Why celery-eating sharks are brilliant language teachers

The Beijing taxi driver was stunned to hear my utter gibberish. "I feel sad

because I'm good at going to hell to watch a shark eat celery," I say in Chinese.

The cabbie was a victim of my new language-learning system in which I randomly grab five flash cards containing new words or expressions and force them into a normal conversation.

The weirder the conversation, the easier it is for me to remember.

I've recently learnt 500 new words, but find it difficult to employ them in sentences and after a few weeks simply forget them.

The 5 expressions I used with the taxi driver were: celery (qin cai) good at (shan chang), feel bad (yu men), shark (sha yu), and hell (di yu).

But a celery-eating shark?

"I've said it before and I'll say it again," the cabbie must have told his wife later. "These foreigners are a weird mob."

Learning Chinese is a big reason why I am living in China and according to the experts, I'm about a year away from a comfortable conversation.

I can speak and listen a little now, but it is far from relaxing.

So far I've slogged away for 20-months, with a few concentrated one-month bursts.

These intense, 10-hour a day, 6-day a week routines really fried my brain, but boosted my speaking levels immensely.

But like many expats, I have a full-time job and time is limited. If I clock up 15-hoursof language work each week, I'm happy.

Experts say it takes a native-English speaker about 2,000 hours of hard study - that's 15 hours a week for three years.

It's a hard slog, but I'm more than half way through my plan and patience and making up strange sentences are my keys.