My progress of sorts

Last year around this time, I decided to study Chinese. I started out memorizing characters, and soon after began listening to the Pimsleur tapes (they are great) during my commute to and from work. These days I'm now concentrating on vocabulary building, and after that's progressed a little further I'll probably try to boost my listening comprehension.

Besides absorbing about 750 high-frequency characters and 45 hours' worth of spoken Mandarin training, I also learned about my misconceptions concerning the language -- some of which, I now realize, were very naive. For starters, I thought that once you have learned X number of characters, you are then able to read Chinese.

Not true. I forgot about compound words, for instance. Mandarin does not consist only of simple, one-character words; like other languages, it combines units to produce complexes of meaning. In English, just knowing the words "under" and "stand" doesn't ensure you can guess the meaning of "understand" -- you might assume it means "to stand under something." Didn't you know it's bad luck to understand a ladder?

Similarly, in Mandarin you will come across such words as chu kou (out+mouth=exit), tou ding shang fang (head top above space = overhead bin) or shui long tou (water dragon head = faucet). Furthermore, there's the small question of syntax and grammar, which you can't pick up just by studying characters.

Attempting to learn a language, especially a memorization-heavy one, also reveals interesting things about how the mind processes, or fails to process, new information. As everyone knows, it's simple to register material in short term memory (the cram factor), but harder to get it to stick.

Perhaps even harder than that is to learn how to recognize it in varied contexts. What the mind loves to do is place things in a relationship. So after repeated poring over a list, what you eventually learn is the list. It even happens with flash cards, despite shuffling -- you learn to recognize something in the flash card format, but not when it pops up in a printed text.

There just aren't any shortcuts -- you study and then come back three days later only knowing a fraction of what you thought you had down. Weeks go by with little evidence that you're doing anything other than playing with word sand. Knowledge accumulates gradually and imperceptibly -- you realize that you just understood something you read or heard that you wouldn't have three months ago. Such are the satisfactions...

11:59:09 PM   |