In Closing.
So here is a short sort of end of study report regarding my experiences in Taiwan. People still occasionaly find me on the internet and ask questions about how much one can learn, and whether I have tips or not. Chinese study is increasingly popular, and I'm happy to be of any help my limited experience may offer if you have questions.
Altogether I spent eleven months in Taipei. I started off in a very basic class studying Practical Audio Visual Chinese book 1. I opted for intensive classes as I was of the mind that more hours of instruction would help me to get a good foundation. For my first two terms (3 months a piece) I studied through the first book of the PAVC series and the first half of the second book which is divided into two Shang and Xia. I then opted for the third book in the 'Far East Everyday Chinese' series. It was a bit of a jump in level but I worked hard. I chose it because I found the vocabulary to be a bit more up to date than the PAVC series.
For my last term (which I only attended 2 months of) I studied News and Views which is fairly new on the Shida course selection. The book I used was actually published by Taida and my teacher who was one of the co-authors worked at both Shida and Taida. It was a very good course and I am still working through the materials now.
My Chinese is at a decent level. I can now stop people on the street and have conversations. I've just gotten a new job here in Canada working as an interpreter at a Maritime Musuem and I'm able to use it when Chinese tourists come in to visit. It usually gets a good reaction as they, reasonably enough, don''t expect their white tour-guide guy to be able to speak any Chinese.
I still often lose track of spoken Chinese if it is on an unfamiliar topic of spoken very quickly as in news reports. I can read newspapers, but it can take a good deal of time depending on how many words I need to look up.
Presently I'm not practicing as much as I'd like. I try to listen to radio news in Chinese (which I download as a podcast). I also try to pick up newspapers when ever I can. There are a few free Chinese news publications here on the East coast. I've got a language exchange partner here but we don't meet as often as we should and frankly as a soon to be full time student with an almost full time job I'm a little bit over-worked.
So my verdict is that if you're either very talented with languages or a sucker for punishment who will practice hours per day a good workable basis in Chinese is quite attainable within a one year time frame.