I’m a “heritage learner ” of Mandarin Chinese, which means I grew up with the language when I was a child but lost it when I started school (the 1970s were NOT a time when the United States welcomed multiculturalism). As a result, my Chinese language skills are stuck at about the level of a four-year-old and I never learned how to read.
Thanks to the incredible technology available now, I can study Chinese on my own time. What I’ve found interesting is that when it comes to language learning, or learning anything really, people online seem to be in a hurry. They want to be fluent in a new language in 3 months or become a guitar hero in a year. I don’t get the impatience.
I started learning how to write and read Chinese in August, and this is my progress:
It doesn’t look like much, but I’m absolutely thrilled that I can read simple sentences now. The great thing about Chinese is that once I learned a critical mass of unique characters, learning new words usually involved putting characters I already knew together. Many of these combinations are so delightfully fun, with their own internal logic. Like the character for “think” is a combination of the characters tree + eye + heart.
Or the character for “manage” is the character for “bitterness” doubled with the character for “strength” in between.
Other words are more literal: the word for “airplane” is the characters “fly + machine.” Telephone? Electricity + talk. Cellphone? Hand + machine. Turkey? Fire + chicken (hahaha)!
But the fun I’m having now wouldn’t have been possible if I gave up three months in because I learned only 200 words in that time.
Learning classical guitar has been a similar experience on a much longer timeframe — I’ve been studying for two years and I’m still a total newbie, but at least now I can play things that sound less like exercises and more like music. When I play, my hands and body are less tense than they used to be, and occasionally when I play something I’ve memorized, I brush up against that magical feeling of getting lost in the music. That’s the feeling I chased when I was a teen bassoonist, and it’s amazing to feel it again now with a new instrument I love even more.
If I’d quit after a year because I thought my progress was too slow, I wouldn’t have this experience.
I’m not saying I don’t quit things — I’ve quit a LOT of things, sometimes within a month when I realized I didn’t have enough interest to push me through the inevitable difficult parts. But if I’ve committed to something I love and am just having a bad day or week or feel like I’m not progressing fast “enough” (like, who’s setting a timetable anyway)? I keep taking those baby steps and remind myself to think in terms of decades, not months or even years, and to enjoy the learning process without pressure. Progress has a way of sneaking up on me when I’m not aiming for it.
Grace Wen 