I know a little bit of German – enough to realize that “gute” wasn’t some technical term I wasn’t familiar with, but rather just a relic of a presentation translated from German.

That made me think . . . and I realized that no Chinese speaker would be likely to leave an untranslated Chinese word on an English presentation.  They stick out too much, look too different from English to be passed over or forgotten.

After the success of last year’s resolution to finish Harry Potter in Chinese, I decided to read Life of Pi in Spanish this year.  It’s going well so far!  To finish the book this year I have to keep up a pace just over 1 page per day, and today on the 30th of January I’m on page 42.  My atrophied Spanish muscles are strengthening and I feel like I’m getting faster at getting better, and getting better at getting faster.

I started a Spanish Anki deck when I started the book, and have been adding both the new words I have to look up and old words that I know pretty well.  This helps avoid burnout when reviewing all really challenging cards :)

I’m also still reviewing my Chinese and German decks, plus in a spurt of zeal after I upgraded to Anki 2.0 I made itty bitty decks for all the other languages I’ve picked up words in while on trips . . . I can now say that I know 13 words in Khmer (oh heavens!  10 of those are numbers . . . ), 9 in Korean, 4 in Polish, 5 in Dutch, and 10 in Slovenian.  Not much, but it would be sad to lose those tiny treasures!

Anyway, it’s been interesting having to swtich between languages in a way I’ve never really done before.  When I started learning Chinese I pretty much let Spanish fall by the wayside and never focused on any other language for longer than the few days I was in country.

The other day, I was reviewing Spanish and the English word “complain” came up.  I answered immediately – but incorrectly.  It’s a word that I considered myself to have known before, so I was confused as to how I could have gotten it wrong?

Even more confusing, after a few seconds of consideration, I realized that I knew the true meaning of the word I had answered with - manejar means “to drive”.

But I figured it out.  ”Complain” is quejarse in Spanish and manyuan (埋怨) in Chinese . . . My answer, manejar, was a combination of the two.

Interesting how the written languages can be so distinct, but my mind puts all the sounds in the same place!

“Useless” words

My biggest concern when starting Harry Potter in Chinese was all of the “useless” words that I was going to have to learn.  In most languages, proper nouns stick out and don’t really require “learning”, but it’s a different story in Chinese.  (Can you pick out the name in this sentence?  ”罗恩打不起精神来，天气实在太热了“)  

But actually, it didn’t end up being too bad.  Yes, I learned about 20 proper nouns (Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Draco Malfoy, the entire Weasley family, Neville Longbottom, Dumbledore, McGonagall, Hagrid, Snape, Quirrell, Voldemort, Hogwarts, all four houses, and Quidditch), and had to be familiar with a few others at least well enough to recognize when they were being used.  

But the great thing about reading a 191-page book about the same people is that those proper nouns were almost a one-off deal, an upfront investment I had to make to facilitate the rest of it.  And in the rest of it, I got to learn some really useful things – expel, coma, lion, referee, invisible, peel, Ireland, hatch, sniffle, bow and arrow, intestines, pitch-black, armchair, ankle, chess, flame, and rare are just some examples.  

And the very non-Muggle words like wand, flying broomstick, alchemy, and wizard are really great for impressing people :)

Written vs. spoken language

When I got to see a good Chinese friend of mine over break, I was delighted to have the opportunity to speak Chinese with her for several hours.  As we spoke, I caught myself several times speaking in a way typical to written Chinese, or 书面语.  I guess this is a potential pitfall for this method, which could vary with language and your choice in material.  Harry Potter is not a very formal book, but in Chinese there is a fairly noticeable difference between written and spoken language.  

As I said, I don’t think this is a good way to learn a language from the beginning, and I also don’t think it can or should be the only method used to maintain or advance a language.  It would be most beneficial paired with increased speaking.  In hindsight, I wish I had sought out opportunities to talk to Chinese friends about the book, which would have given me a chance to talk about a subject in whose vocabulary I am well-versed!  

Despite these drawbacks, I made a new resolution this year: this time, to finish my first full book in Spanish!  I have chosen Vida de Pi (Life of Pi) from our family’s quite extensive Spanish library.  I plan to apply the skills I learned last year (though not the vocabulary, haha!) in this endeavor.  I’m interested to see if this tactic works well with my Spanish, despite the linguistic differences (aaah! cognates!  how I’ve missed you!  Conjugations, not so much . . .) and my lower language level.  Stay tuned for future posts!

