Cheers! The movie star secret to mastering a language

"How long will it take to master English?" Relatives and friends like to ask. Often, I counsel them to just enjoy learning the language. But they insist, "how many years if I go to America?"

If only one could count in years. When I arrived in the US at the age of 20, I heard of Chinese couples speaking to each other only in English, even at home. I thought I could avoid that embarrassing stage, for I had always excelled in English at school and it took me only a semester to be able to discuss schoolwork with my classmates.

To have a long casual conversation on things American, however, turned out an entirely different matter. Who's this Bill Clinton? What Monday night football? What is a martini? The subjects, and the fluent, excited American ways of discussing them, eluded me. For a year, my vocabulary outside of the classroom was limited to McDonald's meal menu and the long 5,000-year history of China.