Day 327: learning chinese

i’m trying to decide whether to learn chinese while i’m in taiwan. i don’t know how long i’m going to ultimately be here, but it almost seems like a waste not to take advantage of my immersion.

it would help me toward my goal of helping any asian grandma who comes up to me and starts firing off questions before realizing that i have no idea what they’re saying. (this has happened far too many times.) i have a dream of being able to help them out regardless of whether they assume i’m korean, japanese, or chinese. i wanna be the ultimate east asian grandma helper. nothing against grandmas of other ethnicities — they just don’t come up to me asking for help as often.

but here’s the thing about me and languages: i’m terrible at learning them.

i took five years of spanish in high school, but i barely recalled any of it while traveling through latin america for four months back in 2017. i’d sometimes come across other travelers who were practically fluent after spending a similar amount of time traveling, and i’d marvel at their abilities. they could easily hold a 30-minute conversation whereas i’d struggle to say anything beyond some sentences you’d find in a lonely planet phrasebook.

of course, a lot of this has to do with the fact that i wasn’t consistently studying the language. i took spanish lessons in places in guatemala and nicaragua, but i was focused much more on making videos than getting better at spanish. i spent most of my time talking to other backpackers in english than with locals in spanish. turns out that just being immersed doesn’t magically make you fluent.

and even though i lived in japan for an entire year, i never got to the point where i felt comfortable holding any sort of real conversation in japanese. thanks to google’s relocation benefits, i got free one-on-one tutoring lessons with some rad teachers, but i somehow managed to not improve all that much despite that. today, three years after having left japan, i struggle to remember the basic alphabet.

so if i decide to learn chinese, i want to do it right so it doesn’t enter the graveyard of languages that i kind-of-spoke-but-not-really-and-too-bad-i-forgot-everything. on the flight over here, i started reading fluent forever, a bestselling book on learning languages, and it made me think about how perhaps my approach to learning spanish and japanese was misguided. i had spent a lot of time studying grammar and memorizing vocabulary in a classic textbook approach, whereas this book stresses the importance of focusing on pronunciation when you start and training your ears so that you can really hear your language’s sounds. maybe if i tried that this time, i’d have an easier time.

i started googling for resources to learn chinese, and boy, the amount of stuff out there is overwhelming. there are so many books, courses, apps, and podcasts out there for learning and looking through them all sends me straight into decision paralysis. i think i just need to choose something reasonable and stick with it rather than spend all my time trying to decide what to use to learn instead of actually learning.

but do i actually want to commit significant time to learning chinese instead of focusing on browserflow and other fun hobbies like bjj and climbing? HM I DON’T KNOW

—

i posted my gold card guide on reddit and people are leaving comments about how it made the news

wat