Update 2: Back to Pre-School

What the Frick-Frack-Paddy-Whack-Diddly-Dack is a Twenty?
I have discovered something truly great about this blog: it's a great way for me to procrastinate, while still feeling like I'm getting something done. And while we're on the topic of my admirable study habits, I'd like to share a story my parents told me when I was younger:

Chinese numbers 0-9

One day, a boy went to school. There at school, the students were learning how to write numbers. The teacher started with the character for one (yī). It is, as you will observe, a single line: 一. Then, the teacher moved on to two (èr). It was two lines: 二. Next, the teacher taught them how to write three (sān). As the boy predicted, it was three lines: 三. After seeing this, the boy got up and said, "Well, I know how to write numbers now!" And promptly went home. After staying out of school, for a few days, the boy decided to return. That day, the students were taking a test on how to write numbers. The boy thought it would be easy - until the teacher asked them to write "one thousand" in Chinese! 

This week's practice characters included the numbers one through ten, which I luckily already knew. The nice thing about Chinese numbers is that, once you know one through ten, you know all of them! Here's how it works: numbers larger than ten are kind of like "compounds". You break them up into the different parts of the number. For example, the number twenty-three is 二十三 - both written and pronounced "two ten three". Once you get to 100 and larger numbers, you use different characters (they're not based around ten anymore), but this makes Chinese counting a lot simpler than English (how are we supposed to know that "twenty" is two tens??). Malcolm Gladwell actually proposes in his book Outliers that the simplicity is part of the reason why Chinese students score so well on math tests - because they have an easier time counting in early childhood.

The Struggle is Real
This week's characters were a bit harder than the previous week's - mostly because they're building in difficulty. By difficulty, I mean the obscurity of the word. Not that I'm learning how to write "enigma" or "relentless" in Chinese, but that these characters aren't the most obvious ones that I still remember from Chinese school. In other words, I didn't recognize most of these characters (compared to last week, when I did recognize a good number of them). This was a little challenging, but I employed the help of Dani, who apparently is a lot more creative than I am (honestly, who knew?). I would go through my flashcards with her, and if I was stuck on a word, she would usually help me find some sort of visual cue to help me remember it. For example, I was stuck on the word kè (guest) for a really long time. I eventually realized that the character 客 had a little kǒu (口) on the bottom. This character by itself can mean mouth or opening. And I thought to myself - you would open your home to a guest, so it makes sense that there's an opening in the character for guest. I have no idea if that was intentional, but now I never forget it!

I've also been struggling with proportions. If you've seen my handwriting in real life, you'll know that

Some grids for Chinese practice

I usually don't struggle with making it look nice. That is, when I write in English. Catelyn said to me a little bit before I even knew this would be my genius project, "I bet your handwriting in Chinese would look really nice." Ha. You were so wrong. Sometimes, I write my characters really tiny and compact - a bit more like my handwriting in English. Other times, I write the characters so big they look like a toddler's handwriting. Part of the problem may be that I write on plain paper without any grids or lines. Sometimes, Chinese practice sheets come with little dotted lines within the boxes, so students can write the strokes in the right positions and in proportion. To test my theory, I wrote a few characters on graph paper, which you can see below. It reminded me of the long strips of paper we'd get in elementary school to practice our handwriting - fun fact: I would always get compliments from my elementary school teachers on my handwriting! Anyway, I think the graph paper helped me regulate the overall size, but the grid itself was probably too small for me to write some of the more complicated characters.

Practicing on graph paper

Within the characters themselves, I also struggle with proportions. Chinese characters are made of individual little elements. Sometimes, I would write these elements too big or too small in comparison with the others and end up with a really deformed looking character. Speaking of these elements, now would be a good time to introduce what the actual topic of my blog post is about:

That's Totally Radical, Bro
Believe it or not, Chinese radicals are actually automated buttons you can attach to a skateboard, and they say "bruh" every time you do something totally gnarly.

