Ten More of Us, Ten Fewer of Them

Last Saturday I started a new thing: Learn everything about Chinese characters in two hours. Ten people turned up, and when they staggered out of the venerable Honolulu Coffee Shop two hours and fifteen minutes after they’d sauntered in, indeed they knew everything about Chinese characters.

Everything they need to know about looking them up in the dictionary, that is. Now comes the long slog of trying to read the newspaper and all that. Yes, it takes a few hours, but if it was easy, even idiots would be at it, right? And don’t forget, even very small children can do it, so why not you?
It was good fun (for me) and we had competitions of which team could look up sentences like “I love beer” (我好鍾意飲啤酒）（o hou jung yi yam be jau) the fastest.

And I have to say I was amazed at how quickly they learnt.

Everybody had a grounding in spoken Cantonese, which really helped.
So, contrary to the beliefs of about 1.4 billion Chinese, learning Chinese is NOT genetic. Another victory for Whitey! I’m doing another crash-course this Saturday, May 8th, at 3pm.