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shyshyshilohso, i’ve been teaching myself to read mandarin.
this isn’t, like, new, because as i’ve mentioned in previous dw posts, i’ve been trying to learn and/or teach myself on-and-off for so many years now. i was taught simplified characters in my high school chinese classes. i’ve tried duolingo and dot languages. i’ve attempted just straight-up buckling down and memorizing a bunch of characters.
these didn’t work, for a variety of reasons. obviously the formal education back in high school was the most effective, but simplified characters aren’t much use to me as a taiwanese person and i haven’t been in high school for a long time, and the self-learning always fell flat because i was busy or lazy or just couldn’t make it stick.
but earlier this summer, i was back in taiwan visiting family, and several things happened that made me realize very, very acutely: there are people i love who aren’t going to be around forever, and there’s only so much time i have before it’s too late. i can’t always be asking my relatives “what does that say?” and waiting for them to translate for me. i need to be able to, like, navigate roads and grocery stores and hospital buildings like the fullass adult person that i am.
hence, this. my hashtag motivational mandarin-learning journey.
the thing that’s made using existing frameworks hard for me is that i’m in a… unique, i guess, situation when it comes to learning. i don’t really have any problems with speaking/listening. i am certainly not confused by tones or pronunciation, and sentence structure comes naturally to me. my vocab’s not big, and it’s unbalanced in certain funny ways (ex: not a lot of scientific vocab. lots of religious vocab, because growing up going to a mandarin-speaking church is one hell of a drug) but it’s certainly more than you’d cover in even four years of college-level education. the only thing i really need to focus on is being able to read, and in specific, i need to be able to read traditional characters.
you would think that finding an app or community class or something that allows you to skip the speaking/listening parts while focusing on reading, while teaching traditional characters, while also not being boring as fuck, would be easy. spoiler alert, it’s not.
i’m just kidding — that list of demands is completely insane. of course nothing like that exists that can cater to my very particular set of needs. i don’t know why it didn’t occur to me earlier that i needed to develop my own regimen, but, well. better late than never.
here’s the method: at a very, very base level, i teach myself 7-10 new characters every day. sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, but that’s the target range.
and the way i get those characters, obviously, is from reading children’s picture books.
the thing about taiwanese picture books is that each character is annotated with symbols called zhuyin. this is the transliteration system used in taiwan (as opposed to, say, the hanyu pinyin that is used in china) (not the same as romanization systems, btw), and it’s what kids learn so that they can read characters and start recognizing them (it’s also how people type on keyboards in taiwan). there are 37 zhuyin symbols used in the modern day, and so i began by teaching myself all of them so that i could read at the level of a literal kindergartener.
now, every morning, i read pages of a children’s book until i get my target range of new characters, and then i make anki flashcards of them. on one side is the character itself, and on the other is its zhuyin and definition. i make cards in both a “recognition” (providing the character, and testing if i remember its sound and meaning) and “recall” (providing the definition/zhuyin, and writing the character) deck. and then every night, i run through my flashcards. as of the time of writing, i’ve learned 463 new characters.
this method has been helpful because i get the context that words appear in, and i’m also motivated by ✨getting to read the story✨. (not that this is the most advanced of literature — i recently finished reading four books by the same guy, and they were, in order, about a crocodile that liked to eat veggies, a tailor who made clothes for animals, a cow that liked to eat fruit, and an architect who made houses for animals. points for thematic consistency, i guess.)
(i’ve also realized that being able to condense this into a couple paragraphs makes it seem a lot simpler than it is and has been. i mean, it’s not torture or anything, but i am needing to balance a lot of things around it and be really diligent about making it a habit. lmao)
but this method also has its flaws. not all of the characters i’ve learned are of much practical use. like, i’ve learned a Lot of onomatopoeia…
and anyway, i mean, is this really the most effective way to do this? am i actually on my way to becoming fully fluent or am i just learning how to write “giraffe”? and should i, just about two months into this crazy fucking project, be letting fear be my greatest motivator?
idk. still, they say if it works, it’s not stupid, and this is the only thing that has worked for me for this long. i get so excited when i walk around the house or go to the asian supermarket and i can now read more signs and packages than ever before. i’m also starting to run through all the children’s books that i own, and i’ve moved onto grabbing characters from wherever i see them. snack bags, celebrities’ names, all of it. i think letting myself not be so discerning or proud about what exactly i learn has also been key in keeping the momentum going. knowledge is everywhere. i don’t consider myself to be especially smart or talented, but this is something i’m committed to working hard at, and i am going to brute force my way into literacy if that’s what it takes.
that said, i am also, for the future, strongly considering taking my characters from hsk vocab lists until i finish those, and then going right back to my silly ones so that i can have a more, well, useful set of characters in my toolkit. knowing “phoenix” and “conical bamboo/straw hat” are fun, but i still can only read bits and pieces of things that aren’t children’s books, and i think one of those is maybe of a higher priority.
bonus section that i didn’t know where else to put! characters that i like writing:
characters that i don’t like writing:
in any case this is what i’m up to these days. besides writing tens of thousands of words for a kpop rpf f1 au. shoutout to self-improvement — it only took existential + familial dread and becoming briefly unemployed for this to happen!!
this isn’t, like, new, because as i’ve mentioned in previous dw posts, i’ve been trying to learn and/or teach myself on-and-off for so many years now. i was taught simplified characters in my high school chinese classes. i’ve tried duolingo and dot languages. i’ve attempted just straight-up buckling down and memorizing a bunch of characters.