I'm sorry, that's not actually what they are, and the day someone invents that is the day I enter permanent hibernation underneath Earth's crust. Chinese radicals are called 部首 (bù shǒu), literally "section header". Many Chinese dictionaries come with an index for radicals, and the most commonly accepted table includes 214 radicals (again, why would Chinese ever be easy?). You can think of radicals like prefixes or suffixes: they're often attached to or appear on Chinese characters, and they can sometimes hint at the meaning of a character. Radicals can appear on the top, bottom, left, right, or in the middle of characters. They can make learning Chinese simpler, but I wouldn't recommend trying to memorize all of them. You're better off just noticing when they appear and making connections.

If you've ever had nightmares about verb tables, this is way scarier. For definitions, check out this website

I'm not going to try and explain all of these, but I'll show you how they can be used. 艹 is a radical meaning "grass". It appears at the top of characters. Although it means "grass", I think of it more of as "nature" radical. As you can see, it appears in the character for flower 花 (huā), tea 茶 (chá), and the word grass itself 草 (cǎo). Some radicals are more common than others, and some don't really even have meaning - they're just common reoccurring elements. But radicals can be really useful and, to someone learning a pictorial language, they provide a little method to the madness.

Returning to the Struggle
I also need to show you the practice sentences I wrote this week. As I learn more words, I'm getting excited because I can finally express my thoughts on paper, instead of solely verbally.

1. Girls learn English.
2. Your name is...
3. I sit on the ground.
4. He lives in the courtyard.
5. Your child is a foreigner. (Note: "foreigner" has some negative/insulting connotations in English; this isn't the case in Chinese.)
6. I ask you.
7. This painting is very expensive.

Some of these sentences are a bit awkward in Chinese because I haven't learned how to write some of the nonsense phrases that make things sound more natural. For now, I'm trying to use new vocabulary, but also mix in words that I learned last week.

Also, I should tell you that, on my flashcards, I've been putting the pinyin (phonetic version of the characters, coming later in a blog post) and German translations of the word. Usually, I can recognize the character with just the pinyin, but I like putting the German to exercise all my language skills. Interestingly, I had the word 宿 (sù) this week. It means "to stay overnight". Obviously, we don't have a single-word English translation for this....but the German verb übernachten is a perfect translation. Funny how languages work, right?

There is one more thing I want to show you (before we get to the cute animals...): Chinese cursive! Most people only use cursive as a sort of shorthand, or just for aesthetic design purposes. I know I'm not exactly literate in Chinese, but I can hardly read it. Imagine your doctor writing in that!

Regular writing (left) vs. Cursive (right)

As promised, here's your cute animal of the week.

- Jess

Resources

• thechinesesymbol
• yellowbridge
• Centre for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language at the University of Oxford
• activityvillage
• chinese-learner

Meanderings: 新年快乐!

Hello, readers!

As you may have noticed, my blog posts are usually rather lengthy...that's because I have a lot of ideas throughout the week, and I save them up to write in one cumulative blog post. I've seen some of my friends do these types of posts, so I'm going to start a specific category for all my rambling, slightly off-topic, meandering thoughts. (Honestly, I'm so clever. I'm like...a Renaissance man...)

If you can read the title, you may have already guessed what this post is about. Chinese New Year starts tomorrow! This year is the year of the sheep (羊). I say "starts" because Chinese New Year is a large celebration in China, lasting about two weeks. People get time off from work and school to celebrate with their families. In fact, some call this time of year the world's largest "human migration" because so many people take public transportation or fly home to celebrate. You may also lion parades at the beginning of Chinese New Year, and a televised event, the New Year's Gala, similar to the United States' Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve (what a mouthful). On the whole, Chinese New Year is usually a much bigger celebration than the regular calendar New Year. Families, government officials, stores, airlines, and more all build up to the holiday with decorations, speeches, and special merchandise.

