not conversing with someone using the language all day long either. I haven't used Spanish since the day I submitted my final assignments. So that probably has impact too - actually using the language.

[rachel83az]

They're nowhere NEAR fluent. But they generally have enough of a foundation to actually become fluent. Especially with the full immersion that missionaries are subjected to out in the field. From what I've read, they're usually paired with a native speaker in the country - one who speaks very little, if any, English.

[freeloader]

Fluent, no, but to have some basic convesational ability, absolutely?

Here is a post from a former LDS missionary on another site:

1. 8-12 weeks in the Missionary Training Center where you study the language for at least 6-8 hours of the day have a big effect. We had experienced teachers that also went through the learning process. After a few weeks of study, we were asked to communicate only in the mission language we were studying, which greatly accelerated the learning process.

2. Total immersion in the language. I was sent from Salt Lake City straight to a city in Mexico, where I was assigned to work with a companion that was experienced and also knew no English at all. The need to communicate was a necessity, and created a total immersion in the language. The way it is typically set up, you cannot fully function until you learn the language.
This may be an extension of point 2, but you are encouraged to pray, read, and even think in the mission language from your first weeks of training. The program and method is designed to push you.

3. After leaving the Missionary Training Center, each missionary takes at least one hour out of every day (for two years) to specifically study a foreign language (the mission language if you are not native to the location, and English if you do not already know it).

4. It also helps when you have full faith that if you're trying your best, God can give you the gift of tongues. When you have complete faith that God will help you learn the language, you tend to have some fairly accelerated learning.

A bunch of posts I have seen on other boards say that it takes about a year in country to be able to fully function, answer difficult questions about theology, and so forth. So, if you take that to be 52 week + 9 weeks of language “school”, that is very similar in timeframe to what the military and State Department take to train people in a language.

I think the other really important thing is to remember that as a would-be missionary, you understand at the start of your program that you are going to be dropped into a foreign country and need to be able to live and spread the gospel. And not really use English. Soldiers and diplomats have the knowledge and comfort that they are going to be around other Americans at their base or embassy.  Hope, excitement, faith, and probably a little terror are all strong motivators.

[bjcheung77]

Depending on the language, it will be very hard to be fluent in such a short time...  Especially when you're referencing a Tonal language!  If it was Spanish, I would think the 9 weeks would be equal to or similar to the knowledge you would have learned with the CLEP + Study.com courses, so that's like very basic intro to the language to get you started.  

Full immersion starts when they're "immersed" in the language, that is when these people go to the respective countries to learn that specific language by building on the basics they've been taught.  Being fluent is when you actually speak "colloquially" with people in that specific language, it's more natural when you really know the language well enough...

9 weeks, Nah, unless it's Esperanto. Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto - LOL, Kiel vi fartas?

---

Mi estas komencanto de Esperanto - My mistake, typed too slow and brain was going in different directions... anyways, I was trying to say, if someone knows Spanish or one of the Romance Languages such as French/Italian or Portuguese, then learning Esperanto for example, would be an easier task. BTW, Mi fartas bone!

[rachel83az]

Conversely, if you know Esperanto then learning a Romance language will be much easier! Maybe even some Slavic languages, because of Slavic influence in Esperanto.

[sanantone]

They've probably learned tourist-level Chinese. That's what Level I of Pimsleur would teach. I would say it's impossible to go from speaking English (a Germanic language with Latin and Greek vocabulary) to being fluent in Chinese (a non-Indo-European language) in nine weeks.

[dfrecore]

I had a friend who majored in Japanese and International Business. After graduation, she went to live in Japan for 3 years. She was completely fluent - BUT, when she got back, she had a group of people she met with WEEKLY, where they spoke Japanese only for 2-3 hours. She said that if you missed even a few weeks, your level of fluency was gone.

[Johann]

About 25 years ago, I took a one-semester course - beginner Mandarin Chinese, in Community College, at night. I did OK but man, it was work! It was the eighth language I had gone to school for and WAY more difficult for me than ANY of the others. I have never seen a language that "worked" that way (grammar is different to European languages - but is doable) and, of course, I had ZERO background in vocabulary - or a tonal language.

My take -can you get fluency in nine weeks? 你不能 (Nǐ bùnéng) - No, you cannot. But you will be able to order a darn good meal, find the washroom, ask directions, shop, introduce yourself and be polite when you meet someone. It's a good start.

[LevelUP]

Here are some notes I made about their method.

Missionary Training Center
1. 6:00 am -9:30 pm schedule 4hrs morning, 4hrs afternoon + some additional study time on their own.
2. Most teachers recently went through the program, not professional teachers.
3. They try to speak the language all the time and use Oral repetition
4. Little focus on grammar, or tests.  It's a context-based approach.
5. Practice one-on-one a lot

One way to measure fluency is CEFR levels.
https://www.fluentin3months.com/cefr-levels/

My personal experience is with Spanish.  I know that Spanish around 1/2 the language is based on cognates.
http://spanishcognates.org/cognate-ending

You only need around 1000 words to reach a B1/B2 fluency in Spanish.  A lot of language learners use frequency lists to learn only the most used words in the language.

To get an immersion experience at home, people can use online tutors.