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