A woman hands a red envelope to a lion dancer

The Chinese Zodiac

In celebration of Chinese New Year, here are some common Chinese phrases or terms you may use during the holiday:

• 新年快乐 - (xīnnián kuàilè) happy new year!
• 恭喜发财 - (gōngxǐ fācái) another way to say happy new year. It's often written as gong hay fat choy, which is the Cantonese pronunciation. I'll have more coming about the different dialects of Chinese in a later post.
• 羊 - (yáng) sheep. The "years" are based off of the Chinese zodiac, which you can read more about here.
• 红包 - (hóngbāo) red envelope. Parents and grandparents often give brand new money, packaged in red envelopes, to younger children. (This was a good source of income in my childhood years. Oh to be young.)
• 身体健康 - (shēntǐ jiànkāng) good health to you - while the regular New Year's celebration in America is typically just a fun celebration (maybe with a few resolutions involved), Chinese New Year traditionally places a lot of emphasis on values like health, good fortune, and prosperity.

(There were so many gorgeous New Year graphics. Here's the cutest!)

1: Weekly Comments

• Allison
• Catelyn
• Josh

Update 1: Let's Get Down to Business

The Formalities
In my last post, I gave you a preview of which topics I'd discuss each week, but I'd like to change that. The new schedule is below:

• Week 1: Building blocks
• Week 2: Stroke order
• Week 3: Radicals
• Week 4: Simplified/Traditional
• Week 5: Pinyin
• Week 6: Dialects

Getting Started
If you know me in real life, you may understand that I am...quite the organizer. Ever since I witnessed Pepper Potts in the Iron Man movies, I told myself I could be a personal assistant, if all else failed. Anyway, I knew I would need plenty of papers and flash cards for this project, so I dedicated a folder to it. It's my baby, and it's beautiful. You can see it below. In the upper left is my progress tracker. Every day I work on my project, I color in a progress bar. (I'm very extrinsically motivated - it was either this, or stickers.) Then, on the right, I have my flashcards binder-clipped to the folder. In this first week, the binder clip was already straining, so I'm going to have to swap this out every week. On the lower left is my little calendar. I've planned out when I need to finish each set of 50 characters, as well as when I'm going to start working on my TEDtalk. Also, I cross off each day we get closer to the final product. Then, on the lower right is one of my favorite motivational quotes. I can't honestly justify the amount of time I spent making it, but it makes me happy every time I open the folder.

Let's Get Down to Business...

1/7 practice sheets from this week

I had a pretty straightforward process for learning the first fifty characters. First, I would write out the phonetic spelling of each character (also known as pinyin, which I'll be covering later), complete with the tones (also coming later). Because I know how to speak Chinese, this was my way of "translating". I was associating the written words with the spoken words I already knew. Then, I would practice writing the actual character. As you can see in the practice sheets, there are multiple spaces, where I would repeat the character over and over again. I realized halfway through that perhaps those spaces were for stroke order - which leads me to the topic of the week.

Stroke Order
I mentioned in last week's post that Chinese was a pictorial language. Each character is, in simplest terms, a picture. Let's look at a picture of a house, shall we?

To draw this house, one could go about it many ways. You could start with the basic outline and then fill in the details. Or you could draw the doors and windows first and then add the outline. You could draw from the ground up, or the sky down. If you wanted to start on the right side and continue to the left, or vice versa, you could. This house is a picture, and Chinese is made up of pictures. Like you could draw a house different ways, you could write Chinese characters different ways, right? No. (Why would Chinese ever be that easy? Silly reader.)

