Learning to read Chinese/Japanese

[MorkTheFiddle]

What are reasonable expectations in terms of the amount of time it would take to read relatively proficiently? What variables may affect this and how?

Steve Kaufmann of LIngq fame claims he learned Mandarin (reading, writing and speaking) in nine months. He worked for the Canadian diplomatic corps at the time, and learning Mandarin was his full-time job. Although I am hardly Kaufmann's number one fan, I see no reason to doubt his claim. Though it must be said that I do not know any Mandarin myself, so I can't put him to a test even now of how fluent he is in the language. I have heard him speak Spanish, French and German, and I am persuaded that, without a lot of data to go on, he is as fluent in those languages as he claims.

I mention this only to give you some kind of a framework to go along with the times for learning Mandarin that other folks have given you in this thread. Note that 22 business days per month times 9 months times 8 hours a day gives 1,620 hours. The Foreign Language Institute estimates it would take a native English speaker 2200 hours to learn Mandarin: http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty. As I say, I have never studied Mandarin. In my case, the Foreign Service Institute estimates are (way) too low, but you are trying to learn only to read.

[aokoye]

Another resource that might be good is the Total Japanese series of textbooks by Okano Kimiko (you can find them used on Amazon for a decent price). I have the whole series and while I haven't really used it it looks pretty good. You would mainly want to use the reading and writing book as well as the grammar book. That said the vocab lists are in the conversation books (there are two of them) which is annoying for your purposes.

It might be worth going through them and translating the text in both the conversation and reading/writing books.

[Dylan95]

What are reasonable expectations in terms of the amount of time it would take to read relatively proficiently? What variables may affect this and how?

Steve Kaufmann of LIngq fame claims he learned Mandarin (reading, writing and speaking) in nine months. He worked for the Canadian diplomatic corps at the time, and learning Mandarin was his full-time job. Although I am hardly Kaufmann's number one fan, I see no reason to doubt his claim. Though it must be said that I do not know any Mandarin myself, so I can't put him to a test even now of how fluent he is in the language. I have heard him speak Spanish, French and German, and I am persuaded that, without a lot of data to go on, he is as fluent in those languages as he claims.

I mention this only to give you some kind of a framework to go along with the times for learning Mandarin that other folks have given you in this thread. Note that 22 business days per month times 9 months times 8 hours a day gives 1,620 hours. The Foreign Language Institute estimates it would take a native English speaker 2200 hours to learn Mandarin: http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty. As I say, I have never studied Mandarin. In my case, the Foreign Service Institute estimates are (way) too low, but you are trying to learn only to read.

FSI estimates only include class hours for FSI students, they do not include all the hours outside of class. I think that's the main reason why you find their estimates too low.

As for Steve Kaufmann, that is definitely interesting. I am also not his biggest fan, but he does provide some insight and while I doubt he was able to become fluent in Chinese within 9 months, he probably was able to reach at least B2 during that period if he's making such a claim, and that's good enough for me within even a 1 year period.

Then again, I'm only looking to be B2 in reading. Anything else could be A2 in that sort of time period and as long as reading was B2, I would be completely satisfied for the time being. It isn't a problem for me at least in an immediate sense if I am incapable of getting the tones right and incapable of writing, as long as I can read. Of course, learning a language is an organic experience and I feel that if some skills are too low, they will bottleneck my reading skills.