erica smith

I want to go to China and I don’t know if I should learn the language.But I think with a minimum of knowledge it would be interesting, because it’s cool to understand the locals.

JohnSIN

Welcome to Flyertalk erica smith,

Hope you get the most out of your travel to China and have a fun time.
Mandarin is one of the most difficult language to learn. If you are really dedicated and spend a significant amount of your time learning the language, yes you can and it will enhance your travel experience as people will appreciate the effort and be keen to converse and test your understanding.

Look at the article here. It states that it would take you 50 weeks at 30 hours per week to reach level 2 proficiency. So that's possible but it's hardly a simple task compare to say Spanish, Italian.
I have studied Mandarin at university and after two years was only able to scratch the surface and was not really able to have a proper conversation.
The fact that the language is tonal is an added difficulty for English learners (the same MA has 4 different meanings depending on the tone).

In large cities, using public transports is relatively easy and would cover most of the tourist sights. So you would be able to visit quite independently.
Let us know how you get on with your trip and language learning.

garykung

Welcome to FT.

Where exactly are you going?

Taiwaned

My wife and I wanted to learn Chinese in our early thirties.

We started at zero. Didn't even know how to say ni hao.

We decided to go to a Chinese-speaking country and enroll in their foreign language program.
Multiple institution administrator's strongly recommended that we do NOT learn Chinese abroad. They told us, we would have to first UNLEARN the Chinese we had learned and RETEACH us the proper way. (I don't completely agree with this thinking now)

We ended up going to Taiwan and enrolled in an intensive language program for 10 semesters. At the time we left, we were functionally fluent and adequately literate.

When I was finally assigned to work in China, we reenrolled in another Chinese university language program. This strengthened our ability to understand the various regional accents.

When people hear us, they automatically assume we are Taiwanese or foreign-born Chinese.

Moving to Taiwan with ZERO Chinese was extremely painful but it was an incredible motivation to learn quickly.

gudugan

As a parallel, I tried to learn Arabic for a trip (US Foreign Service Institute rates it equally as difficult for an English native speaker to learn). I took about 10 hours of private lessons and really didn't get anywhere, the pronunciation was pretty difficult and could only say a few phrases, all of which I have long forgotten. At least Arabic has an alphabet...

Practically speaking, unless you are willing to invest time on the scale of months, I don't think it's worth doing. Maybe the more pertinent question is what do you lose by traveling around China without knowing any Chinese.

As JohnSIN says, public transport in large cities should be sufficiently covered in English. However, this isn't necessarily true in smaller cities. In my experience, the number of people willing to speak English outside of large cities is also fewer.

Personally I think the largest problem is trying to simply navigate around. Google Maps, for example, isn't accurate at all and is missing most restaurants. When I last checked, Baidu Maps didn't have a decent English version and neither did 高德 Gaode, but perhaps that has changed. For restaurant reviews, most people use 点评 Dianping but I'm not sure the app has an English version and/or translations of user content.

Perhaps the discussion is best focused on how to navigate these hurdles?

Loren Pechtel

Yeah, I've tried. My wife (China-born) tells me I'm saying it wrong, tells me what it should be and I can't hear the difference. What little I speak is about 50:50 whether it will be understood. (But she will echo it, to my ear saying exactly what I said, and be understood.)

And I'll third this. Big cities, I would have no qualms with using the public transit. Little cities would be a problem.

Yeah--I feel I could go solo if I was only interested in doing tourist things and if I could tolerate mistakes about food. It would be more expensive, though, as there are plenty of decent restaurants targeted at locals that would be pretty hard to eat at. Anything not on the tourist track I would be stuck.

My experience with Google Maps is that it works pretty well for addresses on public streets but it's hopeless at finding businesses. However, it totally fails at private streets--it generally shows a correct graphic but it doesn't actually know there are streets there. Those private streets aren't generally going to be of any importance to a tourist but if you're trying to find somebody's house it's quite another matter. (I'm talking about things akin to gated communities, although many of them only have vehicle gates, a pedestrian can walk right in.) There's also the pain that I have never been able to download a map over there.

moondog

A lot of people say this, but I've never really understood why:
-90% of time, grammar = subject-verb-object (with no real verb tenses)
-it does take a little time to build up a decent foundation of characters, but this isn't especially challenging (i.e. simplified characters really are simple)

As for the OP's question, I have to say that I speak a lot less Chinese now than I did even 5 years ago. In fact, it would be quite possible to get around (and eat well in) major cities if you didn't know a single word.

CMK10

Can't say that I did before either trip I took to Mainland China. It was not much of an issue in Shanghai or Hangzhou but when I was in Beijing and I went to the Great Wall it was a little harder to communicate in just English for me.