Like a house is made of straight lines, diagonal lines, curves, and dots, Chinese characters are made of different strokes. There are many different types of strokes, but here are the basics:

These are essentially the basic components that structure each character. These strokes have to be written in a certain direction (as the chart shows). For example, let's say you wanted to write a héng, a horizontal stroke. You can only write this stroke from left to right, never right to left. Building on this idea, each Chinese character is written with the strokes in a specific order. Again, these can never be written in a different order. In the end, you could produce the same result, if you used a different order. But a standard stroke order is actually more conducive to memorizing characters and also produces a certain aesthetic look. The rules for stroke order are as follows:

1. Top to bottom: components on the top are written before components on the bottom. 
2. Left to right: left-most components are written before components on the right.
3. Horizontal before vertical: some characters are separated or "crossed" with horizontal or diagonal strokes. These horizontal strokes are written before vertical ones. 
4. Diagonals right-to-left before diagonals left-to-right: it was pretty simple before this one, right? Don't worry, it's a lot simpler in visual form. The character 人 (person) is written with two diagonal strokes. Both start at the top, in the center. One goes to the left, and the other goes to the right. The right-to-left diagonal stroke comes before the left-to-right.
5. Outside before inside: some characters include components enclosed in others. The strokes on the outside go before the ones on the inside.
6. Inside before bottom enclosing: an extension of the previous rule. If a component is enclosed in a character, it's written before the final enclosing stroke. 
7. Center verticals before outside "wings": some characters have outside "wings" that flank a center vertical stroke. These are written last. 
8. Cutting strokes last: some characters may have a vertical stroke that "cuts" through other components. these are written last. 
9. Left vertical before enclosing: again, with enclosing characters, the leftmost vertical stroke is written first. 
10. Top/upper-left dots first: pretty self-explanatory
11. Inside/upper-right dots last: pretty self-explanatory

Examples of the rules

Back to Business
Returning back to my actual process of learning, I remembered most of these stroke order rules from my early days in hell Chinese school. In the instance that I didn't remember, the website chinese-tools was helpful in providing stroke order. Additionally, the website also has English-Chinese translations and vice versa. Finally, although every language teacher is clutching their chest in pain, Google Translate was also pretty helpful. The app on my phone has an option where I can just write the character - a much simpler method than googling pinyin or switching between various keyboards on my phone/computer.

I also promised that I would write a few practice sentences in Chinese, and here they are! Translations:

1. How are you?
2. I am her mother.
3. My brother's teacher is very good.
4. Our guests drink tea.
5. My father's Chinese book is mine.
6. Little brother is not an adult.
7. Thank you all.
8. He is looking at the map.

I was surprised with how much I could actually write. I take German at school, and it took me years to construct sentences like #3 or #5. As I was writing these, I was reminded of both the complexity and simplicity of Chinese. You may notice that I repeat a certain character in many of these sentences - 的(de). In English, one could translate this to "of". Interestingly, Chinese has no possessive case. In English, we can "my teacher's book" or "Julia's house". A literal translation of the same phrase in Chinese would be "teacher of book" or "Julia of house". This construction is called genitive case (and it's used a lot in German, less so in English). Although it may seem strange to English speakers, use of "de" for genitive in Chinese makes writing easiser. I didn't learn genitive case until two years into German. Another interesting thing to note: the spoken word "ta" in Chinese means both "he" and "she". However, the written word distinguishes between the two. This is why some Chinese speakers confuse "he" and "she"! (Also, as I learn Chinese, I lament more and more the lack of 2nd person plural in English. It seems common in other languages, so what happened to English?) The last thing I wanted to address was the specifics of familial terms. If you look at sentences #3 and #6, I refer to a "brother" in both. However, I used completely different words. In Chinese, one distinguishes between an older brother (哥哥) and a younger brother (弟弟). This applies to sisters, as well. In fact, Chinese has so many different terms for family members - we distinguish between older/younger and paternal/maternal.

I'm sorry this post got so long. It seems I have a habit of writing long blog posts. Last year, I would reward readers with cat gifs for sticking through long posts...maybe I should continue the tradition? (This is a vine, not a gif, but it's worth it)


- Jess

Resources

• chinese-tools
• thechinesesymbol
• archchinese
• previous knowledge of English, German, and Chinese

0: Weekly Comments

My comments for this cycle:

• Hanna
• Allison
• Alycia

Update 0: 大家好!

