There are plenty of reasons why living in China isn’t easy—the pollution, the cultural differences, the ladies at the grocery store who are always shouting WAY TOO LOUD about the latest buy-one-get-one deal on almost-expired yogurt. But by far the most challenging aspect to navigate is the language.

My first couple years in China, I had good language days and I had bad—on my good days, I would let loose torrents of flowing Chinese to anyone who would listen, while on the bad, my tongue lay limp as a dead fish. It was for this reason that I began to regard Chinese with a superstitious, even mystical mindset—you know the way medicine men seek their spirit animals or Kirstie Alley pursues fad diets? That’s how I started going after new study methods, each time convinced that this was the one that would unlock the mystery of what the old dudes at the bike stand were saying, or how I could get the lowest price on fruit.

Learning the language became less a goal than it did a vendetta, and I explored every possible approach in my quest to satisfy my vengeance: language partners, podcasts, tutors, a Chinese boyfriend, even a six-month immersion course… none of it was enough. I still found myself gaping with envy at Smug White Guys letting loose fluent strings of Beijing-accented Putonghua, while I sat in a corner fumbling around with my latest sentence pattern.

Though I’ve since learned that a lot of progress just has to do with time and patience, I also know that no amount of textbook drills or ChinesePod is going to turn me into the next Da Shan—which is why I decided to go on a quest for the very best way of learning Chinese. I talked to roughly 20 friends, acquaintances and strangers who’ve lived in China for anywhere between one and 15 years about how they learned (or failed to learn) Chinese, and what advice they have for those starting out. Here, without further ado, are five conventional and not-so-conventional ways of getting your Chinese up to snuff.

MAN IN THE WILDERNESS: Immersion for Tough Guys

When Scott Nydegger first landed in Xi’an around the beginning of 2011, he didn’t know anyone, didn’t have a job and couldn’t speak a word of Chinese. And that’s exactly the way he wanted it.

“Language was one of the big reasons why I chose Xi’an,” he says. “I felt like if I went more to the west of China I would be forced into it more… And actually it’s true, because here you’re either forced into speaking on a daily basis or isolating yourself into a group of foreigners.” This was a familiar approach for Nydegger, who spent the last 10 years traveling throughout Europe, learning local languages on the street. Though Chinese was to prove a bit more foreign to him than French or Portuguese, the setting was fruitful: “In Xi’an we have lots of little barbecue places where people like to drink for hours, and if you just sit there with a book and you’re white, everybody will come up to you and ask what you’re doing. When they saw I was trying to learn Chinese, everybody would want to sit down and help me.”

From there, Nydegger says, he would try out phrases on his new language partners, miming when he couldn’t get the point across, until they’d reward him with new vocab or sentences. After they left, he’d move onto the next table and do it again.

While Nydegger admits this isn’t the most systematic way of learning Chinese, he says for someone like him, who has trouble learning in a classroom, it’s the best way to make the language stick. But two things, he says, are crucial: 1) being able to identify what parts of the language are the most useful, as well as being able to assess your own strengths and weaknesses and 2) not being afraid to make a fool of yourself.

This, he says, is where the booze comes in. “I think alcohol is the greatest tool for learning a language. The most difficult thing is you get so stressed out about it, what you’re saying and whether you’re doing it right, and what you need to do is quiet your mind and just talk. When you’re drinking, that’s when it happens.”

Though this might sound like a strange approach, thousands of foreigners do it every year—whether they’re teaching in the countryside, where Chinese is essential for everyday life, or dropping into a second-tier city for the express purpose of finding a free, if slightly more daunting, year of language education.

Of course, this approach can only get you so far—Nydegger admits that he’s completely illiterate, and his grammar may leave something to be desired. But immersion can do wonders for developing the skills of people who already have an academic foundation, and even leave a powerful imprint on absolute beginners.

For Joseph Stern, an English teacher who’s lived in China for 10 years, immersion was an initially frustrating, but ultimately rewarding experience: “The way I first learned was a little too luanqibazao (乱七八糟, chaotic), not enough discipline,” he says of his early years, picking up Chinese on the streets armed with little more than pricked ears and a dictionary. “But I picked up a lot through osmosis. Later, when I added some formal learning, it became invaluable.”

As I discovered, this is a common sentiment among expats who came to China through an English-teaching program and ended up falling in love with both the people and the country.

This period was crucial for Nick Richards, our former managing editor and guitarist for Beijing dance-rock band Not There, who spent two years teaching in rural areas before going to study at Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU).

“Those two years I spent were really important, because I learned how to communicate with people in a really intuitive way,” he says, describing the countless hours he spent engaged in half-mimed conversations or watching the people around him talk. “For me it wasn’t a linguistic thing, it was a cultural thing, a human thing.”

