I’m back in Wuhan, and I now have less than a week left before it’s time to move out of our apartment (squat toilet and no heating, but home for the past year and a half nonetheless). I’ve slowly started to pack my things, with the painful knowledge that I’ve accumulated way too much during my time here for everything to fit into my suitcase home. And at the top of the list of prized possessions that won’t make it home are the flashcards that I’ve used to learn new vocabulary words during my Chinese studies.
Flashcards: Chinese word or idiom on one side, and on the other side pinyin pronunciation on top and translation below
Using flashcards for memorization is a tool I’ve kept with me since my middle school days — they take a long time to make, but I’m a very visual learner, and I’ve found them to be a very effective tool for memorizing the thousands and thousands of characters needed for learning Chinese. I’ve made a flashcard for virtually every word or idiom I’ve learned, and the pile has grown and grown during my time here. My parents sometimes ask me how many characters I’ve learned, and to be honest, I have no idea. But I did an estimate of how many flashcards I have: around 8900. In total, they weigh 7 kg — which was what finally convinced me to leave them behind. Most words are compounds made up of two to three characters, so I’m not sure how many characters 8900 words and idioms roughly translates into (and I most certainly don’t claim to remember every single word or character that I’ve studied), but all in all, it’s a lot.
As any student of Chinese knows, learning Chinese takes a long time. For speakers of Indo-European languages, it takes much longer than learning another Indo-European language — the difference between English and Chinese is just so much bigger than the difference between, for example, English and Spanish. The US Defense Languages Institute estimates 25 weeks of full-time, high-quality teaching for English speakers to reach a level of basic communication in Group 1 languages (like Spanish, French and Swedish), while they estimate 63 weeks to reach a similar level of basic communication in Group 4 languages (which are Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic). Many before me have ranted eloquently on how difficult it is to learn Chinese (see, for example, here, here, here, here, here, and here), and from a pure cost-benefit perspective, the pay-off is questionable (see here and here for more on that). (To be fair, learning English is difficult for Chinese students as well).
So on the whole, for someone coming from European languages, learning Chinese is a lot of work, maybe not the best investment of time from a pure career perspective, but incredibly interesting, and a great investment of time from a life perspective. My flashcards are my one piece of evidence of all of the hours and sweat and tears I’ve poured into this project, and when I leave those behind, I’ll have to rely entirely on my communication skills as evidence of progress… a daunting prospect. But the time has come. Flashcards, goodbye!