Introductions!

[highways]

What it says on the box. How long have you studied Chinese, and for what reason, and anything else you feel is relevant to the comm!

Comments

[highways]

My name is Brittany (in Chinese, 伍蘭妮) and I've been studying Mandarin since January 2009, so for about a year and a half. A few weeks ago I moved to Taichung City, Taiwan, to spend a year here studying the language. My native language is English, and I can also speak some Spanish and a bit of Japanese. I'm from Arizona.

Oh! And I write with traditional characters. And pinyin, though I'm trying to learn zhuyin, too.

[pne]

I'm Philip (陳信哲), and I live in Hamburg, Germany.

I learned Japanese at evening school for several years, partly because there were so many Japanese at my school. So Chinese kind of grew out of that, though I'm fascinated by languages in general and pick up bits here and there.

I never formally learned Chinese, just kind of absorbed a bit by osmosis, looking through textbooks. Also, I never paid attention to tones so while I know the Pinyin spelling of a fair number of characters, I don't know which tone they go with! So I'd be awful at speaking.

I got my Chinese name from a Chinese boy in my class at school.

I also prefer traditional characters, perhaps because I learned Japanese first and they use mostly traditional characters (and the ones that they did simplify are usually not as radically simplified as the Simplified Chinese ones).

[highways]

Yeah, I should've noted that about the Japanese, too--I also started out in Japanese, ages ago, and the characters helped me out a lot when it came time to learn traditional characters. Though a few traditional characters still through me off, probably because I'm always trying to think of the simplified Japanese characters. Mostly it's 國, 氣, and 醫, since Japanese uses 国, 気, and 医, and the characters are so common.

[supermouse]

I'm learning to read Mandarin slowly through ReadMandarin.com and it's working for me so far. I was on a character-a-day community on Livejournal, but the teacher vanished. ReadMandarin is quicker for learning characters, but there is very little context. However, there is pronunciation. I'm more interested in reading than in speaking, though.

In theory, I recognise over a hundred characters. In practice, it's probably less than half that when they are out in the wild. I want to learn a thousand.

[highways]

Actually, in my experience it's EASIER to recognize characters "out in the wild"--you generally have more context than you do on a freaking text, plus you learn to recognize the high frequency characters really well because you see them all the time. At least that's how it is for me! I'm complete crap at hanzi on tests.

Welcome to the comm!