Nydegger agrees, “Some people think, ‘I can learn the language then establish relationships,’ but that’s putting the cart before the horse. There are some people who you meet who are instantly your family and you’re comfortable with each other and it’s just natural that you’ll pick up on each other’s language.”

For: Self-starter extroverts who don’t mind making fools of themselves; people who hate classrooms.

Advantages: You’ll learn real, colloquial Chinese at an exponential rate.

Disadvantages: Lack of structure means you’ll need a lot of discipline and self-study for this to work.

ON THE JOB: Sink or Swim for Ambitious Upstarts

The first Chinese words I learned that weren’t from a textbook were “glass cleaner” and “rag.” I repeated them to myself over and over as I scrubbed the pastry case, the tables and the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined Superdiner, the Shanghai restaurant where I spent nearly two months waitressing.

Learning on the job is either a great or a harrowing way of studying Chinese depending on how you look at it. Lucky for me, the stakes were relatively low and the yields were high: after a month of being surrounded by Chinese coworkers and customers for 10 hours a day, I learned more Chinese than in a semester of college. Even better, learning the language through real experiences (and knowing that I would have to rely on what I’d learned later) made everything stick much more than stuff I’d learned from textbooks.

Learning on the job is like immersion on steroids: you learn not just because you want to, and because you’re surrounded by the language, but because you have to. It’s a form of motivation that works amazingly well. I was shocked when I learned that my friend Josh Feola, who books shows at a local club, learned all of his (pretty decent) Chinese through work: “[I learned] just [by] having practical things to communicate, like booking a show, explaining the agreement with the bar, what time to soundcheck, and so on,” he says. “It took about a year to get decent.” As with other kinds of immersion, one of the beautiful things about learning on the job is that your language skills develop more organically than they would in the classroom. “I have a lot of gaps in grammar and vocabulary that I wouldn’t have if I had taken classes in college, I suppose,” Josh says. “But the advantage is my ear is much faster than many people I know with formal training… which for me is of much greater practical importance.”

The danger to learning on the job (in addition to potentially making a fool of yourself in front of customers or clients) is that your language skills can become rather myopic. For instance, while I may have been able to tell you the difference between table and floor rags while working at Superdiner, I still didn’t know such practical words as “rent” or even “noodles.” Likewise, I’m willing to bet that while Josh could name every piece of stage equipment, he probably has no idea how to comment on the weather.

All of which is why on-the-job learning is perhaps best-suited to people who already have a relatively solid academic background in the language to serve as a foundation.

Nancy Tong, a 23-year-old shop manager in Beijing’s 798 District, spent years studying through university classes and tutors before starting work in an all-Chinese environment. “For actually using spoken language and listening, of course on-the-job Chinese has put all my years of training to the test,” she says. “Customers expect quick response, so my listening has gotten instant… I have also had to communicate with my co-workers, train new staff, solve problems, etc. Ultimately, learning on the job has got me thinking in Chinese.” It was the difference, she says, between theory and practice. “In a classroom, we learn grammar, how to summarize newspaper articles, but what experience I see as most important is actually socializing with locals and finding a comfortable place in a group.”

The key, of course, is finding a job that isn’t only an all-Chinese speaking environment (i.e. no English teaching), but in which either customers or coworkers are counting on you.

For: Learners with at least one-to-two years of classroom learning experience.

Advantages: Total immersion and the pressure of a job will cause your Chinese to improve by leaps and bounds.

Disadvantages: You may end up with Chinese that is weirdly specialized at the expense of more general knowledge.

BRINGING IT ON HOME: Learning Through Fun with Friends

Johanna Atterby had been studying in Beijing for a year when she came to a sudden realization: “I hadn’t learned that much,” she says. Or so she thought. Atterby had been taking classes at Peking University full-time for two semesters, and even had a healthy crew of Chinese friends, but her language skills had never really been put to the test—until the summer of 2008. “It was during the Olympics, and  many of my foreign friends had to leave Beijing—including a good friend that always translated everything when we were out with Chinese friends.”

This was bad news for Atterby, a bubbly extrovert, who suddenly found herself unable to communicate easily with her friends. “During that summer, when I sat at a dinner or a party or whatever, I realized that I was very quiet, and that I couldn’t really engage in the conversation,” she says. “Things got very boring… and embarrassing if one of my Chinese friends asked me something and the rest of the party just kind of quieted down to hear my stuttering response. I just really wanted to participate in the conversation or at least understand what everyone was laughing at, or get to know the people you see every time but never really talk to.”

Instead of withdrawing to the expat bars of Sanlitun, Atterby threw herself into her new all-Chinese world, attending rock shows with all-Chinese crowds, going out to dinner with all-Chinese groups and even finding herself an all-Chinese boyfriend. Though the first few weeks were painful, she says by the end of the summer she found her language skills transformed. “I got back to school in the autumn, and I took the test that I had taken a year before. The first time I understood almost nothing, but this time I did pretty well and was surprised by how much I understood.”

