I’m endeavoring to attempt something never before achieved in the history of mankind: make a New Year’s resolution, and stick to it. Given my desire, it’s apropos that I write this on the first day of the lunar new year, since the resolution for 2009 was: learn Chinese, like for real.
“For real” means expanding beyond the lazy, expat-level of everyday, common Chinese I’ve been stuck at, for a while now, being one of a plethora of lazy Americans living in Beijing or Shanghai. It means actually having a damned vocabulary, for one, and it means taking more than a token a swipe at learning some lingo, and some words that don’t appear in the everyday Chinese dictionary.
In order to learn something, to really learn something, it takes commitment, it takes repetition, and it takes curiosity. The intellectual curiosity is not the problem for me; it’s the commitment and repetition I’ve had trouble with. Also, you absolutely have to make it fun. Well, technically, you don’t. You can sit there and force – no, torture – yourself by having your head buried in books, but you’ll have two undesired end results: (1) you’ll be bored; and (2) it’ll be less efficient. So, I’ve decided to make it fun. When things are fun, the learning just comes.
So, I’ve started out by learning a word a day and putting it on Twitter, with a twist: I’m going to create a narrative out of it by re-using the previous words en route to learning new ones. Along the way, I’ve found that Twitter is not enough, because of its paltry character limit, and that I need to introduce some new words and sentence structures at the same time. It’s a fun challenge, and of course, this being me, the sentences will be absurd. (But therein lies the “fun” for me. If I have to learn how to say “Where is the pharmacy” one more time I’ll shoot myself.) This whole artificial construct should create enough repetition for me to actually learn the concepts I set out to learn.
And, given that it’s so public, maybe it’ll give my friends some entertainment, so they can laugh at my pathetic progress as time goes along. Laughing at people is always fun, after all…
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