Previously, I anecdotally recalled my earliest encounters with Chinese (outside the context of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and covering the critical first year in China. I did forget to mention a few critical aspects of my learning program.
In the year between my first visit and ultimately moving to China, I did buy some Chinese learning PC software from a discount book store. Though I spent quite some time doing the vocabulary drills, the whole experience slipped my mind because of how ultimately stupid the endeavor was. The software didn’t teach “blue,” it taught “deep blue” and “light blue;” the food section focused entirely on Western foods like toast and pizza.
Furthermore, I should give credit where credit was due. I got a significant boost from a PC-based dictionary which both included animated stroke order of characters and had a hand drawn look up function. This is what helped me figure out writing on my own. (Mind you, these were pre-smart phone and Pleco days). The creator of the dictionary, Pablo, also made a useful character learning game called Pingrid.
You can find them both here. The latest version is fairly different from what I played 10 years ago, but the basic idea of having to find a target character given its pinyin and/or English definition (drawn from CEDICT) from a set of characters really helps one build sight recognition. Spaced repetition was involved and there was an incentive to find the character quickly. One could change the fonts and even select random fonts to really train visual recognition. The best part was probably the ability to upload your own vocabulary list and the system could handle up to 2-character long words. I highly recommend Pingrid for anyone looking to improve their reading speed.
Recognizing characters became a game I played in my daily life. From menus to bus stops, shop signs to the subtitles on televisions, I was in a constant quest to see what I recognized and was encouraged by the fact from one week to the next, I would find new characters and words had lodged themselves into my brain.
In China, it wasn’t just a matter a self studying some textbooks, listening to tons of podcasts, and interacting in my daily life, I also invested a lot of time in building vocabulary lists. For every textbook chapter and podcast, I took notes of the vocabulary words used, collecting everything in a master Excel file. There were three main purposes to this. First, to see if I had already “learned” the word from a different source (or even a previous chapter). Secondly, to index the words by the characters contained within them. This allowed me to notice that a particular character was being used in multiple words and build up an internal semantic representation of the characters. For example, in an early lesson of Short Term Spoken Chinese, the vocabulary list included 书包 (shu1bao1, “book bag”) and 包子 (bao1zi “steamed stuffed bun”), it was obvious that 包 was contributing to the meaning of both words and as I came across more words with 包, my understanding of the character slowly shifted. [I would be uploading the Excel files and/or screen shots, but those are on an external hard drive in a suitcase in Beijing.] Finally, and possibly most importantly, writing characters out helps one remember them. I only occasionally put any effort into hand writing, but typing pinyin into an IME which brings up a list of homophone is a process that forces on to really focus on the character as written in a textbook and match it to the screen. I took the typing task even further by transcribing the dialogues (textbook only) into a Word document.
Anyways, eventually I ran out of Short Term Spoken Chinese textbooks that could be purchased at Book City, and being a cheapskate I didn’t want to invest a lot of money in other textbooks. So, I got a library card. That allowed me to access lots of 对外汉语 books (Chinese as a Foreign Language), including both other series of textbooks and various graded readers. I became voracious, and was willing to put in a little time skimming over books that were too easy for me. I found that quite helpful because it was a review/consolidation of the language in novel forms, and yet one occasionally came across new words to jot down.
At some point, I bought a used iPhone from a friend and discovered Pleco and a bunch of new podcasts. Though the phone was stolen a month later, I was hooked to the even more efficient studying tool and picked up an iPod Touch in Hong Kong.
As my listening and reading comprehension grew, I did dive into Chinese media, watching several television series, including 《家有儿女》、《男人帮》、《喜羊羊与灰太狼》、《北京青年》、《北京爱情故事》、《康熙微服私访记》以及《还珠格格》。I gave up on 《蜗居》 for being too melodramatic (not that the other serials weren’t soapy), and only watched about half of the episodes of 《我爱我家》, which for some reason didn’t have subtitles. I’m not sure how well the links will work outside of China, and its crazy to see how the internet companies are not so diligent about protecting IP. They were all free to watch back in the day, now most of the streaming sites want you to pay for a membership in order to watch a 20 year old TV show.
And things continued mostly like that for the 4 years I lived in Shenzhen. Though I became more busy with work, I would always spend at least one morning or afternoon a week in a coffee shop self studying because it was a past time I enjoyed.