I have 80 Chinese characters (flashcards for children) taped to a wall of my Beijing apartment. I add about five per day. I wrote about this earlier, before starting. So far it’s working. With almost no effort, no discipline, I know what almost all of them mean. I test myself a little whenever I’m in that room. This is a vast improvement over several previous attempts to learn the characters, such as studying flashcards the usual way or using Anki, a flashcard program.
I ruefully realize this is an application of something I thought of many years ago: the forces we can turn on and off are much weaker than pre-existing forces we can only take advantage of. Burning coal is a force we can turn on and off. Solar power is a pre-existing force we can take advantage of (and which almost everyone in Beijing uses to dry clothes). The sun shines no matter what we do. Deliberate studying we can turn on and off. We can study or not. In contrast, I am inevitably going to be in that room. Taping characters to the wall takes advantage of that.
My strategy used to be to carry a pocket dictionary with me at all times in Beijing and to look up as many characters as possible from those that I encountered on street signs, in shops etc. It worked pretty well.
Mikael,
yes, that’s a standard thing to do — have some way of identifying the characters I see in public. Such as an electronic dictionary. The problem is that I know so few characters there’s little payoff to being able to decipher one character in a 10-character message. And to do all 10 characters would take too long. After I learn a lot of characters, your strategy will make more sense, I think.
This sounds like a good idea. This reminds me of a family story. When my great-grandmother died, my grandmother and her siblings were still very young, ranging in age from 4 to 9, I think. The oldest of the three, my great-aunt, had to stop attending school in order to do all the housework and farmwork her mother had previously done. My great-grandfather felt very bad about that, because he valued education, but he couldn’t see how to else to meke out an existence without his daughter’s help. To mitigate the problem, he used to cut out newspaper articles that he thought were interesting and post them up on the wall inside the outhouse! My great-aunt grew up to be a voracious reader, one of the best read and well-informed adults I knew.
It’s fun to read about your experience with learning Chinese. One psychology professor at my school told me: Learning Chinese is like learning Klingon!!
A helpful way for me to learn a new language is to be with people who are supportive. A lot of people at my workplace speak a second language and they always support me in my learning. They encourage me and they correct me when I am wrong and talk to me in the foreign language I am learning. Also, another thing that helps me is to speak to people who know that language and to discuss with them my questions and thoughts on learning it. Berkeley students know different languages and they help me a lot. They’re very nice to me, even when I make mistakes. I enjoy using language books and I like to teach myself things, but I also ask other people for help at the same time. Perhaps there is something in the App Store, as well. Apps are fun!!! Some apps are free.
What I’ve been thinking about lately — and possibly someone else has thought it, too — is that obesity rates in the United States are much higher in the flatlands than the highlands (Gulf Coast vs. Rockies, let’s say). I assume it’s because you can’t help but get more exercise when you live among rolling hills, but you burn far fewer calories getting around town when you don’t.