a little coffee

Chris, being the good nerd that he is, has decided to learn the Chinese characters.  We’ve already gotten ourselves a tutor to help speak the language, but learning to read it is much different.  See, to my very western mind, learning to speak and read another language go hand in hand.  As you learn to read, you learn to speak.  Not so when the written language is composed of 900 billion different doodles that you have to memorize.  I was content to just speak because that’s more important, but Chris would not be satisfied.  He even got himself a book on the characters and for the past two weeks has been meticulously making flashcards and quizzing himself.  His first goal is to master “category A” the 2,000 most common doodles before taking on the other 2,000 just common doodles, and lastly the “2,202 words the frequency of use of which is next below words in category B” so says his book.  If you’re a good little student, you can master all the doodles in the book in…FOUR YEARS.  Yikes!  So you see why this avid reader lacked enthusiasm to learn to read Chinese (aside from important doodles like “hospital” and “noodles”).

Yet watching Chris pour over that doodle book, pieces of paper fluttering around him, his hands colored with black ink I felt ashamed of myself.  I couldn’t let him show me up!  I’m in this small city for one year, where not many people speak English so the least I can do is try learning the most common doodles.  I took a deep breath and picked up a stack of flashcards.  Some, like “one”, are easy because it’s a single horizontal line.  ”Two” is two horizontal lines.  ”Dot” looks like a big apostrophe, but suddenly you get incredibly complex doodles, like “to stay, to live, or to stop” is a combination of multiple doodles that look absolutely nothing what it means.  Chris’s book has explain that there is a logic behind this complex writing system, but it has become so convoluted that it stopped making sense.  And obviously there are no Chinese cognates so you have to memorize the 900 billion doodles.  Eek.

But anyone who’s tried pure memorization knows it’s not very effective.  Especially when you’re trying to cram all those doodles into your brain with nothing to associate them with. This goes doubly for me so, in some cases, I’ve resorted to creating stories to remember the doodles.  So, it’s been working well with doodles that look similar.  An example:  

This is The Epic Tale of Zhŭ :

丶 is zhŭ. His life begins insignificantly, he is but a dot upon the earth.  But after much hard work 丶 becomes 主 or zhŭ, the lord, emperor, the most principle person in the kingdom.

The stories of 丶 travel far and wide and soon a stranger arrives.  He is shown such hospitality, such kindness that he decides to zhù ( 住 ) or stay with 主, thus stopping his journey and living in that kingdom forever.

They become life long friends, performing many great deeds together.  Upon their deaths a flock of doves, the zhuī ( 隹 ) arrive to carry their souls to the underworld.

Oh, China.  This is what you do to me!