For some Westerners, learning Chinese is an affair of the heart, undertaken to please Chinese girlfriends or boyfriends.
But for Nikko Asset Management Asia head Blair Pickerell, it was a call of duty rather than devotion that got him started.
In his third year at university in 1978, Pickerell, then a fresh-faced 21-year-old, was selected by his professor to join a classroom of students in Taiwan to see if he could learn to read and write Chinese in three months.
The lanky American dutifully stood to greet his teacher every day with the other pupils in the class - some as young as eight years old - and joined in reciting Chinese poems and writing Chinese characters.
During this time, he lodged with an elderly woman in an area of Taipei where the locals spoke no English.
Pickerell's professor was testing a language theory based on the experience of young Chinese emigrants to the United States, some aged just eight years old, who picked up English within three months.
The professor surmised this was made possible because the children joined a class of English-speaking children and were 'immersed' in the language. 'My professor considered if an eight-year-old could do it, an adult could do it, too,' said Pickerell.