Hello everyone!

My name is Jess, and this blog is meant to document a six-week process through which I teach myself 300 Chinese characters - and, no, I don't regret this. Yet.

got Chinese?

For those of you who don't know, I am Chinese. Luckily, I already have some background "native" knowledge in the language, which gives me an advantage over completely unfamiliar learners. That being said, I don't need to start at the most basic of building blocks - simple words like 大，小，火， 上，etc. These building blocks are useful, though. This is the theory the theory of one Chinese-learning website, Chineasy.

Building Blocks + Pictorials
Chineasy begins its Chinese lessons starting with its building blocks. These are simple characters that often appear in other characters. For example, this is the character for fire (huǒ)

Building block for "fire" from Chineasy

And here is the character for flames (yàn). As you can see, it's a bunch of little "fires" stacked on top of each other.

"Flames" from Chineasy

This makes it a little easier to learn some Chinese characters, but the visual cues can only tell you so much. If I didn't know the word above was "flames", I could guess that it was related to fire. Beyond that, I wouldn't be able to say. In English, the Latin alphabet gives speakers an advantage. The word "antidisestablishmentarianism" is a mouthful. But if speakers dissect the prefixes and suffixes, they know that it has to do with getting rid of something. Therefore, Chinese learners need to use rote memorization to learn most of their characters.

Motivation

So, we've established that reading and writing Chinese is a bit of a challenge. And I already know how to speak and understand the language so...why learn more? The truth is, I've always felt a little estranged from my family members. Growing up in America has forced me to reconcile two cultures that are sometimes completely incompatible - even the littlest things remind me that I'm not quite American. When I go over to a friend's house for dinner, I stop and consider whether I should take off my shoes, and then I eat a meal without a bowl of rice. Despite this, I speak English better than Chinese; I use a fork more often than chopsticks; and I dress in American clothing. As all my relatives in China say, I'm American - but not quite. Learning how to read and write Chinese will hopefully bring me closer to my family and culture. After all, I'd like to actually write a birthday card to my grandparents, or read a menu in Chinatown every now and then.

Measuring Achievement & Resources

Each week, my blog post will feature a different post about an aspect of the Chinese language:

• Week 1: Building blocks
• Week 2: Radicals
• Week 3: Simplified/Traditional
• Week 4: Pinyin & Tones
• Week 5: Dialects
• Week 6: None

Scallion pancakes (葱油饼) - yum!

Along with these bits of information, I will also be documenting my progress. These are the progress sheets I plan on using to practice writing. I'll scan a few of the sheets each week and upload them for you to see. Additionally, I plan on writing a few sentences to actually apply my knowledge (those will be uploaded too). I don't have specific goals regarding the characters, as they are difficult to divide into different "levels". Some are more complex to write than others, but they all correspond to certain words, and it takes the same amount of effort to learn and memorize them. As far as the sentences, I will only be looking into grammatical structure minimally, given that I already speak the language. I just hope that the sentences I write will eventually become more detailed/precise as I learn more words. My plan is to work up to the final product: a written recipe for scallion pancakes (and my TEDtalk may also feature the actual dish...). I'm also grateful for my family - I'm surrounded by native speakers who are probably more excited than I am that I'm finally taking the time to learn some Chinese.

Goal

When this project is over, I will have learned 300 Chinese characters. Additionally, I hope to write a recipe for scallion pancakes, or 葱油饼. But, most importantly, I will have a deeper connection to my family and culture. According to some, learning Chinese is a lifelong effort - the BBC estimates that the average Chinese person will know around 8,000 characters, and one needs 2,000 to 3,000 to read a newspaper article. Hopefully, this beginning will motivate me to continue my pursuit later.

I already have this week's practice worksheets printed out. Now I'm off to practice and do English homework!

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Resources

• BBC
• Chineasy
• Practice sheets