An UDN blogger, who also claims herself a semi-professional translator living in the States, observed in one of her essays that she had difficulities communicating with English-spoken people in daily life, especially when the speakers were pouring out a deluge of sentences and words too fast.  She then somewhat lamented how come a person utiized English every day like her couldn't tackle with daily-used English well, and she said she felt frustrated sometime.  The feeling is mutual.  All I can say to her is you are not the only one.  I once listened to a lecture given by a professor of English in NTU, and I could clearly remember that professor admitted he could barely understand 50% of the dialogues from TV dramas or  Hollywood movies without subtitles. 

Why was that?  I think the root cause of the difficulties the blogger and the professor have been confronting is largely due to English is not their mother tongue.  Whenever they use English, particularly in oral communication, they have to translate English into Chinese, and then reverse it back into English again as to response.  All of the process must be done in the "switchboard" in their brains instantly.  If they are not quick enough to response, their counterparts would probably lose their patience, or the screen has already moved to next scene.  So the frustration emerges.  Practice makes perfect?  Probably yes, but you have to have a flair for language.

If your mother tongue is Chinese, you should learn a foreign language in an enviorment of immersion earlier so as to become a real bilingual.  I would like to raise three examples to testify my theory: Dr.顧維鈞, Dr.林語堂 and my daughter.  Before six, Dr.顧 was taught classic Chinese at his home in China, after that he went to America and received American education all the way to finishing his doctorate study at Columbia.  Dr.林 entered a full-English junior high in China, and continue his study in English enviorment until he graduated from St. Johns University at Shanghai, then advanced his academic career in Europe and America.  My daughter entered a junior high in the States at 12, studying the same way as other American students did till her graduating from a law school.  They all are able to master English pretty well, and also good at Chinese comprehensively(my daughter is weak in writing due to lack of practices).  Does something in common among them?  Yes, Chinese is the mother tongue of theirs, they immerse in English enviorment before their adolescence, and they all think with English.  I believe all of their minds are ready for English any time, but whenever English-Chinese interchange is needed they are able to react much, much quicker in their "switchboard" than we are, for the deep-rooted mother tongue makes them possess the advantage.  Do we think with English every minute, every day? Of course not.  So we have to spend a whole lot time in learning English prior to competing with people in English-speaking countries, and it is unfair.

People always argue for which one is the main factor of the United States' dominance, productivity, economy scales, military power, or US dollars?  I think none of them is because someday China will surpass U.S. in every fields.  But not until Chinese language replaces English as world's most important tool of communication, never will China dominance actually achieve.