What does it take to succeed in this dive?

Like studying any foreign language, to succeed with Chinese Mandarin, you will need to spend a lot of time reading, writing, speaking, and listening. These four skills together will help you to master Chinese Mandarin.

The hardest part about learning Chinese is the first three months, as you grow accustomed to the Chinese characters, and the Chinese tones. Once you get over that hump, it then becomes merely a matter of constantly adding to your vocabulary, as the grammar is relatively simple. For example, unlike many western languages, there are no verb conjugations in Chinese. Ahhhh, how nice.

For those who really wish to master the language, you should make the commitment to make the pursuit of Chinese Mandarin a lifelong hobby. Every day, more and more people are learning Chinese Mandarin, so it will be time well spent.

You will have to find good study materials, good teachers, and good practice partners. Most importantly, you will have to find the discipline to study and practice and improve regularly. If you don't study regularly, you won't make much progress, or worse, you'll make lots of progress and then forget what you've learned!

The secret to fluency (since we know you want to know) is quite simple: master reading, master writing, master speaking, master listening, improve your pronunciation, and improve your vocabulary. The issue is that most people don't actually do any of these tasks well.

You see, most people only focus on one or two of these skills, or they focus on all six, but at a very cursory level. If you wish to become fluent, however, you need to focus on all six, all the time, and spend enough time with each so that you see regular progress.

Bottom line, if you want to become fluent, do this:

Do these things regularly, and within 4 - 7 years, you can almost certainly become fluent in Chinese Mandarin. The question is: will you actually do these things? Ahh, that is the question. We hope you will!