Nearly all the people I’ve met who have amazing Chinese learned it this way: through friends, significant others, or both.

If you’re living in a small city or remote area, it shouldn’t be hard to make fast friends with locals. But if you’re in a big city like Beijing or Shanghai, it can be a bit harder to reject the expat world in favor of Chinese-speaking buds with whom you share common interests.

One surefire way to surround yourself with Chinese is to move in with a non-English-speaking Chinese roommate; not only will you be speaking Chinese every day, you’re sure to find yourself with an instant supply of Chinese friends.

This is what our former assistant art director Matt Culbreth did when he first moved to Beijing in 2010 and, thanks to the crapshoot of an Internet search, ended up with a Chinese roommate. “It goes without saying that if you only have foreign friends, i.e. non-native Chinese speakers, it’s going to be pretty difficult to learn the language,” he says. “You have to speak Chinese with people in order to learn and retain it. It’s true what they say: if you don’t use it, you lose it.”

If Chinese roommates aren’t an option, then your next best bet is to involve yourself in an established community, whether it’s music, basketball, hiking or speed dating—persistence pays off.

Laura Tucker, who works at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, spent nearly a year studying Chinese in Taipei before finally locking in to a local community. “I really, really wanted Taiwanese friends, so I joined a soccer team and a hiking club and had like a thousand language partners, but it was always just super awkward and not very fun,” she says. “I had been noticing gangs of cool-looking kids riding fixies around town, though, and so I—this is kind of embarrassing, but whatever—dropped a lot of money on an awesome bike, learned how to ride it, showed up to an alley cat race and instantly had a super crowd of people to hang out with.” It was, Tucker says, the first group she found who felt like real friends and with whom she was able to learn how “normal conversations” happen.

Perhaps the riskiest, albeit most effective option, is finding yourself a Chinese significant other. That’s what my colleague Caroline Killmer did when she started dating her now-husband, Eddie Lv (though she emphasizes that she did not start dating him for free Chinese lessons). “By the time I moved to Beijing [in 2005], I’d been out of Chinese classes for a couple of years, and while I could speak alright and read some characters, I didn’t make any progress in the first couple years after moving back,” she says. “I was living in China, but still not immersed in a Chinese-speaking environment.” That all changed when she met Eddie, a local DJ, with whom she speaks mostly Chinese. “It was in talking to him that I learned to speak at a level beyond what I’d learned from textbooks and formal education.” The only drawback? “I realized recently I kind of talk like a dude,” she says.

For: Anyone and everyone.

Advantages: Improve your kouyu skills, learn how to interact socially and how to talk like a normal person.

Disadvantages: If your group isn’t big enough, you may end up taking on the quirks of your friends, or always talking in a casual way that isn’t appropriate for every situation.

CHINESE UNIVERSITIES: Separating the Chaff from the Wheat

If you want to go the traditional route, there are basically two kinds of schools that will actually teach you something: Chinese universities and American immersion programs. When it comes to Chinese schools, there are plenty of options, ranging from the biggies in Beijing and Shanghai (Qinghua, Beida, BLCU, Shanghai Normal, etc.), to smaller schools in such far-flung cities as Guilin and Xi’an. But how much bang do you get for your buck?

To answer this question, I turned back to Nick Richards, who spent four years studying at Beijing’s BLCU and has amazing Chinese. I was all ears for a ringing endorsement of the school that has produced no small number of mini-Da Shan TV hosts. Instead, this is what he said: “Everything I learned, I got for myself… The running joke was this isn’t a school, it’s a business. Student morale was not great.” So what was the problem? “Just the general apathy of the institution, the difficulty getting help when I needed it… and there were so many students who didn’t want to be there,” Richards ticks off. He says that in his four years studying at BLCU, the classes were hit and miss, with the quality largely depending on the teachers and the dedication of the students—many of whom couldn’t care less about their studies. “The school didn’t have a real weeding mechanism—anyone could get in if they paid, so there were a lot of people slowing down the class, wasting our time and wasting the teachers’ time.”

Based on a lot of the people I talked to, this is true to varying degrees of many of the Chinese universities in Beijing, though some are better than others. Most people agreed that the most important factors in determining the quality of education were teachers, classmates and attitude.

Johanna Atterby, who spent two years total at Peking University, says having a number of Korean classmates helped keep up the quality of the education: “Generally, more Asians in your class meant a higher level and tougher ‘competition’ from your classmates,” she says.

Likewise, Mike Gleisten, who spent two years at Beijing Normal University, says he benefited a lot from spending time with Asian classmates who not only had previous backgrounds in Chinese study, but with whom his common language was Chinese. He added that, in addition to improving his kouyu through classes that focused on modern and colloquial Chinese, his biggest gain came from one strict teacher: “He would make us read two newspaper articles every week, and if you weren’t prepared in class he would make you leave,” Gleisten remembers. “My Chinese improved significantly, and I learned a lot about the culture as well.”

