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7/3/13 22:13![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomyOn Sunday I was lamenting to my sister that I just kept on studying Chinese and it didn't seem like I was making any progress no matter how much I studied.
On Monday some books I ordered came in the mail, including Chinese translations of one of the Magic Treehouse books and one of Sara Pennypacker's Clementine books (I love these -- Pennypacker is up there with Beverly Cleary for being stone-cold serious and sympathetic to the dramas of ordinary childhood that look funny if you're standing on the outside but are not funny when you're seven or eight.)
I can actually almost read the Magic Treehouse book. I'm at the level just below "I can pretty much get the gist of it" -- there are places where I can get the gist, and there are places where I drift away from the gist and become completely unmoored, and then I recapture it.
Watching myself learn to read a new language is a very strange experience. I learned Japanese long enough ago that even though I'm a lot slower than with English, and even though there are still a ton of words I don't know how to read, large swathes of text feel like they're just -- text. Shape, sound, and meaning, transparent enough so that I don't have to think too hard. And with Chinese -- it's all still intellectual, still in my head, trying to figure out how to parse sentences, how to parse words, whether X is a word I know, whether I've seen that hanzi before in a different word.
I am happy I know how to say "owl." It will make it easier when I try to tackle my Chinese edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. (I have already learned to say "magic," from a TV show about fairies.)
On Monday some books I ordered came in the mail, including Chinese translations of one of the Magic Treehouse books and one of Sara Pennypacker's Clementine books (I love these -- Pennypacker is up there with Beverly Cleary for being stone-cold serious and sympathetic to the dramas of ordinary childhood that look funny if you're standing on the outside but are not funny when you're seven or eight.)
I can actually almost read the Magic Treehouse book. I'm at the level just below "I can pretty much get the gist of it" -- there are places where I can get the gist, and there are places where I drift away from the gist and become completely unmoored, and then I recapture it.
Watching myself learn to read a new language is a very strange experience. I learned Japanese long enough ago that even though I'm a lot slower than with English, and even though there are still a ton of words I don't know how to read, large swathes of text feel like they're just -- text. Shape, sound, and meaning, transparent enough so that I don't have to think too hard. And with Chinese -- it's all still intellectual, still in my head, trying to figure out how to parse sentences, how to parse words, whether X is a word I know, whether I've seen that hanzi before in a different word.
I am happy I know how to say "owl." It will make it easier when I try to tackle my Chinese edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. (I have already learned to say "magic," from a TV show about fairies.)