these didn’t work, for a variety of reasons. obviously the formal education back in high school was the most effective, but simplified characters aren’t much use to me as a taiwanese person and i haven’t been in high school for a long time, and the self-learning always fell flat because i was busy or lazy or just couldn’t make it stick.
but earlier this summer, i was back in taiwan visiting family, and several things happened that made me realize very, very acutely: there are people i love who aren’t going to be around forever, and there’s only so much time i have before it’s too late. i can’t always be asking my relatives “what does that say?” and waiting for them to translate for me. i need to be able to, like, navigate roads and grocery stores and hospital buildings like the fullass adult person that i am.
hence, this. my hashtag motivational mandarin-learning journey.
the thing that’s made using existing frameworks hard for me is that i’m in a… unique, i guess, situation when it comes to learning. i don’t really have any problems with speaking/listening. i am certainly not confused by tones or pronunciation, and sentence structure comes naturally to me. my vocab’s not big, and it’s unbalanced in certain funny ways (ex: not a lot of scientific vocab. lots of religious vocab, because growing up going to a mandarin-speaking church is one hell of a drug) but it’s certainly more than you’d cover in even four years of college-level education. the only thing i really need to focus on is being able to read, and in specific, i need to be able to read traditional characters.
you would think that finding an app or community class or something that allows you to skip the speaking/listening parts while focusing on reading, while teaching traditional characters, while also not being boring as fuck, would be easy. spoiler alert, it’s not.
i’m just kidding — that list of demands is completely insane. of course nothing like that exists that can cater to my very particular set of needs. i don’t know why it didn’t occur to me earlier that i needed to develop my own regimen, but, well. better late than never.
here’s the method: at a very, very base level, i teach myself 7-10 new characters every day. sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, but that’s the target range.
and the way i get those characters, obviously, is from reading children’s picture books.
the thing about taiwanese picture books is that each character is annotated with symbols called zhuyin. this is the transliteration system used in taiwan (as opposed to, say, the hanyu pinyin that is used in china) (not the same as romanization systems, btw), and it’s what kids learn so that they can read characters and start recognizing them (it’s also how people type on keyboards in taiwan). there are 37 zhuyin symbols used in the modern day, and so i began by teaching myself all of them so that i could read at the level of a literal kindergartener.
now, every morning, i read pages of a children’s book until i get my target range of new characters, and then i make anki flashcards of them. on one side is the character itself, and on the other is its zhuyin and definition. i make cards in both a “recognition” (providing the character, and testing if i remember its sound and meaning) and “recall” (providing the definition/zhuyin, and writing the character) deck. and then every night, i run through my flashcards. as of the time of writing, i’ve learned 463 new characters.
this method has been helpful because i get the context that words appear in, and i’m also motivated by ✨getting to read the story✨. (not that this is the most advanced of literature — i recently finished reading four books by the same guy, and they were, in order, about a crocodile that liked to eat veggies, a tailor who made clothes for animals, a cow that liked to eat fruit, and an architect who made houses for animals. points for thematic consistency, i guess.)
(i’ve also realized that being able to condense this into a couple paragraphs makes it seem a lot simpler than it is and has been. i mean, it’s not torture or anything, but i am needing to balance a lot of things around it and be really diligent about making it a habit. lmao)
but this method also has its flaws. not all of the characters i’ve learned are of much practical use. like, i’ve learned a Lot of onomatopoeia…
and anyway, i mean, is this really the most effective way to do this? am i actually on my way to becoming fully fluent or am i just learning how to write “giraffe”? and should i, just about two months into this crazy fucking project, be letting fear be my greatest motivator?
idk. still, they say if it works, it’s not stupid, and this is the only thing that has worked for me for this long. i get so excited when i walk around the house or go to the asian supermarket and i can now read more signs and packages than ever before. i’m also starting to run through all the children’s books that i own, and i’ve moved onto grabbing characters from wherever i see them. snack bags, celebrities’ names, all of it. i think letting myself not be so discerning or proud about what exactly i learn has also been key in keeping the momentum going. knowledge is everywhere. i don’t consider myself to be especially smart or talented, but this is something i’m committed to working hard at, and i am going to brute force my way into literacy if that’s what it takes.
that said, i am also, for the future, strongly considering taking my characters from hsk vocab lists until i finish those, and then going right back to my silly ones so that i can have a more, well, useful set of characters in my toolkit. knowing “phoenix” and “conical bamboo/straw hat” are fun, but i still can only read bits and pieces of things that aren’t children’s books, and i think one of those is maybe of a higher priority.
bonus section that i didn’t know where else to put! characters that i like writing:
- 鱷 — used in 鱷魚, meaning “crocodile” or “alligator”. so fun. i love the little grid-like set of strokes
- 滿 — meaning “satisfied” or “full”. it is very amusing to me that the character with this meaning contains the water radical… like yeah you would associate fullness and wetness, wouldn’t you
- 鬆 — meaning “beard”. i just like that it’s broken up into four neat quadrants, very satisfying to write
characters that i don’t like writing:
- 幫 — meaning “to help/assist”. cannot for the life of me write this without it becoming so vertically long
- 鑽 — meaning “to drill/bore”, or “diamond/jewel”. always end up running out of room for the 貝, it’s annoying
- 龜 — used in 烏龜, meaning “turtle”. i cannot stress this enough: FUCK THIS GUY
in any case this is what i’m up to these days. besides writing tens of thousands of words for a kpop rpf f1 au. shoutout to self-improvement — it only took existential + familial dread and becoming briefly unemployed for this to happen!!