I felt a random urge today to learn to read Chinese. Why not?, I thought to myself. How hard can it possibly be to learn 30 000 characters?
Also, that way I can embarass all my lame Chinese-Canadian friends who can’t read a Chinese menu when we have dim sum. And let’s face it, nothing is better than making Chinese people feel guilty.
I found this great web site with a list of the 2000 most popular characters.
(Added: I wonder how people think differently when they write a pictogram based language like Chinese?)
Yeah, I’ve often wondered the same, but it’d probably take like twenty years to get fluent enough to know how reasoning might differ. Not that that’s a good reason not to learn – I wonder if in a few years thinks might not be like the Matrix though? Where you can just download a language instantly… depends on how long we take to work out how the brain works & learns these things I suppose.
Anyway, it might improve your maths – http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13560741/
I bet that’s why you want to do it, isn’t it? You were always complaining about how your slowness at maths caused low self-esteem… (actually it might have been Rob that told me you were useless at maths, someone like that anyway – well, don’t worry. We can all still keeping learning everyday! maybe this Chinese will just be the starting point in yr journey…)