To learn or not to learn the Chinese characters

A lot of people ask me whether or not I am learning the Chinese symbols, the characters. Before I started learning Chinese, I didn't know much about them.

Are they like letters? How many are there? How do you write them? How do you type with them?

Well, it turns out, there are over 50,000 characters!

So, they are not like letters. And no, I am not learning all of the characters. Apparently, some say you only need to know 1,000-3,000 of them in order to read the Chinese newspaper. Pretty cool!

How it works is that each character stands for a word or part of a word. For example, the characters in "hello" are actually two characters that mean "you" and "good." (你好) Additionally, there are traditional and simplified Chinese characters. Wait wwhhhaaaatttttt, so I just always choose simplified, sounds easier right?

So am I learning some characters? Well yes, but not purposefully. I am learning them incidentally through my language-learning resources. So when I am learning on an app on my phone, I can see the character, but I can also see the pinyin which is the phonetic spelling of the sounds of the character, with tones marked (I'll get into the tones in another post I'm sure). I also see the characters in the subtitles during my T.V. show that I like to watch. So when I keep seeing these characters over and over and over again with the word heard aloud, they just kind of stick! It would take way too much time for me to learn so many characters on purpose.

Personally, for the sake of my learning, I am not learning how to write the characters. I don't think that would be very helpful, seeing that technology is used so often for communication these days.

So how do we type the characters? Well, on the iPhone there are two types of keyboards for making characters. There is one, where you start to type in the pinyin with the QWERTY keyboard and then you pick the character from a set of choices. The other keyboard allows you to draw the character. So if I find a character that I don't recognize and I don't know what it sounds like, I can copy it and put it into the translate app to figure out what it means and how it is pronounced as well. THANKS ANNA!

So as it turns out, I can read a good bit of Mandarin. Sometimes my reading is actually better than my listening because I can take my time figuring out what the sentence means (sometimes it takes a couple seconds), but it's starting to make sense to me.

Obviously, I am not an expert on Chinese characters, so PLEASE feel free to do your own research if you've become curious :)

Well, wish me luck in this next week of learning, because I have to give you all a video post NEXT WEEK when I'll be busy with Thanksgiving and everything, and then it's only 1 month left 'til my goal mark. You'll soon find out what resource I'll be using in December to boost those conversational skills.

On to the next...