.

There are countless helpful and not so helpful posts about how to learn a foreign language so I will try to offer a new perspective based on my experience learning Mandarin and teaching English to 300+ Chinese students.

Some people have natural advantages when it comes to learning languages: people who already are bilingual or have learnt a foreign language before, students who already need to use the language

Firstly, your third language will be easier to learn than your second, and your fourth will be easier to learn than your third.

Basically, there are compound advantages that come with learning new languages. Not only do you learn the discipline of sitting down and reading texts in multiple languages or hearing people speak different languages. Your mind also develops the ability to intuitively switch context.

Second, if you do not need it regularly, you will lose it.

Instead of learning a language first, then using it, I recommend the approach of getting a critical mass of knowledge of vocabulary and grammar to have a basic conversation (5 minutes when you meet a stranger at a cocktail party) then adding multiple hours of effort daily. This is the huge advantage that students who live in the right language environment have. Firstly, the need to learn provides you with the necessary motivation to do the work instead of putting it off because more important priorities have filled up your time. Secondly, the emotional ‘high’ that comes with a successful conversation where you have spoken with someone in their native tongue motivates you to study harder and have more conversations like that. It also builds up the confidence that you need to keep trying and practicing, which is how you crystallize knowledge in your mind. Finally, you learn best by doing.

In this way, for the best students, learning a language is not seen as a means to an end but an end in itself. Success is being able to effectively communicate with your taxi driver, shopkeeper or even your teacher, in the language of instruction despite your imperfect grammar or weird accent. The journey is far more important than the destination. In that journey, everyone becomes your teacher by correcting you when you are wrong, which helps build rapport and friendship. It helps you empathize with the other person and their culture, which will serve you in good stead when you are actually negotiating a deal or doing business with someone like them.

Third, you learn best by crossing the bridge

I have always found ‘language partners’ to be quite inefficient: each person teaches the other. What’s significantly more useful is to befriend someone who does not know your language at all. This forces the student to cross the bridge of misunderstanding to understand the other person. This is what every single interaction will be as a student is ascending the steep curve of learning the language: figuring out what the other person means when it is ambiguous. So teachers of students above the basic level should minimize the usage of the students’ native language. Initially, this will seem very difficult and incomprehensible to the students, but their level of comprehension will rise with time, which is the goal: deciphering the meaning of sentences in the target language.

TLDR: I went to China because I was curious about how this country had pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty within one generation and I wanted to be involved in leading similar change for my own motherland.

Acknowledging my privilege

I attended an all-boys Jesuit high school, arguably one of the greatest institutions of education in Africa. We had manicured green lawns and rose bushes, overlooked by a castle built in 1927. In a desert of suffering and poverty, this was an oasis where the children of the well-to-do were educated: the political, diplomatic, business and professional elite.

The purpose of our education was to become ‘Men for Others’ who would serve our communities and make the world a better place. This drove me to lead student activities focused on helping the poorest in our society. It was a century-old elite private school deeply steeped in the British tradition of classic education. We studied Latin for two years and French for 4 years, wore blazers despite being in the hot summer sunshine of southern Africa and played cricket and rugby. We revered fearsome exceptional student leaders who were Prefects and had a clear hierarchy with unique privileges based on seniority.

Obligation of service to others

The grandiose aims of our education resonated quite strongly with my idealistic and ambitious teenage soul. My deeply pious parents had a deep commitment to service to others, which was reinforced by my school education. My mother was an industrial nurse, running a clinic at a factory and my father was a mathematics teacher who spent his career rising up the civil service. They respected all people, regardless of their station in life but by their example, they ingrained within us a commitment to serving those around us.

Stepping out to ‘serve the nation’

Eventually, I had the opportunity to join the Youth City Council, one of the more formative experiences of my life. Sixty high school leaders from different corners of the city were selected to represent the views of young people in the capital city, and by proxy, the nation. I served as head of the Council titled the Junior Mayor and learnt countless lessons about leadership from that experience. I worked with people different from me and we all strived to make our city better (or at least be seen to do that).

Throughout the time I led the city council, I wondered how I could be useful to the country. I was frustrated with all these politicians who had run our country’s economy into the ground. If only these politicians understood economics, the lives of people throughout the nation would be better. I aspired to be the change that I sought in the world and imagined that one day I would be need to step up and come up with the policies that would build this country up.

The revelation about China

While I was Mayor, I looked around the world for examples of countries that raised themselves out of poverty. How had they done it? China arose as an example that piqued my interest. When the Beijing Olympics were held, I watched the opening ceremony and was impressed with the glamour, pomp and fanfare that made China look so abundantly rich. This is the same country that had been poor as I had seen in a book about the ‘Private Life of Chairman Mao’, which took me three months to read. At that moment, it clicked to me that I should better understand China. I had begun taking courses towards an Economics degree at the University of Zimbabwe, but the campus closed down because of the 2007 cholera epidemic and we all had to go home. Instead, all I could do was read books at home, mostly about the Zimbabwean history that my high school education had failed to fill my mind with. So when I got the opportunity to study Mandarin in China, I leapt at it.

In preparation for the move to China, I spent 3 months taking weekly classes in basic Mandarin with a group of other Zimbabweans who were going to study in China. And then at the end of August 2009, I departed from Harare International Airport on an Air Zimbabwe flight to Beijing via Singapore. The adventure had begun!