4 to 6 months if you are in China

The rest of your life, if you do it right.

Foreign students at Chinese universities are fluent speakers in 4 to 6 months.

No kidding!

The level of progress of an individual is not solely based on intelligence but on how to work on that intelligence. For you to study excellently Mandarin, you need to be patience and determination to study, learn and comprehend it.

4-6 months? If you are not kidding ,then I have to say, you have a great talent in language study.And I can see how hard you have learned Madarin.

I would think it's different for everybody, and depends on the person. It's going to be.. easier for someone living in a mandarin speaking community (out of necessity) than it is for, say.. someone like me who is literally studying it all alone. It's also going to be easier for somebody who has a propensity for learning languages (like some are math oriented, science oriented) than it is for someone like me who studied spanish for 2 years in the classroom and never really took to it til I went to spanish speaking countries. For any language, you can't really put any kind of time frame on it, and if you do.. you might just cause yourself some frustration if you dont get it.

If you study it all day, everyday then you can learn it in 4-6 months. But I seriously doubt anyone has that kind of staying power. If you practice for an hour everyday then it'll take a few months to be able to converse but it will probably take at least a year to become somewhat fluent.

To be truly fluent in Mandarin, you need to learn how to read and write as well as speak.

There are only 400 combinations of initial and final sounds in Mandarin. Multiply that by 4 tones and you have about 1600 different things you can say. Of course this means that every sound has multiple meanings... Take the Zhonghua Zihai - Chinese dictionary - it has over 85,000 characters. So this roughly means every sound is represented by on average 60 characters.

Then of course there are compound words or Sinocized words, some of which have little to do with the actual characters (coca-cola).

Spoken Chinese, at fluent levels, requires you to know at least some characters because you need to understand the language in context.

I highly doubt people can become fluent in 4-6 months. Conversational, sure. I had basic conversation down in that time. Fluent? Again, I'd like to meet a college student who has been studying for 4 months discuss the pros and cons of nuclear energy in Chinese or what China's role in the future will be due to the global economic crisis.

Being able to order food, direct a taxi, and say hello does not mean someone is fluent.

As MrTribbles described it, to be fluent in Chinese, 4-6 months are hardly enough. I have studied two years here at the Shanghai International University and it just gives you the basic of Chinese language.

When you learn Chinese, contrary to Western languages, you have five aspects of the language that you need to concentrate on :
1) the pinyin allows you to pronounce the Chinese characters,
2) the tones allows you to give the right intonation of a syllable ("ma" without tone can be a particle to make questions, "mā" 1st tone can mean "mother", "má" 2nd tone can mean "toad", "mă" 3rd tone can means "horse", "mà" 4th tone can mean "to scold"),
3) the Chinese characters allow you to read or write,
4) knowing the radical of a Chinese character allow you to look it up in a dictionary if you don't know its pronounciation and,
5) to know the correct order of writing a character allows you to know its radical and to look it up in a dictionary by its number of strokes.

Now considering that a very good Chinese scolar would know around 10-12000 characters and a Chinese university student around 4-5000 characters, you may then understand that it's somewhat ridiculous the assumption that 4-6 months allow a foreigner to learn Chinese fluently....

Often foreign or Chinese teachers repeat this absurb fact about learning Chinese language : "with 2 to 3000 characters you are able to read a Chinese newspaper". Actually that's wrong. By knowing 2 to 3000 characters, you can simply recognize the most part of the characters used in a newspaper, but you don't necessarily understand what you're actually reading. Chinese words are a composition of one to several characters. For instance, you may know the following single characters 可口可乐 (able-mouth-able-happy), but if you don't know that when they are together, they mean "Coca-Cola", then you're knowledge of 2-3000 characters doesn't help you much.

Also contrary to Western people who learn another Western language, the roots of the new Western language can sometimes be guessed or learned. When you learn Chinese, you're like a baby, you learn everything from scratch....from being able to pronounce correctly a word to then be able to make sentences....

Even though I have translated movies from Chinese into French, I still need a lot of time not because I don't know the characters, but basically because I don't know the new word I am dealing with. The same for financial or legal documents......

