observing cognition: reading Chinese characters
I studied Mandarin for several years when I was in California My plan then was to move to China after my job finished, but it was while I was at the job that I discovered my gluten intolerance. Living in China with a gluten intolerance was more than I wanted to cope with. I would be a perpetual outsider anyway due to my race and my age, but the idea of not being able to eat with other people was overwhelming. Instead I wandered here and there and ended up in England, and kept working on my Mandarin until I started my master's degree. I found then that after studying linguistics all day I had no more brainpower left to learn this language or any other, so I gave it up.
However, recently a friend of mine inspired me to start reading what my friends are saying on facebook, and some of them post in their first language, Mandarin. It turns out reading facebook posts is a perfect way to reacquaint myself with the language because of the conversational writing style people use there. A great deal of my focus in studying Mandarin was conversation; I spent many hours consistently for years struggling through conversations in the language first with a teacher, then with a teacher and with various conversation partners. Literary Mandarin is different, unfamiliar, not so easy.
The experience of reading in Chinese after several years of not doing anything with the language has been very strange indeed. At first I could see characters and remember how to write them. Knowing how to scribe Chinese characters, with the correct stroke order, is a skill in itself, but I used to write characters for hours each week and I hadn't lost it. However, that's the most consistent and straightforward part of Chinese orthography, so the easiest to recall. What I couldn't do was read. I would see a character and remember it, would remember knowing it, would recall the experience of writing it, would know how it feels in my hand and what it looks like in my childish handwriting. I could point out the radicals that turned up in that character. Sometimes either a pronunciation or a meaning would come magically to mind, but hardly ever both. I ended up having to go to the dictionary and rediscover the process of looking up words, which felt like relearning dance steps from long ago, and I found myself looking up absurdly common characters, words as common in Mandarin as "out" and "get" and "with" are in English.
But another thing happened too. I would read through a paragraph while setting aside the frustration of being surrounded by these familiar glyphs without understanding them, focusing instead on just reading, reading as if I could understand. If I did that about twice and went away without comprehending then when I came back the following day and tried again the characters would come alive; their sounds and meanings would swirl about and then coalesce around them. I would end up with just a word or two per sentence to look up, generally words I hadn't known so well back in 2006 when I stopped reading.
It seems to take an overnight for my brain to walk through the old filing systems and blow off the dust, and in the morning I have many of the characters back. It's like standing in a blurry room and having someone who isn't me turn the lens and bring it into focus.
However, recently a friend of mine inspired me to start reading what my friends are saying on facebook, and some of them post in their first language, Mandarin. It turns out reading facebook posts is a perfect way to reacquaint myself with the language because of the conversational writing style people use there. A great deal of my focus in studying Mandarin was conversation; I spent many hours consistently for years struggling through conversations in the language first with a teacher, then with a teacher and with various conversation partners. Literary Mandarin is different, unfamiliar, not so easy.
The experience of reading in Chinese after several years of not doing anything with the language has been very strange indeed. At first I could see characters and remember how to write them. Knowing how to scribe Chinese characters, with the correct stroke order, is a skill in itself, but I used to write characters for hours each week and I hadn't lost it. However, that's the most consistent and straightforward part of Chinese orthography, so the easiest to recall. What I couldn't do was read. I would see a character and remember it, would remember knowing it, would recall the experience of writing it, would know how it feels in my hand and what it looks like in my childish handwriting. I could point out the radicals that turned up in that character. Sometimes either a pronunciation or a meaning would come magically to mind, but hardly ever both. I ended up having to go to the dictionary and rediscover the process of looking up words, which felt like relearning dance steps from long ago, and I found myself looking up absurdly common characters, words as common in Mandarin as "out" and "get" and "with" are in English.
But another thing happened too. I would read through a paragraph while setting aside the frustration of being surrounded by these familiar glyphs without understanding them, focusing instead on just reading, reading as if I could understand. If I did that about twice and went away without comprehending then when I came back the following day and tried again the characters would come alive; their sounds and meanings would swirl about and then coalesce around them. I would end up with just a word or two per sentence to look up, generally words I hadn't known so well back in 2006 when I stopped reading.
It seems to take an overnight for my brain to walk through the old filing systems and blow off the dust, and in the morning I have many of the characters back. It's like standing in a blurry room and having someone who isn't me turn the lens and bring it into focus.