I’m also using some tools to track my progress, namely Beeminder to keep me on a steady pace of about a page a day.  (A page a day.  Now doesn’t that sound manageable!  Imagine my dismay when, in the depths of my frantic reading over break, I realized that I could have read the entirety of Harry Potter in one year by reading only half a page per day!)

We’ll see how this year goes, but I have tentative plans already.  I was given a copy of 最风筝的人  (Kite Runner, one of my favorite books) in Chinese for my birthday in 2010, and I would love to read that.  XuLei has offered to send me a book in Chinese every year for my birthday present, even making some recommendations.  Adrian, my Mexican lab mate, is also full of suggestions of books written in Spanish.  It would be interesting to read a book written originally in a foreign language, and to read a book that I have never read in English.  These are all future challenges that I hope to tackle soon!

Lastly, I want to share an anecdote from my Harry Potter reading.  While looking up new words after finishing, I came across a few that really surprised me.  Unlike English, Chinese has a finite number of possible syllables, as each syllable is made up exactly of an initial and a final sound, and there are 21 initial sounds and 35 final sounds.  But there are even less than 21*35 = 735 syllables, because not all of the finals can go with all of the initials.  Thus bǔ is not a valid sound, or quen, or xong, or ruai.  After learning around 2000 characters and hearing many more, I have a pretty good feel for what is and what isn’t a valid Chinese syllable.  But there are still some surprises . . . in Harry Potter, I came across four syllables that I had never heard before!  If you had asked me, I would have said that they weren’t even Chinese, but the dictionary says otherwise!  

After looking into it a bit, I suppose it’s not too surprising that I’d never come across them before.  There are only 8 characters that sound like “zei”, 8 “zuan”s, 13 “pie”s, and 30 “kua”s.  This is in comparison to, say, the syllable “shi”, for which my dictionary offers a staggering 276 possible characters.  Crazy.  

PS－ looking through the rest of the possible syllables listed on this site, I was surprised by a few others: cen, chuai, chuo, cuan, den, jiong, kei, keng, miu, mou, nang, nen, nou, nǔe, pou, rua, seng, shuan, weng, and zhuai.  Well, that was humbling.

On the 31st of December, in a plane from Milwaukee (I know, right?) to San Francisco, with only a few hours left in 2012, I read the last page of 哈利泼特与魔法石.  I started reading in Cambodia (around New Year’s 2011) and made enough progress to convince me that finishing it was doable.  I picked it up again last Christmas and made enough progress to convince me that finishing it was doable in 2012.

Chinese Harry Potter makes a great travel companion; the type and format are not nearly as child-friendly as the English publications, and my paperback copy is only 191 pages.  Plus, because I read so slow, I can only make a little progress in a long transoceanic flight!  For these reasons it accompanied me to Cambodia, and for those reasons I also brought it to Europe this summer (although scant progress was made).  

Grad school is busy and reading in Chinese is a relatively slow, laborious, demanding task, so when Christmas break 2012 came around, I found myself with about 70 pages left and two weeks in which to read them.  Even that didn’t arouse my sense of urgency; it wasn’t until I calculated that I had 35 pages left and 5 days – which meant a daily requirement of 7 pages! – that I really got my butt in gear.

By the end of this intense sprint to the finish, my reading speed had increased noticeably.  Without looking words up (only underlining them to look them up later), I was reading about 7 pages an hour.  Abysmally slow for me, used to reading in English, but lightning speed compared to when I first started reading in Chinese.  So that helped, as did the climax of the book and the exciting finish!

I’m really proud of myself for finishing my first full-length book in another language.  I had tried to read books in Spanish before, even Harry Potter, and never made it very far.  Why did I succeed this time?  I don’t think it was simply a matter of language skills.  Here are the three main reasons to which I attribute my success:

A balance between reading and learning

If you look at my copy of Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal, you’ll find maybe 50 pages of intensely underlined text, while the rest of the book is in mint condition – because I gave up.  I guess I viewed it as a textbook and insisted on looking up every single word that I didn’t know or wasn’t sure of.  This slowed my reading pace to a crawl (especially because I was using a paper dictionary and keeping paper lists!) and reduced my enjoyment to exactly zero.  This is why I gave up.  

