Today, after school, Richard came to the office to say goodbye to his homeroom teacher Mr. Chang. He's going back to Germany on July 14. "I can't believe I'm going back," he said in beautiful Mandarin. We teachers had a long chat with him, for almost one and a half hours, everyone surprised at his fluent Mandarin.
Richard told us, as he once said in my class, that motivation, environment, and sufficient input are very important in learning a language. Take him for example. He has a strong motivation, which showed when he asked a Chinese teacher how he can keep improving his Mandarin after he goes back to his hometown. Besides, swimming in the sea of Mandarin in Taiwan, he certainly got wet. Also, he reads in the Mandarin newspaper the articles which interest him. "Read whatever you like in the language you're learning, whatever," he emphasized.
During the conversation, he showed me a Chinese book he got from his host family: 卡內基給青少年的禮物：溝通與人際關係. I opened a page randomly, and he read aloud a passage from it without difficulty. There is no Chinese phonetic alphabet! Within a year, Richard mastered not only spoken but written Mandarin. What a miracle! And he himself is the miracle worker. Not everyone can achieve this, only those who are highly motivated.
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