I studied Chinese full time for three years before beginning work in Beijing. I had enough to eventually get me translating for technology seminars and documents. Now I can give half my lecture in Chinese.
I never felt satisfied however. How can you? My old teacher C.C. Sun, used to point out that you could study just Confucius for sixty years and still never claim claim to have read everything. On the other hand China has such a massive corpus of literature that for an educated Chinese, everything has been written, said, or painted. It’s simply not possible to be original.
The good thing is that I can carry out my life principle of 活到老,学到老。I intend to continue studying as long as I live. I have only two years to go before I should automatically do the right thing without thinking about it according to the Master. I look forward to that.