On my second try reading Harry Potter, this time in Chinese, I relaxed more.  I allowed myself some leeway.  Some words I figured out from context, and figured that they weren’t important enough to look up or learn.  Some words I looked up – some while I was reading, some later.  (I added over 600 new cards to my Chinese Anki deck throughout the book, so it’s not like I was slacking off! ) The truth is, you only learn from books as long as you keep reading them, and if the process is decidedly not fun, you’ll stop reading and won’t learn anything at all!

I also know that, depending on my mood and schedule, my attitude towards this balance shifted.  Some days I was very curious and looked up (or underlined) lots of words; some days I went a few pages without marking anything.  That would have freaked perfectionist me out when I was reading La piedra filosofal, but I’ve finally been able to embrace this flexibility.  

Mimic “the reading experience”

I love to read books.  I love curling up on my bed with my body pillow and reading some evenings.  I love reading on our couch by the glow of the Christmas lights (that we leave up year round . . . ).  I read in cars, trains, planes, buses, boats, subways, and occasionally while walking.  

Therefore, if I am going to attempt to learn or study a language by reading, I have to emulate those things that I love about reading as I’ve always done it.  Another mistake I made when trying to read in Spanish was to require an elaborate setup for my “reading”.  I would have the Spanish book, the English book (for comparison), a dictionary, a notebook (for new words), and at least one writing utensil.  This pretty much confined me to a desk or other such uncomfortable place. 

At times while reading 哈利泼特 I accompanied it with my electronic dictionary or (eventually) smartphone with Pleco installed, and I always had a pencil tucked into the book, serving dual purposes as writing utensil and bookmark.  Especially near the end of the year, when I was trying to get through a lot of pages every day, I merely marked new words to look up later, dispensing with all of the electronics.  Then, at its most barebones, I was able to lay on the couch next the gas fireplace at home and power through an hour of reading in comfort and with great pleasure.

Of course, this required me to go back a separate time to look up words and add them to Anki, but I rather liked the separation between “reading” and “studying” times, as it made the former more enjoyable and the latter shorter :)

Good book choice

Depending on your language ability, it may seem impossible to read in a foreign language without aid of a dictionary or the English-language version for reference.  Of course, I don’t think reading this way is appropriate for a beginner, but more someone at or above the intermediate level.  But even then, I think it’s a good idea to have your first book be something that you’ve read before in your native language.  

I say this for two reasons: First of all, the general story will be familiar enough to you that more words will become apparent through context, further saving time with the dictionary.  But secondly (and perhaps more importantly),  you know you like the book already.  Given how slow I read in Chinese, I would be devastated if I got a third of the way into a book only to become bored and give up for pure aesthetic reasons.  Think of the wasted time!  

Instead, I knew that Harry Potter would keep my attention, even the nth time around.  In fact, I enjoyed this time through more than I expected.  Reading in a foreign language is a different experience – namely, it’s slower – and I got different things out of the book.  

These were important things to learn, and I’m glad after a few tries that I finally figured out some tactics that work for me!

this article on a Shaanxi restaurant in New York that had pictures of the shredded meat sandwiches that were my go-to running-late meal at West Gate;

the sound of a live band playing “I Gotta Feeling” or anything by Rihanna just takes me back to Saturday nights at the Key.

I definitely miss it.  But then again, posts like this one also remind me of some of the more frustrating aspects of life in China:

When I started at a four-year college in 1998, I didn’t think it the least little bit odd that the schedule included in my orientation package already had the date of my graduation ceremony listed. Considering that family and friends would be traveling from out of town and would need to plan in advance, this made perfect sense to me. Why would it be any other way?

Fast forward to late September of 2002 and I was trying to find out what the October Holiday was, . . . what day or days it took place, and how many days off work I had. . . I couldn’t understand how this apparently very important yearly holiday was something that wasn’t listed on the school calendar of events.

I’ve been in China for a tad under 10 years by this point and I still don’t understand. I accept that the Chinese are apparently culturally unable to plan in advance, but accepting and understanding are not and never will be the same thing.

On January 6, 2003, when I left China for a trip to the US and Thailand, I gave my employer a wide variety of options for contacting me to let me know about my schedule. I would have given them my contact information anyways but it was more important than an American might otherwise think due to no one knowing when the Spring Term was going to start. Within half an hour of arriving at Capital Airport in Beijing my phone rang. The head of the English Department was frantic with worry because she hadn’t been able to reach me by phone, hadn’t tried my email address, and classes were starting tomorrow.

