Learning Chinese? Why Not Live The Language?

It is the Catch-22 that faces every laowai that ever tried to learn Chinese. Until you learn enough Chinese, you can’t use it at work or make Chinese friends; and until you make Chinese friends and use it at work, you’ll never learn enough.

The solution to this ambition-sapping cycle, according to Andreas Laimboeck, the founder of Beijing’s LivetheLanguage Mandarin School, is “total immersion”: go somewhere where no-one speaks English and learn to survive.

Anticipating the usual excuses – I wish I had a year to study Chinese, but I have a family and my boss won’t give me the time off work – LivetheLanguage now offers full immersion language courses that last a week, or even just a long-weekend.

“Everyone’s busy,” says Andreas, with the slightly crazed eyes of the evangelist, “but the only way to really progress in Chinese is to be immersed. Busy people can string weekends of immersion together over a period of six months and you can really watch their improvement.”

Those brave enough to take the plunge are sent to stay with an ordinary middle-class Chinese family in Chengde, a temperate city in the hills 150 miles in the north of Beijing that the Emperor Kangxi declared as his summer residence in 1703.

Armed only with a Live the Language staff member’s mobile phone number for use in emergencies (there is a full safety net, but pride dictates the difficulty must be of the life-or-death variety before you use it) the journey starts with buying tickets in Beijing’s bus or railway station.

It is the first of many baby-steps towards surviving in China without the aid of a secretary, office assistant or other translator, as is the phone-call at the other end to announce your arrival to your host family.

Using a new language has the capacity to make the most confident of people a little nervous, so these small experiences, while a bit frightening are also exhilarating, and any lingering fears evaporate at the sight of my ever-smiling host, Mrs Wang, ‘halloooing’ at me across the car park of Chengde bus station.

Over the next three days the timetable organized by LivetheLanguage, is packed: I do a series of two-hour Chinese classes, learn Tai Qi in the shade of a sweet-smelling pine in the old imperial gardens, get whipped at ping-pong by the youngest member of the family (age 12) and then lose at drinking fire-water shots with the oldest (Mrs Wang, aged 63).

For much of the time, the experience is a bit like what I imagine it must be like to be hard-of-hearing – catching snatches of language, but often feeling slightly befuddled, with occasional shafts of light piercing a world dimly perceived and half-understood.

The chance to live with an ordinary Chinese family alone made this trip worth it and, while I wouldn’t claim to have magically improved after a just long weekend, it felt like I’d crammed a month’s worth of Chinese classes into three days.

And perhaps as importantly was left feeling determined to use Chinese whenever possible back in Beijing.

For more on Live The Language see www.livethelanguage.cn, email info@livethelanguage.cn or call 5100 1561. They are currently offering 15% off all courses in July.

Peter Foster is China Correspondent for the Daily Telegraph

Photo: Adam Dean