It's been 10 years since I posted to this blog. Rather than close it, I've decided to start posting about my language learning experience, with the occasional review of a game or book.
Chinese isn't my second language. I learned French from childhood in bilingual programmes and took Russian in high school and at university. I used to speak some Italian and can understand some Spanish, but Chinese is very different from the predominantly European languages I've studied.
I started learning Chinese at the end of 2018 so it has been about 2 and a half years since I started. I had tried to learn Chinese in 2012, before a business trip to Taiwan. I used Mango Languages through my library and really didn't learn anything other than 你好 (hello), 很高興認識你 (very pleased to meet you), 謝謝 (thank you), and the numbers from 1-10. Just before I left, I bought a tiny book with the unimpressive name "I Can Read That" (full title is I Can Read That: A Traveler's Introduction to Chinese Characters) by Julie Sussman. "I Can Read That" didn't teach me to speak Chinese on the plane, but I did learn to read somewhere between 40-50 characters on the flight, which impressed my hosts. Though the book concentrates on simplified Chinese characters, the traditional versions are listed in an appendix which was extremely useful for Taiwan.
I spent the next few years thinking Chinese was just too hard for me since the oral method (no characters) didn't work for me, but when another opportunity to visit Taiwan and work with scholars from Taiwan came up, I decided to give learning Chinese another try.
Six years later, there were many more options for learning Chinese on your own. I started with Duolingo and added Memrise and Living Language later. I also downloaded a wide selection of other Chinese learnings apps of varied utility and started buying graded readers and bilingual readers. Later I added Youtube videos for Chinese learners and music videos to improve my listening skills. A year ago, I started practicing speaking with tutors since I had concentrated on learning to read up to that point.
In future posts I will talk about some of the tools, books, etc. I have used so far. I will be concentrating on electronic resources such as apps and books since it is still much harder to find graded readers as ebooks.