The kindergarten after the high school job let me know on a Tuesday that, despite the printed schedule in my contract, classes were ending for the summer on Wednesday and I needed to prepare “going away party” materials to say good-bye to all my kids. I thought maybe it was a boss-to-foreign employee relationship thing but as a student at Hainan University, it was no better. Holidays were announced or not announced seemingly at random and no one knew when classes started until after they had already started. Maybe it was my fault for not living in the dorms?

However, as I got to know more long term laowai and got to know them better, I realized that it wasn’t just me. For instance, friend and fellow Lost Laowai contributor Nicki was working for a training school that wanted her and her husband to renew their contracts for a further two years. The couple made some unreasonable demands to the school, however. They wanted to have two consecutive days off each week and they wanted all schedule changes (with the exception of emergency cancellations) to be posted 24 hours in advance.

This inability to plan in advance isn’t just a school thing but seems, rather, a cultural thing that is endemic to Mainland China. . .

Even though the October Holiday is on the 1st of October every fricking year no one is going to know what days they have off until its published in the newspaper; and the same goes for May Holiday, Spring Festival, and New Years’.

Things are going really well at Stanford.  I’m basically done with my first year, and so far each quarter has been better than the previous one.  It’s a good trend!  I leave for Europe in a week for a short course with my lab, plus trips to Slovenia and the Netherlands to see classmates from my year in China!!

I’m still cranking away at my faithful Chinese Anki deck, which requires about 5 minutes daily to refresh my vocabulary of ~2000 characters.  And some friends and I recently reinstated Viernes Español, a tradition of [trying to] speak only in Spanish on Fridays.  (My lab mate, Adrian, is a real stickler, making me use Spanish even when discussing research.  Sometimes when we’re talking about continuum mechanics in Spanish, I don’t even understand what I don’t understand!) 

But then I overheard Adrian, who is Mexican, talking to another of my labmates, Manuel (from Germany).  They were discussing Spanish and German vocabulary and grammar – and points!  They had just started using a program called duolingo to learn each other’s languages.  Duolingo’s gimmick is that it has you “translate the web”, but in my opinion that feature needs a lot of development.  The real draw of duolingo for me is that it awards you points for learning and reviewing, giving you a concrete way to track your progress . . . and compare it to others’ : )

So I convinced another friend of mine, Martin, to start learning German with me.  Apparently competition is a very good stick (or carrot?) because we have definitely been pushing each other along in the pursuit of knowledge.  Martin, who I am convinced does not ever do work, has 1968 points to my 1162, but I do pretty well in second place keeping him on his toes. 

It’s been fun learning a new language from [almost] nothing.  I’m back in that heady era of high returns, when the words you learn immediately get used in every sentence you speak (“I”, “you”, “to be”, etc.).  When exceptions and, for that matter, all tenses but the present are a far-off threat.  When your mistakes are adorable because you clearly don’t have the skills to be malicious (Adrian recently told our summer student that he ate her instead of that he saw her). 

Also, it’s fun to learn a Germanic language!  It’s fun to struggle with grammar instead of vocabulary (as Chinese is totally the opposite).  Cognates are super fun – oh my goodness, after 3+ years of Chinese I had forgotten how wonderful cognates were!! 

I don’t know exactly how far I’ll go with this program or with this language, but I do know that I will not likely have another time in my life more conducive for learning German.  I have a large circle of German and Swiss friends, including three people I see every day in the lab, and I’m going to Austria for a week in September.  Might as well take advantage of the opportunities and incentives! 

Auf Wiedersehen!

Maybe it was just a coincidence, but when the Shanghai Stock Exchange fell 64.89 points on Monday — uncannily echoing the date of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy students on June 4, 1989, exactly 23 years earlier — the Chinese blogosphere went into a tizzy.

. . . Whatever the reason, the strange trick that the stock market played on the Chinese Communist Party sent the country’s censors scrambling as well, prompting them to undertake unusually strenuous efforts to block references to the tragedy, which Chinese leaders have tried desperately to erase from their country’s consciousness.

In a nation where numerology is taken very seriously, the censors quickly began blocking searches for “stock market,” “Shanghai stock,” “Shanghai stock market,” “index” and related terms. They also deleted large numbers of microblog postings about the numerical surprise.

