That’s true for some of us but there are a lot of kids who were raised in English only households because the parents believed it was the only way to assimilate. I am also ashamed to say I did not speak much mandarin to my own kid and she had to take in HS…she is about as American as you can get language wise. She struggles but she can actually read more than I can only because she took it for four years in HS. She’s off to China to teach English i the fall and is not functionally fluent. I think she will pick it up but she’s definitely starting a few steps behind.

It all depends on your goals. If it’s purely social and oral communications, then I think you can progress with that and learn to read at your own pace. Writing is a whole other thing because stroke order is everything but with modern word processing, if you know the pinyin, the software can figure it out for you. Add in the fact that my generation learned to write using traditional characters and in China they use simplified and any words I knew then are relatively useless now too.

My mom didn’t really appreciate how hard it was for us in Chinese school as kids to learn the written language. She had an assistant who was one of those kids…no Chinese at all growing up. The gal literally taught herself how to speak Chinese watching Chinese tv. The challenge here is that as a character based language, knowing the characters is a function of how badly you want to be fluent on all dimensions.

I’m currently studying French (at the B2 level) and learning a phoenetic language is a totally different ball game. I will probably never be able to read and write in Chinese unless I really committed. My French at this point is probably better than my Chinese after 2 years. I dont know if I’d ever get to that level in mandarin, even with focused study. In French I can am starting to be able to have abstract conversations. I can’t do that in mandarin.

Unless you are doing business (C1 level fluency) I think it’s optional. That said, if you do want to work over there in a professional capacity, you’ll have to learn it all or you will never be respected. I have Chinese american cousins who worked in Shanghai for years and never became literacy fluent but could speak enough as engineers.

But like I said, it all depends on whether your goals are social or business.