Learning Chinese

Is Chinese for me?

In summary, I think Chinese is a good language to learn if you are interested in China and/or talking with Chinese people. However, I think learners should be warned of the mysticism and hippie dippy new age thinking surrounding Chinese (as well as other Asian languages, and second language learning in general) and consider carefully whether or not Chinese specifically is worth their time—the irrepairable bloat of the Chinese writing system and its influences on spoken Chinese present serious barriers for time-pressed learners to make fast progress. Furthermore, confusion about Modern Standard Chinese (pǔtōnghuà) leads to even more suffering.

Pros

Chinese is very different from English and people in China/Taiwan/etc. often have very different ways of thinking and talking about things compared with Westerners. If you take your Chinese learning far, it will certainly broaden your view of the world. Most Chinese speakers do not speak English, so learning Chinese is practical for communication purposes, especially if you are going to live in China for a while or something like that.

If you seriously study Chinese, chances are the people around you will regard you as very studious and smart. You can virtue signal your cosmopolitan alignment and eagerness to profit from globalization through Chinese study. Students of Chinese are generally less despised than weebs. You will definitely run into annoying problems with fonts, displaying text, particularly if you also use Japanese.

Cons

Chinese has a terrible writing system that makes your life difficult. The complexity of the Chinese writing systems means you either have to use dinosaur techniques to look things up (i.e. paper tables, dictionaries, counting strokes, and other archaic arts) or you have to embrace the surveillance state a bit and squint at your phone while scribbling lines with a finger. In any case, the written language will definitely require a lot of time on your part. If you do become proficient in Chinese, you can assume every character you type is being logged in somebody's database somewhere; the complexity of Chinese writing necessitates cloud-based typing for most people.

Despite having many speakers, Chinese is not an "international" language in the sense that it is "ethnically bound" to Han Chinese people. If you don't look Chinese, you will forever be treated like a monkey in a suit while speaking Chinese. Nobody knows if you are a dog on the Internet, so you may be able to sneak by there though.

My experience with Chinese

I began learning Chinese toward the end of my high school days, intensely through my undergraduate days, and casually to the present day. I started Chinese from scratch—my parents never spoke to me in any form of Chinese and I had studied Spanish prior to my university years.

Learning Curve

Chinese is rather easy to begin with but later becomes very difficult, perhaps exponentially difficult.

Starting Chinese is easy for the following reasons:

• Novelty factor, fun
• Relatively few sounds
• Many high quality beginner resources available
• Endless encouragement, especially if you are not ethnically Chinese, and even more so if you are good looking

However, moving beyond a basic conversational level, things get more difficult. This is mainly due to the direct and indirect effects of the Chinese writing system:

• Looking up Chinese characters/words is difficult
• Classical/literary Chinese stuff pops up
• You realize the Chinese movie you wanted to watch is in Cantonese, not the language you are studying
• People keep on "code-switching" into English or using English words instead of helping you build your Chinese vocabulary (often because they themselves use these terms mainly)
• Chinese subs are low quality
• Chinese Internet blocks your country
• You develop myopia

The best solution(s) I have found to overcome these difficulties are to use a pop-up dictionary via a browser extension, primarily reading Chinese text on the computer. This combined with increasing font size can save your eyes.

Nonetheless, media besides hypertext remains hard to work with: novels, text on phones, movies/shows, etc. I'll continue to try to develop my vocabulary mainly from the browser and audio/video to dodge character lookup annoyances, but isn't preferable and I find it much more pleasurable to study other languages where I don't have to deal with these artifacts of an unfixable writing system.

Tech Notes

On web pages when using Chinese, always use the lang attribute to specify which text is Chinese. Otherwise, you might get Chinese characters rendered as if Japanese or some other issues. For readability, this probably won't matter, but it will look bad.

I type Hànyǔ pīnyīn using emacs' chinese-sisheng input method. I have yet to find a better solution; 真方便！ Zhēn fāngbiàn!