学中文

There are a multitude of reasons why I wanted to study Chinese. Being the language of the “workshop of the world” naturally offers many business opportunities, but I am more interested in the burgeoning fields of Integrated circuit (IC) R&D and software development. Planet Emacslife allows me to keep tabs on the goings-on in the Emacssphere, but I also want to be able to read Emacs China; so I figured it might be a good idea to be able to read Chinese.

Right now — after 1-2 months of quite intensive study — I am roughly at an HSK 2-3 level in writing and reading, however my listening and speaking skills are far worse. I can read slightly over 70% of average Chinese text.

I’ve been interested in learning Chinese for a few years now, but the greatest mental barrier was understanding how to go about actually learning. If I were to try and learn Russian I would naturally begin with quickly learning to read Cyrillic, but how should you learn Chinese? Should one try and master speaking Chinese and reading romanisations first, before memorising thousands of characters, or the other way around?

Really, neither is possible without the others. In general I have focused more on the written language than the spoken one. This is because Chinese is intimately connected with the written form, more so than the other Germanic languages I know¹. Not only do many words sound very similar (only differentiated by tone) but there is a very large number of homonyms — words that sound exactly the same. When only romanised text is available, especially when written without tonal markers, it is often impossible to tell what is written.

This means that knowing written characters, and their corresponding pronunciation, is critical to understanding spoken Chinese. Many times there is a lot of split-second guesswork involved, with some characters having many possible meanings beyond just having to remember what character is being said.

I decided to jump in the deep end immediately by travelling to China with practically no knowledge beforehand. In hindsight this was perhaps not the best idea, I spend much of the time learning the very basics, but it was certainly fun. Formally I was enrolled in a “Chinese for beginners” online course at Uppsala University but I did most of my studies outside of the confines of the course. It was however very useful as a way to motivate myself to actually study when abroad.

Most of my study was done through Hanly, a Chinese-learning app that pedagogically introduces new characters by showing how they are composed of other ones. To give an example: Early on in my studies I looked up how to write numbers in Chinese, and was pleasantly surprised at the numbers 1-3 (一, 二, 三) but equally afraid of the character for 0 (零) with its 13 strokes. But when I eventually learned it through Hanly it was in fact quite an easy character to learn, being composed of the character for rain (雨) and for order (令).

Hanly uses flashcards, an established technique for memorisation, paired with preprepared mnemonics and AI-generated artwork. These range from quite sensible (three people 人 are a crowd 众) to absurd but surprisingly easy to learn (A racecar driver using their tongue 舌 to check if a road is suitable 适). Hanly also teaches words — combinations of characters — that both increase understanding and help ground characters in actual use. These and the characters themselves are taught in the same way, each with their own flashcard.

I try and learn 20-30 new cards (either characters or words) each day, and aim to do a minimum of 100 repetitions of old cards daily. While in the PRC I would often do 200+ repetitions and sometimes even 300, especially on long subway rides. I now know roughly 600 characters and 300 words by heart, and can therefore read slightly over 75% of “average text” according to Hanly. Had I learned just the 600 most common characters I would have understood 80% of average text, but learning those 600 characters would have been a lot more difficult.

After learning new words I tried to quickly get them into my usable vocabulary by employing them in daily life. This of course varied quite a lot depending on what the words was — 戈 is quite difficult to use in everyday life for example — but I think it helped anchor a lot of words in my mind. Having a mental “mission” for each day makes practical application a lot easier, even when the words are abstract.

I am still struggling quite a bit with tones, both in speaking and listening, but that will hopefully improve with practise.

Chinese is quite fascinating as a language. It feels both familiar and alien, with a comparatively simple grammar and Subject-verb-object word order but also reliance on guesswork and rote memorisation.

My mental model of the language looks something like this:

Characters are initially grouped by pronunciation² while not having anything to do with each other, and then have their meaning narrowed down by combining with other words. To emphasise the character as its own word the sound is often repeated³, but it can also be combined with another word with a similar meaning to create a new synthesis. This sometimes works the same way as compound words do in German, Swedish, or Norwegian where the two words are completely different but combines into one word (such as 学院, college, literally “learning institution”) but also with words carrying very similar meanings (like with 打开, literally “hit on”, used similarly as “slå på” in Swedish). If a character does not have any overlap with adjacent characters in a sentence, it is its own word.

This seems like the long-term challenge with Chinese to me. Navigating this three-dimensional space of guessing the meanings of words based on their pronunciation, tone, and context rather than the quite simple one-dimensional space in, for example, English (what does that word mean?).

In general I sense a surprising similarity to toki pona in Chinese. This is something of a horseshoe I guess; the easiest and hardest⁴ languages to learn being similar. Both have very abstract building blocks that represent something conceptually rather than being fixed — with Chinese just having a few more.

Hopefully I will be able to continue improving, although likely not at the same rate as I was before. I am starting to feel that I should immerse myself more in Chinese media and start reading texts in Chinese, but the texts that I would really like to read are far too advanced.

I would of course like to improve my speaking and listening skills, but I think for the near-term I will continue focusing on reading until I get to a level where I can get some practical use out of it.