I’m excited! I got accepted to Northern Illinois University. So I’ll be studying Anthropology with a minor in Chinese studies. I can’t wait actually. I really want to start officially learning Mandarin with a teacher.
On that note, today I picked up two great books to help with learning Chinese characters. I’m too lazy to find them online and link you to them, but one of them is called The First 100 Chinese Characters and it goes through 100 characters, tells you the correct strokes and how to write them, then gives you the entire page to copy them down a couple of times for repetition. The second book is really cool I forgot the name exactly but it’s something like Learning Chinese Characters and they give you the characters, they sometimes give you pictures for the characters for example the character for the word tent actually looks kind of like a tent so they have a picture of a guy sleeping in a tent and the draw the character over the shape of the tent. They also tell you the compound characters that make up the character and then they give you a little story with those compound characters to help you memorize. And, they also give you the correct way to right the characters. Pretty cool!
I can’t wait to start learning more Chinese…I love it! According to my book The Chinese Language: Its History and Current Usage the average rate of learning characters is about 30 a week. And it will take about 2,400 characters to learn to understand 99% of modern Chinese. On top of that, it will take about 3 years before I can expect to being to read newspapers. Fun stuff!!!
Take care everyone!
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