The Delights and Frustrations of Learning Chinese Characters

How I Started to Learn Chinese as a Second Generation Canadian

I grew up speaking Mandarin with my family and did so from a very young age. Over time, my capabilities in English surpassed Chinese as I spent most of my life reading, writing, and speaking in English. As I got older into my early adulthood, I was interested in developing my Chinese identity. Identity is a topic I think that is constantly being talked about in the discourse on immigration. It is constantly shifting and it doesn’t have a finite answer or shape for everyone. I thought the first way to understand and be aligned with my Chinese identity was to develop my literacy in Chinese.

When I was young, I learned a lot of the basics of Chinese writing, such as how to use pinyin, or write with very simple characters like numbers. I can string together very simple sentences in writing, such as “I am Jane”, or “This is red”. But this was about as good as I got for a very long time. I can speak fluently and have no issues carrying out a conversation. But I really struggle with vocabulary. Chinese characters are notorious for being difficult to memorize. A lot of Chinese people would forget how to write by hand since they would more often text or type in Chinese.

So how would I go about developing my vocabulary? I used to read a lot of graphic novels online and I knew the online community where people volunteered to do translations from Japanese, Chinese, or Korean to English. I thought of an idea to translate comics from Chinese to English as a way to learn Chinese. I decided to volunteer my time with some online non-profit translation services. This was very hard at first, I would not recognize about 80%–90% of the characters on one page. I would look up each individual character and translate it little by little. After spending a summer translating several chapters, I picked up a lot of commonly used characters. I was able to recognize significantly more characters than before. I don’t think this method works well with beginners, it would be too overwhelming. I was starting at a point where I knew what a lot of characters meant and knew to how to use and say them well. But I think it’s a great step for intermediate learners.

Translation is a good way to learn new characters, but not a good way to practice and apply them. About two years ago, I started listening to more Chinese songs, but I was never able to fully comprehend them. After listening to many songs in Chinese, I settled on certain artists and genres that I liked. I decided to learn what the songs were saying six months ago. I developed a method to learn these songs:

1. Go through characters I did not recognize in the song to understand what the song was about.
2. Practice some of the new characters I have never seen before by hand and learn the strokes.
3. Begin to recite the characters- I would play a section of the song and try to write it just by listening. I’d check which ones I got right or wrong. I’d then practice writing the ones I got wrong a couple of times. Then recite another section of the song.
4. I’d do step 3 until I was able to write down the entire song by hand from memory.

I found this method to be effective because learning with music provides a rhythm. It’s really hard to forget tunes over time, and for each new character I learn, it has context. That new character is embedded in a story of the song. This doesn’t mean I will remember all the new characters I learn, it is just a means for me to integrate learning into my daily life without it feeling like homework. I remember when I was able to listen to a song after memorizing it and the feeling of comprehending what the artist wanted to convey. It felt like a new gateway opened up and a new bridge was built as I was able to understand more than before.

What learning something new looks like

I had the question of “how could I show both the fun and frustrating parts of learning something new?”. Learning Chinese can be both delightful and frustrating. It’s fun to learn how characters can be pieced together to provide new meaning, but it’s also frustrating to memorize characters with complex strokes. Learning something new is a constant struggle where I am trying push myself to a new level. To show my learning experience, I made a data visualization piece expressing both the delightful and frustrating moments of learning Chinese. The following series of visualizations show my process learning 慢慢喜欢你 by Karen Mok.

This song had a total of 139 unique Chinese characters. Of the 139 characters, 28 of these characters were completely new to me.

Here you see characters that were new to me at the top, and characters that I already knew at the bottom

Strokes help define characters

Chinese characters are comprised of strokes, every character has a defined set of stroke count. Before mobile apps, it was very important to know a character’s stroke count to find it in the dictionary. For example, the following character means moon. It requires 4 strokes to write it.

Source: https://www.thoughtco.com/stroke-order-for-chinese-characters-2278406

The character I encountered with the most stroke in learning the song was 餐, which means meal, dish, or cuisine.

Source: https://dictionary.writtenchinese.com/worddetail/can/13246/1/1

This character has 16 strokes, it’s a complex character to write and remember. I personally believe Chinese is so hard to memorize because of the complexity in its writing and form. However, there is a reason for complexity- Chinese is a language that is meant to be seen and understood as an image. Earlier forms prior to the Chinese we currently know existed in the form of pictographs. Characters were meant to look like what they were describing.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters. This shows how the current character for Sun was derived.

It’s very difficult to memorize each and every character I encounter. It takes many tries before I get it right.

Here, I show the progression of how I recite the characters. When I am trying to memorize a song, I do so by writing it down. I don’t always get it right, even after I get it wrong.

I had a really hard time getting the character 孩 right when I was recalling it. 孩 is a character I previously learned and yet I still struggled with it. When I was reciting to write this character, I would get it wrong, then right, then wrong, then right, then wrong, then finally, get it right. Even when I think I have mastered a character, I have to revisit it several times to practice it before I get it right. Writing in Chinese is truly a matter of ‘use it or lose it’.

The delights and frustrations

All the characters I learned within new characters

It’s super fun to discover new characters within new characters (it’s quite meta, I know).

For example, 烫 means hot/to heat up/to iron. Its two components are 汤 (soup) and 火 (fire). By learning the character for 烫, I also learn the character 汤. These characters also share similar sounds. Observe:
烫 = 汤 + 火
烫 = hot/to heat up/to iron; 汤 = soup; 火 = fire
烫 = tàng, 汤 = tāng; 火 = huǒ

It’s very frustrating when I confuse characters that look similar or sound similar.

This shows which character I mistook it for when I was reciting it.

The character 怎 looks very similar to 急. They have different sounds and different meanings, but only look similar.

怎 = zěn = how/why
急 = jí = anxious/urgent

While 只 and 直 sound very similar, but have different meanings.

只 = zhǐ = only/just
直 = zhí = straight/direct

It’s very challenging to learn a language with four tones for every single character. Sometimes characters share the exact same tone and sound, but have completely different definitions. I think we can all take comfort in knowing no matter how hard it is to learn something, it’s not as hard as this character:

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles This character has 58 strokes in the traditional form, and 43 in simplified.

The Journey has Just Begun

Although I have only been serious about learning Chinese within the last five years, I feel like I am just starting. I learn at a slow pace and at one that I know I can sustain. Creating the data viz wasn’t just for fun, but to show how much I have actually learned. It’s not easy to quantify my progress, I can only know that I have made progress by the fact that I can read more. But that’s still something that’s hard to feel tangibly. Through the data viz I made, I was actually a bit surprised to see how far I have come with learning Chinese, I was able to recognize 80% of the characters in the song I was learning! Every new character I learn is an opportunity for me to discover something about culture and about how life is understood.

I firmly believe that language is not restricted for the the purpose of communication, it’s a means to understand people and culture. For example, the character for love in traditional Chinese has a lot of significance to it. 愛 contains the characters for heart (心), and friend (友). By definition in the character, we love someone who is a friend and who we give our hearts to. We give them our time, compassion, and loyalty.

Thanks for reading! If you like what you read, please follow my instagram(janezhgw) as that is where I update my work first. Feedback and questions are always welcome!

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