My experiences with legacy language immersion

I'm an ethnic Chinese, born and raised in the United States, currently in my mid-twenties. I've been to Taiwan several times, where I can speak Cantonese and Mandarin for the most part.<br><br>I'm fluent in English, legacy proficient in Mandarin and nowhere near native-like fluency. I can read and write in traditional Chinese characters if I wanted to, although it would take some effort, but my ability to listen in Mandarin is far, far better than speaking. I can understand the bulk of what a native speaker says, but when I try to speak back to them, my grammar is poor, my words are mangled and jumbled, and my vocabulary is lacking.<br><br>This past summer, graduating from college and before I got a job, I spent 45 days in Taiwan speaking nothing but Mandarin for as long as I could. I got a local SIM card to avoid having English speaking Google Maps, translation apps, or anything like that to see if I could throw myself into the deep end and improve my language skills.<br><br>I had taken a few classes in college, but those were basically review classes for the most part, and of course, I had been exposed to Mandarin all my life because my parents spoke it at home, and I went to weekend Chinese school for four years when I was a kid. Although it's worth saying that they spoke the Min Nan dialect at home, which is completely different from Mandarin.<br><br>While I was there, I bought a few things, like clothes and food, went clubbing a few times, took taxis, met up with friends, dated a little bit, all in Mandarin. I stayed with family in Taipei. I also bought a bus pass and rode a bus to Kaohsiung and then back.<br><br>In terms of my language progress, it improved a ton. I went from stumbling over my words to being able to hold reasonable conversations without much of a problem. My listening skills, while already good, improved by a lot. I could understand my relatives better. My reading skills improved significantly. I was able to read road signs, advertisements, menus, labels, and most news headlines without any issue. I was able to watch Taiwanese Mandarin media like variety shows, news, and cable TV and understand what they were saying, although there was a lot of Szechuan-accented Mandarin spoken which was tough for me to understand, since I was not used to hearing Mandarin spoken with their accent.<br><br>The biggest thing holding me back from being completely fluent was my lack of vocabulary. The amount of times I had to ask what a certain word meant was staggering, in terms of how often it happened. When I watched shows or the news, they would always throw around words and terms that I had no idea what they meant. It was noticeable and embarrassing.<br><br>Dating in Mandarin also went wrong - I met up with a nice Taiwanese girl while I was in Taipei, who worked at the Shangri-La hotel in London. We met up and spoke for a little bit. We told each other a lot about ourselves, although when she started talking about what she did while she lived in London, I had trouble keeping up because she was using words that I had no idea what they meant in Mandarin.<br><br>I tried to tell her a little bit more about myself, but I could tell that she was quickly losing interest because I couldn't express myself properly. I couldn't find the right words, and I mangled my sentences and my pronunciation was poor. I could tell that she basically tuned me out at the end and was just going through the motions talking to me until I asked for the check and told her that I had to go.<br><br>The biggest thing holding me back was my lack of vocabulary. Even though I went to Chinese school and my parents spoke Mandarin at home, the amount of time they spoke it was basically nothing compared to how much they spoke Min Nan, and the amount of time spent in school taking Mandarin lessons was maybe about two months a year. Nothing at all.<br><br>Because it was a legacy language for me, I didn't challenge myself to learn it when I was young. And now I'm paying the price for it. The funny thing is that even if I throw myself into the deep end, I still can't learn as much as a kid would learn in a year if he were, say, in school in Taiwan learning Mandarin for a year.<br><br>Lesson learned for those of you with a legacy language - even though you might think you have some sort of advantage, you don't. Learn it when you're young. You will regret it when you get older if you don't.