And even before tens of thousands of demonstrators clad mostly in black gathered at Victoria Park in Hong Kong for an annual candlelight vigil commemorating the Tiananmen killings, censors were also blocking searches for “Victoria Park,” “black clothes,” “silent tribute” and even “today.”

Not only did the broad index of the Shanghai exchange fall 64.89 points on Monday, but the index also opened that morning at 2346.98, a figure that, to some, looked like the date of the crackdown written backward, followed by the 23rd anniversary.

The Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index is calculated by adding up the market capitalizations of hundreds of stocks and then converting the sum into an index based on a value of 100 on Dec. 19, 1990. Richard W. Kershaw, the managing director for Asia forensic technology at FTI Consulting, a global financial investigations company, said that it would be almost impossible for anyone to coordinate the buying and selling of so many stocks to produce a specific result.

But hackers have targeted the computer systems at other stock exchanges in the past, and Mr. Kershaw said it was at least possible that this might have occurred in China. He predicted that the government would investigate, adding, “You can bet we’ll never hear the results.”

Chinese culture puts a very strong, sometimes superstitious, emphasis on numbers and dates. The Beijing Olympics started at 8:08 p.m. on Aug. 8, 2008, a time and date chosen for the many eights, considered an auspicious number.

Haha.  I really can’t decide which would be funnier, if some hacker did this or if the censors are just fighting a paper tiger. 

On the topic of internet censorship in China, I recently watched the movie Schindler’s List for the second time.  The first time I had watched it was while I was in China, and while it was too long ago to be completely sure, I think it was a slightly different movie.  I remembered it being much shorter and there were several scenes I didn’t remember.  I don’t know, maybe the guy with the video camera fell asleep in the theater . . .

I just wanted to share a paragraph from an article that I found particularly interesting, talking about the surreptitious ways the Chinese have come up with to refer to him without censorship:

First he was “blind lawyer;” then “blind man,” then “A Bing,” a reference to a nationally famous blind singer. All were blotted out by the Chinese government’s pervasive, highly computerized security apparatus. Lately, his plight has been referred to as “UA898” — the daily United Airlines flight from Beijing to Washington which, this week, has come to symbolize Mr. Chen’s demand to emigrate to the United States rather than face an uncertain future in his homeland.

Who says the Chinese aren’t creative?

I got the phone numbers of my favorite couple, Lao Liu and Han XiaoGuang, though, and thanks to the wonders of Skype, I decided to give them a call.

The phone rang a few times, then someone picked up.

“Wei?”  A woman’s voice.

“Hi, is this Han XiaoGuang?”

“Yes.  Is this Maria?”

What on earth?  I haven’t seen this woman in nearly four years, we’ve never spoken on the phone, never traded contact information, she’s moved since I last saw her, and the last time we spoke I had the vocabulary and grammar of a 5 year-old.

And she picks me out after the first sentence?!

There’s a few things I really like about Benny’s blog.  He wages war against the misconception that some languages are harder than others, he encourages people (sometimes) to tailor their language studies around the activities that the plan to use the language for, he emphasizes speaking even when making mistakes, he challenges the definition of fluent, he utilizes the Pareto principle in language learning and he promotes the use of videos as a way to keep oneself accountable for one’s goals. 

My own personal mission in life, regarding language-learning at least, is to dismantle the belief that some languages are inherently harder than others.  If a language was intrinsically difficult to learn or use, why would it have been developed, and why would it have continued?  That just doesn’t make sense.  I will grant that some languages may be easier for speakers of certain other languages to learn, but no language is just HARD.  Benny apparently thinks similarly; after each language he learns, he does a post called “Why [this language] is Easy”, in which he usually compares aspects of the language to another language that is generally perceived to be easier, like English or Spanish. 

I also agree with his conviction that languages are learned for a purpose, and that no one method of studying is applicable to every purpose.  For this reason, the way I learned Chinese on the farm during my second summer there was very different than the way I learned when I went back for the year.  In Benny’s words:

This language is yours to use as you wish.  What I say about ignoring those telling you what to do applies equally to what I say. Speak if you want to do that, but forget my advice or that of any particular method and watch TV or read comics if that’s what you prefer to do in your target language (I am totally and utterly wrong to follow if your priority isn’t to speak a language socially…). Focus on reading if that’s the enjoyment you get out of foreign languages, and aim to read the kind of things you would read in your native language…  And, of course, if you enjoy debating politics, speaking with no hesitations as you do in your native language, and using fun references to classical literature, then by all means do that too. In that case it truly is how you were meant to use the language.

