Characters

The first week of class here was ridiculous. I have learned more Chinese in the past week than in the past 6 months. Let me tell you why:

The Chinese writing system is non-phonetic. This means that the way words sound does not have anything to do with the way they are written. You can't sound out Chinese characters because they are pictures of the meaning of words, whereas English letters are pictures of the sounds in words. This method is more interesting for conveying meaning through script, but leaves people no easy way to learn how to pronounce things. So, one way to teach people how to pronounce the words that characters represent is through letters in the English alphabet. Instead of representing the meaning, this method just represents the sound. This is called Hanyu Pinyin, and it's the most common way of representing the pronunciation of Chinese characters.

Pinyin is what I learned in school, not characters. Most schools, including Beijing University, does not use Pinyin. All of the books we use are in characters. If you know about Chinese you can understand how devastating that is for my ability to do well in class. For those of you who are not too familiar with Chinese, I'll try to explain through an example:

鸟 is the word for bird. It sounds like "niǎo", or "niao" with the pitch of your voice going slightly down and then up. 鸟 is just a picture for a meaning. How to pronounce it is unrelated. You can't determine that 鸟 sounds like "niao" by looking at it. You have to know that 鸟 refers to birds, and that meaning sounds like "niao". My textbook at Drexel used "niao" instead of 鸟. My textbook at Beida uses 鸟. So, I was lost when I saw "这只鸟没有眼睛。", instead of "zhe zhi niao meiyou yanjing." Even though I might know what it means if I heard it, I couldn't pronounce it or understand what was written.

I knew some characters before I came, but really not many. When I got to Beida and realized everything would be in characters, it was scary. I thought I just wouldn't be able to handle it. But I buckled down and studied my life away for the whole first week of classes. I don't think I've ever studied that hard in my life. I think I learned about 150 characters in one week. That's more than I had to learn over the span of two semesters at Drexel.

I thought it was horrible at the time, but looking back it was worth it. I'm almost caught up now, and I never would have learned everything as quickly as I had without that kind of pressure. But I shoved everything else to the side--blog posts, laundry, haircut, responsibilities back home, etc. Now I've got to catch up on all that. It's okay though, I think I'll be able to acheive much more balance in the next few weeks than in the past few.