Matt Sheehan, a former intern of this magazine who spent a year studying at Beijing Foreign Studies University, says the factor that made the biggest difference in his experience was attitude. “The classes themselves weren’t always great, but I started making a better effort to meet Chinese students at the school and study on my own,” he says. “I started demanding much more of myself than the teachers would ever demand of students. Once I did that, I found my Chinese improving a lot.” He now says that the only thing he would change about his experience was figuring out earlier how to be a self-starter. “I wouldn’t credit most of the improvement to my classes, but to the time for self-study and the chance to be at a school surrounded by thousands of Chinese people who are open and friendly.”

For: Disciplined students who are willing to set their own standards and reach outside school for enrichment.

Advantages: Chinese university programs are relatively cheap and can help provide structure and cultural context to your learning.

Disadvantages: Most are lacking in rigor, and both your classmates and teachers will be hit or miss.

IMMERSION PROGRAMS: The Boot Camp of Chinese Study

Your other option (if you’re in college or a pre-professional with lots of money) is to dive headfirst into an immersion program, which is what more and more recent graduates—including yours truly—are doing as preparation for working in China. These programs last anywhere from two months to a semester and are basically boot camps for Chinese learning: the best of them include a language pledge (banning non-Chinese speech for the program’s duration) and cover the material at lightning speed, averaging about a chapter a day. The biggies in Beijing comprise a trio of alphabet soup juggernauts: Inter-University Program (IUP), run out of Qinghua University; Associated Colleges in China (ACC), the program I attended, at Minzu University; and CET, which has locations in Beijing, Harbin and a handful of other cities. Options outside the mainland include the International Chinese Language Program (ICLP) in Taiwan, along with the prestigious Middlebury intensive language program in the US.

In terms of cost, language environment and quality, ACC, CET and Middlebury are comparable, and comparably intense. Casey Grimes, a financial analyst in Shanghai who studied two semesters at CET and one at Middlebury, describes the classes this way: “We’d basically study a chapter a day… and you’d have to know the tones and characters for the vocab, and then memorize the dialogue. Then we’d go in the next day and just drill, drill, drill; we’d drill on perfect pronunciation and repeating the sentences and just parroting them back basically.” If this sounds miserable—well, it kind of is. And that’s one of the downfalls of committing yourself to an immersion program.

“While I was at immersion programs, having nothing else going on in my life—grad school was on hold and my friends and family were halfway around the world—made concentrating on Chinese infinitely easier,” says Fredy Gonzalez, a PhD candidate who for his dissertation studied at both ACC and CET. “While I was at immersion programs, having nquickly.”

One of the ways some people avoid burnout is by switching it up. “Personally, I really needed to move from program to program… I could already tell at the end of each program, my brain was getting too used to that way of studying,” says Zach Gidwitz, who attended ACC and IUP, and now interns at Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

There are two big distinctions among these programs: CET provides Chinese roommates (a big leg-up for your kouyu) and IUP is geared more at graduate students or professionals who have a good grasp of the language and are trying to hone sector-specific language skills.

The advantages of these kinds of programs are obvious: you get great tones, a solid grammar foundation and high literacy. As for the disadvantages? Well, as I can attest to personally, they result in a high level of burnout. Another problem is that there isn’t much opportunity to go out and make local friends, which means that your formal Chinese will far outweigh your kouyu. Gidwitz notes that although he’s able to speak well and can read complex documents, his speaking still isn’t quite where he wants it to be. “In terms of just comfort, shooting the sh*t with Chinese friends, just the fluency, I don’t think I’m as good as a lot of people who learned from friends,” he says. “I think they have a strong advantage over me just in terms of comfort and speaking fluently.”

For: College students, professionals-in-training or ambitious arrivals who want to learn a lot in a very short time.

Advantages: This is great preparation for professional work, as you learn a huge amount in a very short time, including formal and more advanced Chinese.

Disadvantages: These programs are both expensive and misery-inducing; they also aren’t great for improving kouyu.

Insider’s Tip

Fredy Gonzalez, 28

I think meeting Chinese people was most key to my development-not only talking to my roommate and the old people in the building, but getting dragged to bars and talking to people over shaizi. It also helped to have foreign friends who were better at Chinese, just to bail me out if I didn’t understand.

Zach Gidwitz, 25

ACC did wonders in giving me a foundation in terms of not speaking like a horrible foreigner- interms of grammar and tones and forcing me to speak al the time, because of the language pledge.

Johanna Atterby, 27

Keep an open mind—about everying; how and what they teach here, as well as Chinese society, culture and people. If you like the language and the place and you will learn faster and for this to happen you need to have an open mind.