Speaking even when you know you’re going to make mistakes has been a part of my Chinese language learning from the very beginning, although I wouldn’t have said it that way back when I started doing it.  I did it on the farm out of necessity!  It’s also clearly not something I’ve internalized completely, because I’m confident in Chinese but downright timid in Spanish.  It’s a huge part of Benny’s philosophy, and probably the biggest thing I take away from his posts. 

Especially since I came back from my year in China, I have been asked a lot if I’m “fluent”.  I never really know what to say, because I don’t quite know what fluent is.  To some people, it means the perfect ability to discuss any topic under the sun, but sometimes when I explain my much more modest abilities, others call that fluency.  One of my favorite articles at Fi3M:

Someone may say that to speak a language fluently or “good enough” by their standards, you must be able to:

• Participate in a debate on a complex topic, such as one on philosophy
• Speak with no hesitations
• Use complex vocabulary and advanced expressions
• Never have any serious miscommunications
• Be able to give the definition or translation of a low-frequency use (but still important) word
• Write a complex essay
• Never make basic spelling mistakes or misuse a common word
• Be able to participate in a discussion that any typical native may have

But here’s the thing – based on these criteria I don’t speak fluent English, my native language. I break many of these rules and others. Going through this list again, in order:

• Philosophy is something I’m quite weak at, and debating is something I’m even worse at. If you gave me this test in English, I’d fail it. This is a fact of life; there are some complicated matters I can discuss, but many I can’t.
• I’d fail miserably at a requirement of no hesitations too. Have a look at my TEDx talk, and count how many times I say “ehh…” in the first few minutes. It’s a LOT. Hesitation can be caused by lots of factors (in my case here, by nerves from talking on a stage).
• I don’t have as many videos in English as I do in other languages online, but there are still a lot. If you watch any of them you will see that I don’t tend to use really big words, and I don’t go out of my way to pick clever quotations or use really well worded expressions. In fact, many English learners tell me that they enjoy reading my blog because I have a straightforward and simple way of writing. This isn’t intentional; I simply don’t use extremely complex English with anyone. I did quite poorly in English in school actually.
• Because of speaking Hiberno English, I’ve had some moments where I have had to scratch my head and wonder what the hell that other English speaker is saying, or vice-versa. What the F is a “nitch”?? Why are they so confused by me saying “Stop giving out about your man”? And that’s forgetting the cultural misunderstandings; I’ve had way more with Americans than I have with Spaniards for example.
• Many times, people have said words to me that I probably should know, but simply don’t. One of my most common uses of Google is actually “define X”, where X is some English word. With enough context I rarely have to do this, but sometimes it’s unavoidable.
• I can’t write an essay at academic standards. I rely on spellcheck all the time when writing something like a blog post.
• I can’t participate in “any” discussion. If I find it boring, I’ll lose interest and lose track in what’s going on in the conversation. Sorry, but this is just the truth. There are a very large amount of possible conversations that I can’t participate in English, even when it has nothing to do with technical issues or enough vocabulary. Talk about shoes/fashion or many sports I don’t follow and you’ll quickly lose me, even though these can be quite simple conversations.

The Pareto principle (that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes) is applicable in many different situations, and I firmly believe that language learning is one of them.  I’ve seen it in my progress – in my 10 week course at the U of M, I learned something like 700 characters; in the nearly three years since then I haven’t even learned twice that.  Anyway, when looking at character frequencies, you see that you just get a lot more “bang for your buck” with more common characters:

500 – 75.8%
1000 – 89.1%
1500 – 94.6%
2000 – 97.1%
2500 – 98.5%
3000 – 99.2%
3500 – 99.5%

Combining this with an earlier point, I think that the most important characters/words to learn are not a universal truth.  They depend highly on the situations in which you plan to use the language.  For me, farm vocabulary and tools were extremely important at the beginning (which is why I learned how to say rivet gun before much more “common” words).   Later on, types of dance, American ingredients, and base Catholic theology were priorities to me that most people probably wouldn’t bother with. 

