Handwriting practice!!! Six months after I painstakingly copied my first radicals!
This is huge for me because I was frustrated and intimidated by characters for so long - I started learning Chinese as I was living in China and got up to about HKS4 by being yelled at by kindergarters and approached by curious people in parks: the best way to learn. And I maintain that it's responsible entirely for my comparative strength in speaking and listening - I didn't know much vocab, but what I knew I could express fluidly and with reasonably good intonation. I ended up internalising a lot of things like sentence structure and grammar (I didn't know there were THREE KINDS of 'de' particle until this March lmao, but apparently I use it in the right places) which has been hugely helpful.
I was completely illiterate. And when I say completely I do mean completely. I could recognise maybe ten characters but couldn't write more than 一二三，十 and 个. I couldn't even recognise the character for 我. As a linguistics student and someone who is fascinated by languages this complete lack of knowledge seems weird. But as an eighteen year old in a foreign country for six months with limited access to the internet because my VPN would always be unbearably slow, and no ability to read Chinese at all to search for language schools, and spoken Chinese that was great at telling children to sit properly and stop tipping their water on the floor and little else, I was completely on my own. I was in a second tier city and I couldn't find any English language bookshops, let alone ones that taught Chinese in English. I didn't know a single non-Chinese person, and only three that spoke English. So I went out and muddled my way through the best I could and ended up probably getting a better education in the overlay of tone and intonation than any school could have taught me. I had to ask ACTUAL PEOPLE for directions because at the time Baidu maps didn't have pinyin in the city where I was living. And I had to understand what they said otherwise I was screwed (until I found the next friendly person).
I did, however, remain functionally useless in society.
And so when I got back to the UK I was determined to rectify this. Find a teacher! Characters look so interesting!! But I couldn't find a teacher that was able to deal with the discrepancy between my reading and writing and speaking and listening, never mind the fact that I didn't know why I put a random 'de' particle there, it just sounded better. At the time I wasn't reaaaally in a fabulous place and so self study was beyond me.
But! Fast forward to The Untamed!! I started watching it as a vague hand-wavey approximation at getting some Chinese listening in my daily life and also because I'd heard it was possibly gay and that is always going to be appealing because I am a simple woman who enjoys representation.
AND THEN. And then I got very quickly obsessed. Which was a) amazing because I hadn't actually '' '' 'had an interest' '' '' in anything in a ridiculously long time (if ya know ya know) and b) because it made me realise: HOW can I possibly read the novel and the subs and ACTUALLY understand the content without learning to read??
So I bought Skritter and sat down for a month or so doing the radicals. Then I enrolled in an online semester with a school, using the money I'd otherwise be paying for rent at uni that I'd earned through teaching. And we did four hours every day for eighteen weeks. And every hour outside of class was spent either mass consuming Content (I have watched this show more than I'd like to admit) or writing down words from the audio drama or looking up literary structures that I HAD NO IDEA HOW EPIC THEY WERE. BECAUSE THEY ARE SO COOL AND I MUST LEARN CLASSICAL CHINESE AT ALL COSTS.
And what I learned was that I just had to find a way that worked for me: I like looking at things from a systematic and historical perspective, so I sat down and learnt a large number of phonetic components, meaning components and worked out how they could change with sound changes and so on, and how they often appeared, which ones were productive in forming new characters and which ones less so. I still don't know a huge number of characters, maybe 2500 or so, but most importantly with this framework I can see new words I don't know and more often than not guess the pronunciation if they're the right type of characters. I also find that remembering them (to read, not write) is approximately a bazillion times quicker. So if you're struggling with characters (as I did like ten times before I finally found this approach) try looking at how they're composed!! Try going down rabbit holes and seeing how predictable a certain element makes the pronunciation! It also helped me to realise that handwriting is fun, and I don't have the goal of being able to write every single character I can read - that's just not a good use of my time. But it helps me relax and if I'm a bit dissociated or anxious or whatever and I want to do SOMETHING but can't study it's a great exercise.
And now I have enrolled to audit a second year course at my uni in translation and writing Chinese, as well as reading modern Chinese literature. I have ALSO purchased a textbook that will help me learn Classical Chinese alongside Tang dynasty poetry. I am well aware that this is a hard slog lmao, especially without a teacher, but it's just so immensely cool.
Moral of the story: umm. Things are better now?? And that's good? And that if something doesn't work at one time doesn't mean it won't work later down the line, and don't beat yourself up about it?
And also, of course, that Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji are the best teachers.
dailybridgerton
romaincrisis
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dededos
