So I started a Chinese class last week. It's in the kansalaisopisto (medborgarinstitute, MI) and I signed up for the beginner class but it didn't get enough participants and I met with the teacher and we figured I could join the more advanced class anyway (also that class also needed more participants lest they too are too few and can't continue).
So I'm in this Chinese class that is too advanced for me :P And like, I'm hanging in there, not minding too much that I'm behind, etc. And we got homework. One was to translate a text, which was in both characters and pinyin - easy enough, I can type chinese on the phone and can look stuff up. But the other was this reading comprehension text. That was only in characters. And like, you can't exactly look up a Chinese character on the internet if you don't know how to pronounce. Like, what do you write?
And of course there are dictionaries for the written Chinese language. Words are listed under radicals or by the character's stroke count. But if you're not very familiar with this stuff, identifying the radical it would be listed under is its own challenge. Counting the strokes isn't as straightforward as you might think, either, let alone going through the list of all 12-stroke characters.
But I fucking did it. I succeeded in getting this text of a bit over 100 characters (of which maybe a third is stuff I recognise, like "I" and "is" and numbers and "tomorrow" etc) from characters to pinyin and then translate it.
I feel invincible.