And his method of making videos every few weeks along the way is really cool.  I really wish I had videos of me speaking at various points, just to see how I was actually doing back then.  You can only judge your true speaking ability in hindsight, I think . . .

My only complaint about Benny is that he often comes across in his writing (especially in his responses to comments) as very harsh.  He can be quite critical of commenters (who, in all fairness, are sometimes very critical of him).  Sometimes this means he ignores the advice of people who know the specific language he’s working on better than he does.  An example:

Da Ben Dan:  The problem is not speaking Chinese, it’s understanding it. Come to Beijing and you won’t understand a word the locals say. It’s like they speak with a mouth full of marbles.
It’s like learning "Queen’s English" and then dealing with a Scouse or Brummie accent.

Benny Lewis:  I’ve been listening to a lot of Beijing Mandarin in my learning material and I can understand it fine.

Da Ben Dan:  Well, good, but that’s educational material.  I’m talking about out-on-the-street, local Beijingers, even- dare I say it- uneducated people. Try sitting in the back of a taxi with a local Beijinger who doesn’t move his lips when he speaks (like a ventriloquist) and see how that goes. I’ve been here 12 years and even now I often go: "Shenme?!?"

Benny Lewis: That’s too bad, but I’ll get to Beijing and let you know what I think when I’m there. I imagine it’s difficult, but way less impossible than you are making it out to be.  Sorry but 12 years is a REALLY long time to not be able to understand people at the level you claim – are you speaking in English the vast majority of your time? It’s the only way I can imagine you would be having so much trouble after such a long time.

I feel like he made some unfair assumptions and jumped to some ad hominem attacks there.  While I understand his frustration at being told everything is impossible, it’s also polite to warn someone behind you about obstacles in the path to watch out for. 

So when he made an impractical goal in his original mission statement, I felt the need to say something.

And yes, I will be incorporating reading abilities into this mission, as I’d otherwise be illiterate, and not able to function socially. My priority will be to be able to read menus and signs, but soon after, I do want to be able to get the gist of almost anything I see, with an effortless ability to recognise the most common 1,500 symbols (about half of what most people would consider the number needed to be proficient, so I won’t call my reading abilities fluent). For this mission I won’t go as far as to try to be able to read the likes of full newspaper articles beyond headlines, as that will take too much focus away from my main spoken objective.

I responded:

I’m excited to see you tackle this!  I think fluency in oral Mandarin is totally doable; I worked on a farm in China with local workers and reached conversational abilities (plus lots of technical and farm-related vocabulary) in about 6 or 7 weeks.  Chinese (and Taiwanese) are very understanding and excessively appreciative of attempts to learn their language (which they themselves believe to be difficult). 

A few words of caution/advice: In my experience (15 months living in China, 10 days traveling all across Taiwan), not everyone in Taiwan speaks "standard" Mandarin, so remember that a word you learn once might not work somewhere else.  Make sure you don’t learn Hakka or Min by mistake . . .

Secondly, 1500 characters is a lot, and learning to read beyond the first 500 or so is extremely antisocial and requires a lot of work.  It’s absolutely possible, but when your focus is to speak with people and interact with the world around you, 1,500 might draw you away from that focus.  The 500 most common characters make up nearly 76% of usage; the top 1000, 89%; and the top 1500 nearly 95%.  Is that extra 19% of _reading_ worth it to you?  I’m a much more serious Mandarin student/user than I think you hope to be; I currently know about 1,900 and wonder how much more I should try to learn for my purposes. 

Apparently he revised his mission, for once taking the advice of several commenters in addition to me.  I would be interested in seeing his reading/writing abilities now!  It has been cool to watch his progress in his youtube videos, and I’m glad he took on the “Chinese is hard” myth. 

Talking to my friend XuLei shortly before the new year, I asked her what I was supposed to do during “my year”.  The answer?  Wear red underwear.  BUT you can’t buy them for yourself, she said – they have to be a gift.

I hosted a Chinese New Year party on 除夕 (New Year’s Eve) and had about a dozen people crammed into my tiny apartment for 饺子，麻婆豆腐，拔丝土豆，宫保鸡丁, etc.  I was talking to one of my American-born Chinese friends and told him the red panties, and he said it sounded like XuLei was “trolling” me. 

Next day, I got a text from him.  He had called his grandmother to wish her a happy new year, and she told he should be wearing red underwear. 

He was forced to concede that maybe XuLei was onto something.