As for writing, I learned the traditional (complicated?) script, where 会 is written 會, and certainly complicates the story of a cloud under a roof! (or 人 people 云 speaking as has been suggested below) I find writing to be a very satisfying and almost craft like experience, where putting down lines in a set order to build characters almost feels like building houses out of matches, or a bird’s nest out of twigs.

I’m not learning Chinese formally anymore, but I still practice writing, using William McNaughton and Li Ying’s “Reading & Writing Chinese” and I find it very useful as it provides explanations of how the different radicals of a character come together to make meaning while also providing stroke order. If I could make one suggestion, it would be to try writing with a brush or brush pen, it really is different from swiping a screen, in my experience.

I have learnt Chinese, and I think that the writing system is by far the most difficult aspect to learn. I have learned to read a few thousand characters, and I am still learning. That is just the simplified form – I haven’t even tried to learn traditional characters, and I can read much better than I can handwrite. On top of that, you need to remember a multitude of idioms (Chéngyǔ 成语) and the measure words to accompany different types of nouns.

Having said that, I found the grammar to be one of the easiest aspects, as it is an analytical
language with basically no inflectional morphemes. For example, I “I love her” is “wǒ ài tā” (我爱她), and
“she loves me” is “tā ài wǒ” (她爱我). No changes in morphology or vocabulary, just need to switch the word order. It is often similarly easy to switch verbs to nouns or nouns to adjectives, etc.

I learnt the Japanese alphabet using pictographs as well. For example, あ (‘a’) looks like an antenna, and い (‘i’) for Hawaいい (Hawaii). This allowed me to learn quicker and has proven to be fruitful as I still remember the pictographs until today.

Despite the fact that the program was fantastic, I look back today almost in horror at the way we were taught characters–the rote memorization method. Sure, teachers would occasionally mention something about the radical of a certain character, or that 山 was a pictograph. But most of the types of memorization tips that Ingrid mentioned in her post were learned from other students, or from books we picked up on our own.

Chinese characters are like little puzzles, and once you have solved them, they stick in your head and become easier to remember if you continue to read. I always tell new Chinese learners to study the meanings of the radicals inside and out, which helps with characters you don’t know. I also tell them that when learning a new character, that they should start with the traditional form, even if they are only focused on learning simplified. I just think it is way better, for example, if you know that “electricity” 电 used to have a raincloud over it 電 !

Best of luck in your continued Chinese character study, Ingrid. I hope it’s a lifelong passion!

Ryan

I have the same feeling as Nocole as I only got to know Esperanto in 2010 and learnt it a year later and I have got the B2 examination certificate from EU.

Min Nan Hua is my mother tongue and I learn Chinese and Putong Hua when I went to Chinese primary school. It took me more than 20 years to learn English and still cannot control well of the sentences. However, a year of self-learning, via lernu.net and kurso.com.br I could pass the Esperanto language test. Economical and I have friends from Latin America which I never thought of before as I did not speak Portugues and Spanish.

Thanks for sharing this great quote, Nicole! What’s the source? Would love to read up on it if there is more …

As I said in another comment today on the post about “Supermarket language learning,” to me the immeasurable value of Esperanto is that is can serve as a “real linguistic utopia” in a world where our collective linguistic imagination seems to have been largely reduced to language as either shaped by the state or the market …

“I’m very glad that when a course of Esperanto was organised in our factory, I decided to follow it. Here I felt comfortable, and I enjoyed the lessons very much. Esperanto is like Chinese, a language entirely consisting of invariable elements that combine without limitation. People say that English is the international language. But what’s the use of an international language that cannot be acquired by working people? I have now many contacts all over the world. For what I wanted, I didn’t need English. Too bad that I was so late in discovering it.”

Here is what a Chinese worker in a factory of electric appliances in Nanking has to say. Her words have been translated from Esperanto into English, so that you can understand them. It was not written in English.

“I have always wanted to have contacts in the outside world. So I went to an English course. After an exhausting work day, there is not much energy left to strain one’s mind and overload one’s memory with so many unexplainable things (why, in English, can’t you deduce ‘first’ from ‘one’ as you deduce ‘tenth’ from ‘ten’ and as we do in Chinese? Why can’t you deduce ‘my’, ‘mine’, ‘me’ from ‘I’ as we do in Chinese?). So I realised that I simply could not assimilate all these complications. Just imagine, in English, if you know how to say tooth’, this does not help you to say *dentist*, you have to memorise yet another word. And if you want to say ‘mare’, ‘stallion’ or ‘colt’, remembering ‘horse’ is of no avail. In Esperanto, as in Chinese, those words are derived from the basic word according to a consistent pattern.