It was my success story when I was trying to join a Mandarin Course Singapore. This story can help those who want to learn Mandarin and have a successful career in their businesses here.
Though I did not know any Mandarin when I arrived in Singapore, I had made up my mind to learn it. My friends encouraged me, and I was just able to scrape through my daily work with a spattering of Mandarin that I could muster which was not much. To learn more before going to work, I started getting up one hour earlier every morning and tried to go through the textbook that I had bought. The Chinese alphabets seemed like animal spooks, and I was further discouraged by friends who said things like “Learning to read Chinese is not required if you want to speak in Mandarin” or “You will get bogged down in trying to understand what each character stands for”. I was also told “Inability to read Mandarin is a sign of illiteracy.”
Even after being in Singapore for two years, I could not conversely freely in Mandarin. My attempts to study Mandarin proceeded in fits and starts. Construction of a sentence was difficult for me though I had come to know a large number of characters and words. I could use only small phrases made up of a few words for communication. It was just as if I was a caveman who could make other people understand what he had to say with the help of hand gestures and vocal grunts.
Once during my stay in Singapore I was involved with investors from China who wanted to establish various educational programs there. While interviewing a teacher about his experience and suitability for the job, I came to know about Extensive Reading (ER). He was excited about the effect of this form of teaching and the effect he had experienced while working at a Bangkok university as a teacher. When preparing students for the TOEFL, they had put one group through traditional classroom training program while putting the second group through ER training. They were surprised to find that the group that had gone through ER training did much better in the TOEFL test when the term ended than the group that had traditional classroom training.
It heightened my curiosity and interest about Extensive Reading, and I started doing some research on it. Can this method be as good as the teacher indicated? I started to go through papers written by academicians on the subject, discussed it with experts and read the reviews available on programs that have been identified as successful in the few coming months. I became more and more convinced about the superior quality of ER and understood the simplicity of it as I came across more and more evidence.
Though most of the research on ER was confined to the English language, I had no doubt that it could work for Mandarin also. I found only one series of reading materials in Mandarin, which were graded to be good and bought whatever books that were available in that series. As I was not very conversant with the Mandarin language, I could move very slowly as I started to read the first book. Even though I knew most of the 300 characters it had, I could not recognize them immediately.
I started to recognize them better after going through the first two or three chapters. I could finish the first book after a lot of slogging, but the second book took 30 percent lesser time than the first one as my reading speed picked up and comprehension improved. I started to understand the usage of words in various contexts and the grammar started to become more understandable. Once I surprised myself totally by laughing out loud after reading a portion of the story, and that too written in Mandarin.
I was astonished to find out that I was no longer translating the words from English to Mandarin inside my head to understand them. I knew what the words meant and could understand the words in Mandarin quite easily. I wasted no time in translating them, and my reading speed increased greatly. I could break free from the habit of translating that had been hindering my learning process for such a long time.
The change in me was noticed by my colleagues immediately as I started to understand and participate in their conversations by replying in Mandarin. I was able to read ten books within the first three months and was finally able to converse completely in Mandarin. When everybody asked how I could achieve this success, I only replied “just by reading Mandarin.” I could not give myself any credit for it as the process seemed so simple. I felt the power it gave me and felt the difference it created in me like the difference between day and night. I could brag forever that I can read any book written in Mandarin.
It was the turning point of my life in Singapore, and the world of opportunities opened up in front of me just by reading some books in Mandarin.
Owen Moksnes 