Eric's Beijing Diary

Characters. Oh, what a chore! I told one of my tutors I didn't want to do characters, "Why do I need to write characters?!" She looked at me narrowly, "Do you want to learn Chinese?" Well I told her that I was trying to focus on conversation and I wanted to learn to read; I wasn't that concerned about writing. But my other tutor was relentless. She told me to take it easy and not get discouraged. I don't think I'm going to be able to avoid this. I'm really don't anticipate a need to write Chinese right now, but reading is very important. Seeing a sign or something and not being able to decode it is very frustrating to me. To the extent that writing characters assists with character recognition, it is important, even if reading is your only objective.

I feel like I'm back in the second grade, sitting in that little school room in Tohoku Lutheran Academy in northern Japan. Muto-sensei, my Japanese teacher, is having me copy the characters she has written at the top of the page. The little notebook with the squares. Down the page. Then start at the top of the next column. Finally get to the end of the page. Turn the page and start over. Endless. Boring. One more page, and then I'll be done, and I can go out and play. It's a little different now. I am working from a website that gives the stroke order. And I'm listening to the audio stream of Newshour from the BBC. But it's the same endless routine. Language is work. But learning characters is not hard. It is actually the easiest part of learning Chinese. It is very slow. Time consuming. But time consuming and hard are not the same thing. Tones? Now that's hard. But characters? Easy. Very, very easy. You just have to force yourself to do it. Over and over and over and over again.