yesterday the clerk at the postoffice gave up and spoke to me in chinese (which was better than his english) and a lady in the queue even told me my chinese was good :)

persistence seems to be paying off!

Everyone knows that literacy in Mandarin means hour after brutal hour of memorizing and practicing a script whose design clearly shows the influence of sadistic genius.

from Beijing sounds

hanzillion is a (recently started) photo project*, a collection of the zillion hanzi, or chinese characters, found on the streets of china.
it works as my homework: when i hunt for them, my photographic memory starts to remember their strokes and forms. which i desperately need to do, since i have at least some 3000 to go before i can read a newspaper…

and yet, foreign as 99.9% of these characters still are to me, i can’t but marvel at their mystery, different typographies and simple beauty. it’ll be a work in progress, for a very long time.

* i just can’t seem to get enough of them!