A Whole New World

Would you believe that it took nearly six months of living in China for us to begin studying the characters? No joke. I was convinced that just speaking and listening would be sufficient. Reading and writing? Nah, not necessary. It would slow down my learning considerably.

To be fair, Josh has always said he thinks we should learn to write and he has been studying characters in earnest for over five days now, diligently teaching himself five new ones every day. He even gave himself a pop quiz yesterday, graded it and everything; thirty words with their pinyin spelling and their characters for a total of 90 points. He showed me his paper marked up in red pen and said, “What really killed me was labeling the tones on the pinyin.”

To learn how to write, Josh has a book where on each page is a character and a grid with nice little boxes to practice in. You are shown how the character is created one stroke at a time. Because if you draw, you will have the Chinese in fits of laughter, as my students were when I drew my Chinese name on the overhead projector. At me, not with me. The stroke order counts big time.

So this book is pretty neat. It separates out each component of the character. It identifies radicals and their meanings. For instance, there is a radical made of four strokes that looks kind of like a stick figure with a third leg in the middle. It means ‘tree’ and it’s a component of the character guo* (fruit) to suggest the idea of fruit growing on trees, but also found in the character bei (cup). The character for bei combines the tree radical with bu (not) to suggest that cups are not made of trees or wood.
So if you saw that character, you might say… “hmm… Not tree…. oh yes, of course, cup!”


All this to say that I picked the book up yesterday and taught myself a dozen characters. Later that afternoon we walked to the grocery store and it was like stepping out into a whole new world. I finally figured out why Josh has been staring out the window of taxis looking forlorn and distracted for the past few days. I’d ask the girlfriend-y “Whats wrong?” and he’d say he was just looking at all the signs and billboards trying to recognize a character.
I was taken with the labels in the grocery store. I felt like we were in Disneyland, but instead of pointing and shouting “There’s Mickey Mouse!” or “Look! Over by the castle! Its Sleeping Beauty ”, I said: “There’s the character for ‘enter’!” and “Look! Over by the frozen foods! It’s the radical that means ‘roundish object’!”

As we walked home I felt like I was a the barcode scanner from the grocery store scanning thousands of characters all over storefronts to see if I recognize anything.

……………..blip…………………………………………blip…………………….

We would notice really intricate characters and say, “Woah, check that out. That’s gotta be, what…14 strokes at least.”





* The pinyin is not entirely accurate, as I have not indicated a tone.