My First Chinese Sentence

I've been making a bigger effort to learn Chinese this year, and that includes Chinese characters. While I still find learning most Chinese to be like pulling teeth, I've actually enjoyed learning characters. It's like learning some sort of secret code. A secret code that only some 1.4 billion people can break. The characters look so strange and are so odd to write that I feel like they are imbued with some sort of mystical power. I actually find myself practicing writing them when ever I have a free moment, as opposed to most of my Chinese study, which I usually try to avoid. Writing characters in Chinese is hard for a number of reasons. First, obviously, they don't really look like anything. They are each there own little odd hieroglyphic picture. Second, the characters are actually much more complicated then they first appear. I you look really closely at them you'll notice that many of the lines have little twists at the end, or that some of the lines bend in ways that feel unnatural to write. Third, the stroke order, the order in which each individual stroke of the pen is written matters a lot in Chinese. It doesn't really matter how you make letters in English as long as they look right in the end, but in Chinese the stroke order can be used for inputting characters into your phone, and people will explain which character they mean to each other by tracing it out on their hand in the correct order. Stroke order is considered an integral part of Chinese and everyone can tell immediately if you aren't doing it right.

The Chinese characters are also difficult in that they often have several parts and it's important to get the parts, and the different characters to be the right size in proportion to one another, which given that some characters are much harder to write than others is no easy task. Finally, while simple characters may involve only a few strokes there are some, even some fairly common ones, that take more then 10 strokes to write. But even with all this I've found it fairly engaging so far to write these. I have piece of paper after paper with characters written over and over in an attempt to make them look mostly correct.

For my first sentence, and someday my first paragraph, I decided to write the sort of essay a little child would write. Something like, "My name is Daniel. I come form America. I have a sister and my family lives in Beijing..." After working on it for a while I was finally able to write my first sentence in Chinese: 我的名字是元帅。 "My name is Daniel." Actually it says my name is 元帅 or Marshall, but since it's my name either way I'm translating it as Daniel. This actually raises an interesting question about translation. I think most people wouldn't translate 元帅 as Daniel, but I think it works. There is a good argument that words are essentially signs pointing to a meaning. When I say "chair" you don't consider the letters or the sound but conjure a picture of a chair. So by that logic since both "Daniel" and "元帅" point to me the translation works.

I also recently completed learning my second sentence: 我从美国来。 "I am from America." So that's just about 20 characters down 5000 to go.