Learning Mandarin Daily

I have decided to learn Mandarin in as less time as I possibly can. Learning means reaching HSK 4-5 level. My main focus will be on reading, writing (or typing), then listening and then speaking.

I have had no prior experience with the language. So am understanding literally nothing except "ni hao" when I am starting this.

Day one is done. I have grasped overall idea about how Mandarin works, and some radicals' usage patterns. Especially the water radical has to be my favorite. Through that I have been able to very roughly decipher some new characters such as steam and "follow".

Another favorite moment was when I learned that the same character for sun is used for day, and the same character for moon is used for months. This made a lot of sence. Kinda silly that the weekdays are just "week working day 1", "week working day 2", etc. Couldn't have made more sense.

Today, I have came across more than 50 characters. I have looked into the most used character's list and I think I can retain about 20-30 of them tomorrow.

At first I thought I would brute force my way through the characters, but that seemed inefficient and stupid. No wonder my mind was getting tempted to go that way.

Deep down I knew that noticing the patterns and reading blogposts is the right approach. But another element was missing from the plan. I wasn't able to name it initially but then I saw someone on reddit mention learning "radicals". I knew what radicals were, but I didn't think out the simple fact that I would just learn them straight up. And so I downloaded a list of 100 most used radicals and starting understanding them.

Another thing I have been thinking of is that I should probably use Mandarin-to-Mandarin dictionary as my primary source, instead of the English one. This would help build more connections within the language. Just like how self-supervised models learn.

Anyways, I heavily utilized the Pleco dictionary today. As I was coming across examples characters and words in the PDF of radicals' list, I was looking them up. And then I kept digging into the characters those characters themselves were made of, plus, the radicals. I looked into the example sentences in Pleco and started digging into the characters of those as well.

The character that stood out for me today, among many others, is 好, which means "Good". 女 is "Woman" and 子 is "Child". So, a woman with a child. Which is really interesting. Cause out of all the word combinations, this is like The thing that is "Good". Now, of course there're other adjacent meanings. Still makes one ponder about how Mandarin has evolved.

I also came across the character of sky before that. 天 actually evolved from an ancient character that looked like a man. The matter with that is that during the Shang dynasty, the highest deity was referred to as Shangdi or Di, which meant "Lord". Then at some point, 天 became synonymous with this figure. Prior to the 20th century, the worship of Tian was considered an orthodox cosmic principle in China. We can still see in the modern character that there is the human part in it, that is 人. Which makes a lot of sense as well.

It is evident that learning Mandarin is like opening a treasure trove of ideas, histories and mythologies. I have come to think that this has to be one of the most fun things to do. I doubt I am ever going to be bored for as long as I have the dictionary on my phone. I wonder if other languages are this interesting.

All this has made me think that — language is like the marine sediment that gets carried by the river to the ocean. There is accumulates. And then studying that sediment reveals immense things about the past and its evolution.

I was thinking that I should dive into the sounds of Mandarin at this point. Until now I haven't focused a bit on the sounds the characters make, or the rules of tone. I believe, not utilizing all the senses in my body would be rather inefficient. The more data I get to process, the better.

I took a random article from a chinese blog and tried to decipher it. My interpretation of the first paragraph without any assistance is:

"Half a month ago I bought a small bag, to go along with my needs. It was a bargain, and it was capable of carrying books while walking around or taking to a park if I ended up buying it, as I thought."

Which turned out to be almost correct in the first sentence but then it drifted off, to the point of carrying the opposite meaning of what the text originally said. So I moved on to the second paragraph after verifying the first.

"But I wanted to see it for myself, to judge it firsthand, so I bought it."

And once again, while I did capture the first half of the thought, I failed to include the later half properly. I wonder what's missing from my understanding or methods. Almost as though I am an AI who ends up using the working memory in the beginning, and later functions by hallucinating the answer. If that is the case, if my resources are acting like they are limited, maybe I should break down the sentence into smaller parts and focus more on understanding each component individually. First sentence of paragraph three:

"I actually found the bag to solve my need, it had 3 small pockets, I could put in y 10L water bottle, my phone"

Well... I missed every single actual detail in this one. I have been putting so much focus into individual characters in the last couple of days that I am ignoring obvious phrases or words. And then there are liteal names. This dillutes the entire meaning flow for me. Right now I feel like an LLM more than ever.

I got conscious about the fact that I have been reading Mandarin with English translated sounds in my head. Which makes me think that perhaps having assigned signs to the things we read is really important, for both understanding the language and using it afterwards. Otherwise part of me feels like I am deaf while reading. Sounds really are that serious. And why wouldn't it be so? Humans are verbal first, writers and readers later, when it comes to communication.

The main takeaway is that, a language has to be treated like a closed loop system in itself.

Learned only a few new characters and words.

One of the things I did today is tried to understand social media posts. For instance, this post on X. There are 51 unique Mandarin characters in it. I was already familiar with about 15 among those. The rest of the characters I had to look up in dictionary. And then I pieced together the meaning:

"Currently Github has a dedicated department that is trying to put code through film scrolls, all for the sake of conserving them without power down a glacier cave. It will be kept there frozen for a long period of time. Maybe after thousands of years this will be my proof of existence."

Which is 95% accurate and took me around 7 minutes. Which isn't really impressive to me considering I had to use a dictionary.

Since my vocabularly wasn't as good as my interpretation ability, I decided to grind through flashcards. Studied around 150 words from HSK-1.

HSK-2 flashcards. Another 150 words, plus the revision on yesterday's words. My reading ability has significantly improved in the last few days. It almost feels like I've been into learning the langugae for way longer than just one week. Right now, I am also getting the feeling that this is the perfect time to get started with listening practices. So I watched some Chinese media content with Mandarin + English subtitles.

Just a couple of new words.

Learned some new words. Tried to read an X article. Watched 10+ Chinese reels.