Map from the Foreign Service Institute: estimated time to learn a foreign language for an English speaker

submitted by Chipit from i.redd.it

sorted by:
top
newinsightfulfun
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]Chipit[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Yeah, John Pasden used to be the man, back in the blog era. But nobody goes for Classical Chinese except bonafide scholars. And the idioms are greatly overrated. It's just something that certain learners focus on for their "bling" value. They just want to look clever, which you already get plenty of being able to put two words together in Chinese.

[–]magnora7 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I agree about the Classical Chinese, it's not important really. But I'd say the idioms are important to fluency in modern Chinese. But it depends on how many idioms you include... there are a lot that are completely unused in the mainstream for hundreds of years. They collect their chengyu like pokemon cards