Learning Chinese

Originally posted on xanga.

My Chinese speaking skills continue to decline as I get older.  The opportunity for me to speak Chinese has become non existent these days.  The only times I do speak is when I order food at a Chinese restaurant.  So my vocabulary gets smaller each week, month, urgh.  Having grown up in the US, my Chinese writing and reading skills are very poor.  I can't read a Chinese menu!  I have to go on memory and even that is starting to fade with age.

So, I've made it a point to speak to my daughter in Chinese only.  That's hard since my Chinese sucks and I end up using a lot of English anyways.  So I decided that I should learn to write and read Chinese to help improve my Chinese.  My goal is to eventually read a Jin Yong (Louis Cha) novel(s).

Having my old beginning Chinese books from my college days (easy As), I started to learn Chinese writing/reading.  I thought that if I got 500-700 characters down in the next couple of years, I should be good to go.  Well, I found out that I need 1500-1800 characters to just read the newspaper.  Plus, I am learning Traditional Chinese.  So, if I do learn these, I'll have to relearn 2000+ for their Simplified counterpart.

Wish me luck.  I hope to do all this by the age of 40.  That'll be around the time my daughter rebels and wants to stop learning Chinese.