My guess is that it’s more efficient to study full time while living in the country. I think living there increases motivation, means you learn what you actually need, means you learn a bunch ‘passively’, and lets you practice conversation a lot, which is better than most book learning, and you learn more of the culture. So, I’d guess someone would make more progress living there for a year compared to doing an hour a day for ~4 years, and enjoy it more.
That said, if you use the hour well, you could learn a lot of vocab and grammar. You could could then get a private tutor to practice conversation, or you could go to China (or Taiwan) later building on that base.
My guess is that it’s more efficient to study full time while living in the country. I think living there increases motivation, means you learn what you actually need, means you learn a bunch ‘passively’, and lets you practice conversation a lot, which is better than most book learning, and you learn more of the culture.
+1
Being there definitely increased my motivation to learn the language, even though I didn’t know any Chinese beforehand and wasn’t intending to learn any.
Some thoughts here on how quick it is to learn: https://80000hours.org/articles/china-careers/#learn-chinese-in-china
In there, I guess that 6-18 months of full-time study in the country is enough to get to conversational fluency.
I’ve seen other estimates that it takes a couple of thousand hours to get fluent e.g. here: https://linguapath.com/how-many-hours-learn-language/
My guess is that it’s more efficient to study full time while living in the country. I think living there increases motivation, means you learn what you actually need, means you learn a bunch ‘passively’, and lets you practice conversation a lot, which is better than most book learning, and you learn more of the culture. So, I’d guess someone would make more progress living there for a year compared to doing an hour a day for ~4 years, and enjoy it more.
That said, if you use the hour well, you could learn a lot of vocab and grammar. You could could then get a private tutor to practice conversation, or you could go to China (or Taiwan) later building on that base.
+1
Being there definitely increased my motivation to learn the language, even though I didn’t know any Chinese beforehand and wasn’t intending to learn any.