About
Have passport will travel. My resume
About a year ago, I became interested in living in China. Exactly why, is a more complicated question but it included an interest in the history and culture, but also the language.
My first thought like most westerners is, it’s impossible to learn and it would take a lifetime. Certainly Chinese is different from any western language. Characters take the place of our alphabet and words but in a completely unique way. Without doubt learning Chinese would be an awesome task. Also, I was not born with an innate talent for languages. But because I am very visual I thought that I might be good at learning the meaning of the characters.
I did get a brief introduction to learning Chinese from my friend Goldie. She showed me a few simple characters that were derived from pictographs. The sun, moon, man and woman each created a picture in my minds eye that connected to the character and made sense to me. Historically man has always been associated to the sun and woman to the moon so that was simple. Making these connections made me think that I could at least learn some of the basics. Goldie convinced me that if I wanted to I could learn 500 characters by Christmas.
It’s not quite that simple but it did give me a place to start. The first thing I did was to go to the library and see what I could find that would be helpful. I came back with a great book, 250 essential Chinese characters.
The first few pages talked about the different strokes that are used to create a character. This was helpful for a variety of reasons. The main thing it did was to help me to see the character through its component parts. Instead of just seeing lines going off in all directions.
As complicated as a simple character looks the more you look the more complicated it gets. In a way that’s a good thing. Your mind gets to create all these different associations with it and these help you remember. The kind of strokes, the order they are written in, the sound associated with it written in pinyin (phonetic translation of the characters developed by the Russians) the story associated with the character and finally the meaning.
The book gave me all of that and at the end of each chapter was an exercise. The problem was that the exercises in the book used characters I hadn’t studied so they made no sense to me.
What I would like to do with this website is very simple, start out with those first 250 characters, their meaning, the pinyin, sound files of the pronunciation, then add vocabulary words and phrases using only those characters.
It is my hope that this site can be a learning tool for myself and any other beginners interested in learning Chinese.