"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.

But there were parties to go to and post-lunch chit-chats. After exhausting the greeting routine and some comment on the weather, I could feel the heavy muted smile hanging off my face. The problem grew worse in the second year: I began stuttering every time I faced a casual conversation, which I grew so aware of that I locked myself in after school.

It was hard to pinpoint when things turned around. My dogged Chinese study habit helped - I researched at the library on how other immigrants dealt with English. It turned out many earlier immigrants would pick a movie star and watch his/her movie over and over to imitate their accents. I did something similar watching Cheers on TV, with the subtitles on and a dictionary constantly by my side. I listened repeatedly to the accent-correction tapes borrowed from the library. I bought an American idiom dictionary to familiarize myself with the slang terms.