Over the past two months, I’ve developed a morning routine:

  1. Drink a big glass of water (always hydrate before you caffeinate, folks)
  2. Pour a cup of coffee (essential)
  3. Eat breakfast (almost always scrambled eggs… delicious)
  4. Open Duolingo, and write down everything.

“Write down everything”, you say? Yes, everything! For learning Mandarin, I can’t imagine doing it any other way.

The pages up top show all the symbols I’ve learned so far. Every time I encounter a new symbol or meaning, I add it to the list and try my best to draw the symbols as accurately as possible.

I also write down every sentence, every pronunciation, and every translation I encounter. This is the real meat. So far, I have 39 pages, or roughly 1 page every 2 days:

Has my chicken scratch progressed at all over two months? For some symbols, yes. For others, definitely not. Here are three examples: 我 (wǒ, meaning “me”), 你 (nǐ, meaning “you”), and 是 (shì, meaning “is”). So far, I’ve written “我” 64 times, “你” 51 times, and “是” 48 times.

我 你 是

My 我 (wǒ) is wobbly, but consistent. My 你 (nǐ) likes to tap its foot and flex its right arm, but eventually I was able to convince it to settle down. And then there’s 是 (shì), having a bit of an identity crisis. What happened?

When I first saw 是, I incorrectly parsed the symbol as four pieces: a stacked box, a horizontal straight line, a backwards “λ”, and a “t” with long arms. That’s what I thought I saw, and that’s what the symbol became to me. But for the next 30 times I wrote 是 that way, something felt wrong. It wasn’t until two weeks ago that I realized the bottom line is supposed to be connected, with a “⊢” above it. Now the whole symbol finally feels like it makes sense. (It feels easier to write too, but regardless, I’m still garbage at drawing horizontal straight lines.)

Is it all worth it? On the one hand, if I wasn’t writing so much, I probably could have completed twice as many Duolingo exercises in the same amount of time. But would I really have learned anything? Frankly, I don’t think so. Of the symbols that I’ve “learned”, I can reproduce about half from memory. The half I can’t reproduce are exactly the ones I haven’t written more than a few times!

So, all’s that to say: write every day, and write everything. It’s worth it.