Lenguajero Blog

The Lenguajero team spent the last week enjoying the Oaxacan coast here in Mexico, and taking it easy for a few days.  Well, vacation is over and it’s back to work!  We are starting the week with a new interview in our continuing  series “Successful Language Learners”.

This week we interviewed John Biesnecker on his experiences learning languages, specifically Chinese, while living in China. John is an American, born and raised near Orlando, Florida. He graduated with a political science degree in 2003, and moved to China soon after. John is currently living in Shanghai where he works as a software developer and Chinese-English translator. He runs a small company, Qingxi Labs, and a blog, Global Maverick.

What languages do you speak, and how well do you speak them?

My native language is English, and I grew up staunchly monolingual. I took German in high school and college, and have over the last few years tried to at least get my reading back up to speed, but still, those years of German were pretty wasted and if I wanted to really learn it I’d be starting pretty much from scratch.

I speak, read, and write Mandarin Chinese. My reading and listening are somewhere around adult native speaker levels (though my reading speed is a bit slow), and I speak and write somewhere below that, though still pretty well. Living in Shanghai and being reasonably curious and outgoing gives me plenty of opportunities to practice.

I can handle myself conversationally in Cantonese and Japanese, too. I’m actively working on the former, and plan on learning the latter eventually.

When, where, and why did you learn these languages?

I took a couple of years of German in high school and college. It was just to fulfill a foreign language requirement, and my lack of enthusiasm is reflected in my current level of German.

I started learning Chinese after coming to China for the first time in 2001. When I moved to China after graduating from university in 2003 I decided that I wanted to learn the language, and I’ve sort of just fallen down the rabbit hole since then. Every step forward I take just opens up that many more unknown areas. It’s a constant adventure, one that I’m sure I’ll be pursing for decades.

Cantonese and Japanese are both languages I’ve studied in China, and both of them are basically just out of self-interest.

What do you do when you’re just starting out learning a language?

Besides German, which I didn’t really learn that well, all of the languages I’ve learned have had non-Roman alphabets, so that’s a major hurdle to overcome initially. Beyond that, I try to figure out sentence patterns that I can use to build more complex sentences from. Once I have basic sentence patterns down, it’s just a matter of filling them out, and improving my comprehension. From the very first day I start listening to native speed material as well, as I think there’s basically no other way of ever getting your ear accustomed to it besides pouring on the input.

In general what kind of learner do you consider yourself?  That is, which strategies work for you and which don’t?

I’m a reader. Of course listening and speaking and stuff all have their place, but in my heart of hearts I’m a reader (this is as true in English as it is in any foreign language). A lot of my ’studying’ is just reading lots and lots of interesting things in the language I’m learning. I find that most of my learning starts with reading, and once I’m comfortable with the vocabulary and structures in writing I’ll start to notice them in audio and visual mediums.

Beyond that, I’m a huge fan of SRS. It makes sense to me on several levels, and I’ve used it pretty extensively for about four years now with great success.

—

Thanks to John for sharing his learning insights with us here at Lenguajero.  You can read more about his adventures in language learning here.

Have you had an interesting experience learning a new language?  We want to hear about it. Send an email to august@lenguajero.com.