I enjoy learning languages. Some examples of languages I played with were Spanish, German, Esperanto.. I even dabbed into Hebrew, and ancient Greek.
I've made a few observations about my language learning:
- Synthetic languages, like German or Russian are harder for me to remember, due to the memorization of the long words and spelling involved.
- I pick up how to recognize characters relatively quickly. For example, I learned how to recognize Hebrew script in about a day. Same with Greek letters.
These two points made me interested in Chinese.
Chinese is an
Analytic language, and involves recognition of lots and lots of characters.
Instead of spelling, you're drawing a picture.
And so, two weeks ago I embarked on trying to learn Chinese... And quickly, I ran into problems.
The main reason I decide to try out Chinese, was because I think I can pick up reading characters quickly.
Yet, most of the time learning tools are built to value
speaking more important than
reading/writing.
The Chinese character is almost looked at as an
inconvenience, due to it being difficult to type using Chinese characters online.
With focus on speaking more than reading/writing, a lot of words are taught as a combination of multiple Chinese characters, without breaking down what each character means.
For example, they may teach 名字 means "First Name", without explaining what does 名 or 字 mean.
And just to let you know, neither 名 nor 字 means "First" or "Given" or "Nick".
As someone trying to read and write each character, this makes it very difficult to learn.
And so, I came up with my own system to learn these.
Using various language learning tools, I build up a list of new vocabulary words per subject.
I then load up the vocabulary into
quizlet.
I break up the subject into two sections: Learning the characters independently, and then combining the characters together to form new words.
Finally, and most importantly, I open the quizlet app on my phone.
Writing in Chinese on the phone is the best part.
You can configure your phone to write in Chinese... Not by typing, but by literally drawing each character with your finger.
Not only did writing in Chinese characters help me recognize them easily, but it also taught me about the correct stroke order that you're supposed to write in.
Through trial and error, I got good at it. And Android's AI got better at recognizing my hand writing.
I've made my study sets available to the public. They can be accessed here:
https://quizlet.com/litehacker
The
desktop version of quizlet is a little slow/bugging, but the phone app
version is amazing. I highly recommend opening it on the phone and
configuring the chinese language input to be in written form.
Start with Unit 1, and keep going up in numbers. For each unit "A" contains the individual characters, while units with "B" contains a combination of those characters. This makes the transition to learning more complicated character combinations much more simple.
I'm in the process of adding more and more vocabulary.
The most difficult problem with Chinese is that frequently words are taught without breaking down the characters.
Most of my time and effort is spending time deciphering what each character individually means.
Once I have done the research, I add them to the list.
I hope in the future to be able to read Chinese websites, and find out what that closed off side of the world is all about.