That's why as an advice when learning Chinese, focus on what you need the language for. If you just want to have talk about people, even for business reasons, then just focus on correctly speaking with the right intonation and forget about learning the Characters. If you want to be able to read a Chinese contract or daily office documents, then focus on reading and recognizing characters, and leaving out intonation or being able to speak out the character. That's what I did. I focused all my efforts in being able to read or recognize a character for translation purposes, but I totally left out the speaking or listening part of the language. It's sad, but it was a choice.

The Rest Of Your Life......

You don't 'study' Mandarin, you 'speak' it.

How do you speak it? By making friends. That's when the language is ready-to-use in your brain. Aim for fluency before accuracy.

Suggestion: take a 5+ months uni or night class course in Mandarin to understand how the characters are written and how basic sentences are formed (grammar).

Then ask for people's QQ numbers and offer to treat them a meal: those in the waiter/tress job are easiest to approach, uni students.

Spend all the extra time in shops chatting with shopkeepers, waitresses in Hotel Tea houses, anywhere where people will welcome your presence and your broken Chinese because they're not busy enough and have too much time.

Become friends with everyone, not just people who can become close to you, because after 1month and half you're not so much a curiosity any more and people go back to their busy life (sorry, busy, can we meet in 3 weeks?).

Once you speak basic Mandarin don't spend much time with Chinese English speakers.

Walk around translating every vocab you wana know with the MDBG dictionary which is online (suggest 20RMB in internet fee a month).

Avoid having a gf if you're not willing to speak Chinese as the main language with her.

Avoid cities with local dialects, go for north China and new cities like Shenzhen, Zhuhai. That's where populations are mixed and so people use Mandarin n not dialects.

If you dare live in a city with very few westerners people there will proudly teach mandarin rather than give you the reaction you get in the rest of China which goes 'he's a foreigner; ting bu dong!!'

Go out alone, to the movies, the caffe, the main square,.. because Chinese people usually only start a conversation with a foreigner when he's alone, and it's difficult to get a Chinese's QQ in front of your giggling mates (caught a fish! oh, u like guys!?).

Controversial statement: Northerners are more proud of their Mandarin culture and prone to teach you things whereas the South likes it's dialects and has a business approach to life where they'll only teach you Mandarin if they're getting a substantial benfit from it. (gf saying: why do I need to teach you Mandarin,I'm not your teacher! And we can speak English well! Besides, you should study by yourself)

I tried being in a relationship teaching my gf English and hoping she'd teach me Mandarin in return. Never happened, because we were stuck in English and she was a southerner. Yet, that could be my false impression of southerners.

How long will it take to be fluent? No one knows; it's your choice. Maybe 2 years if you speak every day?

nvm drunk posting.

follow your dreams you can reach your goals I am living proof. BEEFCAKE

If you get the book, Chinese For Dummies by Dr Wendy Abraham, you can be fluent in just 3 short days

To be proficient in Mandarin should take 1 to 5 years of living and studying here, depending on how smart you are. 4 to 6 months is absurb...unless you are literally a genius. To me, proficient means the following: able to go to work in a mandarin speaking environment entirely, watch movies without getting lost and completely understand the news, and pretty much be unlimited by the language with exception to some tough words, idioms, and heavy dialects, etc. 

To speak, read and write Chinese at a native level probably takes 10+ years of living here if ever. Most us foreigners who started learning Chinese after puberty will always speak with an accent/forget certain words from time to time.

I be happy if i can speak very very basic chinese in 6 months, i think the first thing i would reccomend is to learn how to pronouse every letter in pinyin, so at least you can pick up a phrase book and speak the phrases.  Unless you are a genius i doubt 6 months is realistic

You should be able to learn the basics within a matter of days. The basics such as I/Me, You, Them, Her, Him. I think within a week if you are studying by yourself you should be able to learn at least 5 basic sentences like "How much is this"?, "I like sentences, I want to go sentences etc., 

As far as intermediate to the advanced levels you would probably have to take a class and it all depends on the person how fast they can learn something. 

15 years is my goal to be able to understand and speak with my family.

Classes only? Self-study? How much effort do you put in? Do you have a Chinese partner? Do you live with them?? What language do you use when chatting with them? Chinese friends??

All of those will alter the answer...

My best advice has always been - have a NS partner (preferably one you live with) and speak in that language... (I always suggest this for English )

your whole life

i would like to exchange language with you,i am a native Mandarin speaker,my e-mail address is 15001113273@139.com,my telephone number is 15001113273