I was born and raised in HK. I came to the US after graduating sixth grade, so I am still fluent in Chinese.
I think the whole article can be summarized down to just one point: unless you live in China or Taiwan or HK or Macau, you are not going to be fluent in Chinese.
There is no magic in learning Chinese. As I said, I was raised in a Chinese-speaking environment. My teachers taught us single words and compound words. I learned to construct simple sentences like Hello World.
It may be true that you need over three thousands Chinese words (remind you a word is a single word like 海, which means sea, or ocean) to be truly fluent, but honestly I don't think I need more than two hundreds words to understand Chinese. As @msvan has shown, 海军 (navy) is composed of two words sea and army. If you see anything beings with 海, you can quickly assume there is something about sea. You can assume it may even have something to do with color blue.
Sometimes it is funny to see things like this:
海闊天空. Individually, you may read it as SEA, WIDE, SKY, EMPTY. 海闊 describes something wide and broad like the ocean. 天 by itself is sky or divine but you can make it even more explicit or redundant by saying 天空 to point to the sky.
Those four words are often used in this famous quote: "忍一時，風平浪靜。退一步，則海闊天空". Basically "hold on to your emotions and worries to keep the peace; take a step back and you will see the bigger picture." Yes. This kind of old quotes are hard to intrepert even for a native, but this is the art of language. You have to read each word, think of the author's origin, bring in any historical and environment context, and figure out the best interpretation. We do that every day even in America.
Of course, sometimes you can't get away with single word interpretation easily. Take a newspaper headline: 華人當選 (Chinese, person/people, ? , elect/choose). Note how I skip the 3rd one?
當 by itself is ambiguous. In theory it has a "when" and "where" context
當你 means when you
當下 means right now at this moment
當中 means inside or within this
當心 means be careful
當然 means of course
當選 means elected
So you have to know compound words.
Even funnier if you write 當心上人對你徵笑 (when your crush smiles at you). Look at 當心 and 心上人. Where is the "be careful"? It's not there because 心上人 (crush) takes over the compound.
You need to know the compound words. You need to read and talk to people. So you can get away with 200 words, but you need 1000 compound words to be fluent. But this is not something I learn overnight. I pick up Chinese as I grow up.
I think the whole article can be summarized down to just one point: unless you live in China or Taiwan or HK or Macau, you are not going to be fluent in Chinese.
There is no magic in learning Chinese. As I said, I was raised in a Chinese-speaking environment. My teachers taught us single words and compound words. I learned to construct simple sentences like Hello World.
It may be true that you need over three thousands Chinese words (remind you a word is a single word like 海, which means sea, or ocean) to be truly fluent, but honestly I don't think I need more than two hundreds words to understand Chinese. As @msvan has shown, 海军 (navy) is composed of two words sea and army. If you see anything beings with 海, you can quickly assume there is something about sea. You can assume it may even have something to do with color blue.
Sometimes it is funny to see things like this:
海闊天空. Individually, you may read it as SEA, WIDE, SKY, EMPTY. 海闊 describes something wide and broad like the ocean. 天 by itself is sky or divine but you can make it even more explicit or redundant by saying 天空 to point to the sky.
Those four words are often used in this famous quote: "忍一時，風平浪靜。退一步，則海闊天空". Basically "hold on to your emotions and worries to keep the peace; take a step back and you will see the bigger picture." Yes. This kind of old quotes are hard to intrepert even for a native, but this is the art of language. You have to read each word, think of the author's origin, bring in any historical and environment context, and figure out the best interpretation. We do that every day even in America.
Of course, sometimes you can't get away with single word interpretation easily. Take a newspaper headline: 華人當選 (Chinese, person/people, ? , elect/choose). Note how I skip the 3rd one?
當 by itself is ambiguous. In theory it has a "when" and "where" context
當你 means when you
當下 means right now at this moment
當中 means inside or within this
當心 means be careful
當然 means of course
當選 means elected
So you have to know compound words.
Even funnier if you write 當心上人對你徵笑 (when your crush smiles at you). Look at 當心 and 心上人. Where is the "be careful"? It's not there because 心上人 (crush) takes over the compound.
You need to know the compound words. You need to read and talk to people. So you can get away with 200 words, but you need 1000 compound words to be fluent. But this is not something I learn overnight. I pick up Chinese as I grow up.