Tag: hanzi

Categories
in china languages

hanzillion, reloaded

some years ago, i thought i was done with chinese learning and dropped my long neglected hanzillion.com domain, where i used to post chinese characters (or hanzi) that i saw on the streets of shanghai… and then regretted it. by the time i checked on it again though, it had already been snatched by someone else. :(

early 2019 found me in the throes of re-learning all the characters, and it made me miss my little hanzi blog like crazy. patiently, i waited and waited, and eventually it paid off because we were able to get it again once it expired — victory! :D i’ve pointed the URL to a simple tumblr blog, and have been re-using old photos from our time in shanghai to post characters now and then. i hope i have enough photos to last until our next visit to asia!

feels really good to once again own the word hanzillion, a word i’ve made up over 10 years ago to describe all the zillion hanzi out there. :)

Categories
in china

hsk

in case of emergency


a couple of months ago i thought that since i was leaving china soon and had been studying chinese for 1 year and a half, i might as well have some sort of certification. so, at my teachers advice, i registered for the hsk (the standard chinese test for non-native speakers, also called the chinese toefl), but on the basic level, because i hadn’t done any specific preparation for this test. to take the test on the basic level you have to know around 800 characters/1033 words.

so last month, i did the test along with a lot of other hopeful students. it’s a multiple choice test from beginning to end, and it has 3 parts: listening, grammar and reading comprehension. the first 2 parts are ok, but the texts they put on the reading comprehension part are really hard, some of them i was completely clueless… i honestly can’t understand the difficulty gap between the three parts. why would they make a reasonably easy test and then make the last part 100 times harder? :|

anyway, a month later, ladies and gentlemen, i am very proud to announce that i’ve passed the HSK exam! :D i was given a level 2 grade, which translates in

“The candidate has acquired the basic (middle) Chinese competence that can meet the demand of basic daily life, a certain range of social communication and study to some degree. “

yay! i’m really happy about this, and it’s a big motivation for me to keep learning chinese elsewhere. perhaps in a couple of years i’ll be ready for the intermediate exam. :)

Categories
in china in shanghai

small victories

...

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!

Categories
in china languages

quote of the day

in case of emergency

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

Categories
in china photography

hanzillion: a zillion hanzi out there

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!