800 Hanzi in Three Months
Today marks the three month anniversary since I started learning Chinese hanzi. The above chart is a chart of my progress taken from Skritter which has been my study tool of choice. Actually I’m a day early but I pushed on and made it to the 800 character milestone. The dip you see is the result of a holiday. It’s typical to come back and find you’ve forgotten a bunch of characters so it takes a few days to get back up to speed.
I started off with a wordlist which I made from the textbook we’re using at uni. That took me a couple of months, which in theory means that I ought to be able to write anything that comes up in the exam. However since I hadn’t previously studied there were a lot of elementary characters I didn’t know how to write. I could guess at them because I can read several thousand, but that’s no good a lot of the time. Particularly since at exam time they wont let me take in my beloved Pleco. That in itself feels kinda unfair to me, I don’t plan on being anywhere without it. You’re allowed to take in a dictionary, which is basically the same thing just infinitely slower.
To flesh out the elementary characters I moved on to studying the HSK1 list for awhile and then switched to a ’500 most common’ character list and a word list for another, more elementary, textbook which is also used at the university. The problem with Skritter, for me anyway, is that ability to nail a character in Skritter really isn’t the same as being able to write it legibly. I put that down to a general lack of handwriting experience. That’s tending to get better though, particularly with the amount of stuff I need to write in the classes each week.
This does, of course, represent some extreme effort on my behalf. Around half an hour to an hour every day. The steeper line towards the end of the graph is closer to an hour a day. On the other hand I’ve picked up a knowledge of how to write Chinese which is in excess of the students in my class that have been doing studying Chinese writing for several years. Of course they have lovely handwriting compared to my scrawl but you don’t get marks for that 
Learning to write hanzi has also improved my reading ability substantially too, I think. Particularly differentiating characters that look the same, it has certainly fostered a wider understanding of radicals. Aesthetically too, I’m glad of having this skill. I’ve never been an artist, my mind seems to be the sort that draws geometric shapes and diagrams more than curves and pretty things. Nevertheless when I write Chinese I look at it and think, wow that looks lovely. I plan to give calligraphy a bash with some good old fashioned brushes, soon as I have some breathing space and can find someone to teach me.
