Ah. Yes. Chinese. Did I mention that I’ve started teaching myself Chinese?
I’m not sure how it started. I’d been thinking about it for quite some time, but I’d tentatively planned to relearn my German, then tackle Spanish (which I really need to learn, because it’s highly useful in California), then Japanese. I was going to save the hardest one, Chinese, for last.
But somehow, I ended up diving right into Chinese. I think part of it had to do with realizing how important China is going to be in the coming decades, for better or worse. And, of course, Chinese is also highly useful in California, though less so than Spanish.
Also, I haven’t tackled a major intellectual challenge in a while, and after finishing grad school, my brain was starting to stagnate. And, finally, there’s the small fact that Chinese is now the second most widely used language online, and given current trends, will soon be the first. That’s a hell of a lot of content that I don’t have access to, and this is annoying to me. Information sponge that I am. But, then, all of that content gives me lots to work with while learning the language.
And it’s fun! So, I’m going to continue. So far, my approach has been a bit haphazard, but I’m progressing. I’ve even started translating short passages already–though the title of this post came from Google Translate.
(Translating isn’t easy, by the way, since Chinese has no alphabet. There’s no simple order to the characters in dictionaries. There is an organizational scheme, of course, based on the number of strokes it takes to draw the character. But it’s not that simple either. One thing I’ve learned already is that nothing in Chinese is ever simple.)
Now, all I need to do is figure out how to fit this in with work, writing, and everything else. That’s the real challenge.
Hi Brian,
Nice blog, nice variety of interests. I was updating LibraryThing (which I seem to do about twice a year) and I noticed we have 40 books in common (most recently Avatar), so I thought I’d write you a note somewhere. I wish I had studied Chinese since I go to China and Taiwan a lot these days, but I chose Japanese and it helped me a lot in the 80′s and 90′s.
Cheers,
Bruce Irving
I wish I had taken the trouble to learn Japanese about ten years ago. Chinese is a little more useful nowadays, and also more of an intellectual challenge.
b.