My Reading Journey to the West

It's been a long time since I've written about my Chinese language learning but that doesn't mean I haven't been diligently working away at it! In fact, I'm on quite the roll at the moment and wanted to share about my process.

Around September/October, I took a pause from reading Harry Potter in Chinese (which is written in "Standard Written Form") and began reading The Little Prince in Cantonese. This is an amazing learning resource because it includes Jyutping right on the page! It still took me about 3 months to read it, but I finished it nonetheless! From this, I learned that I would much rather be reading in "Cantonese" rather than "Mandarin".

The reason I put those words in quotations is because traditionally those words apply to spoken languages only; there is technically just the one written language of Chinese. Cantonese is a spoken language and it has not traditionally been written down - I write all about this in my post about how Chinese is a diglossic language. However, there has been a recent trend of publishing books that actually use the grammatical structures and written characters that belong to the Cantonese vernacular. Up until recently, all writing would be done in "Standard Written Form" - which most closely lines up with Mandarin grammatical structures, characters and vernacular.

For me, someone who grew up hearing Cantonese, a parallel that I draw is that reading Standard Written Form is like reading Shakespeare or Victorian literature, whereas reading Cantonese is more like reading something written more recently. Plus, I am spending a lot of time learning and improving my spoken Cantonese, so reading in this vernacular is sure to help with those goals more than reading in Standard Written Form!

Lucky for me, as I mentioned, there are more and more books being published in Cantonese! One such book is 西遊記 | Journey to the West, one of the four great classical Chinese novels.

I began reading this book a month ago and am headlong into chapter 7 out of 30 chapters. It's quite a process to read this book and I want to share this process with you! Many folks may read this and think the amount of work I put into this is a bit wild - but many of you who study a language may relate to how therapeutic and rewarding a process like this can be.

I'm at the point in my learning where can recognize many Chinese characters and know the corresponding sound to the character. One of the trickiest parts about reading Chinese is that you may know the meaning and sounds of all the characters in a sentence, but when 2, 3 or 4 of those characters are side by side, then it creates a totally different meaning, such as:

長 long 年 year 累 tired 月 month/moon

they don't make much sense when you think of each word separately, but put them together...

長年累月 = over the years, after a time

I am not yet at the point in my learning where I know these phrases and idioms when several characters are stringed together. So how I "read" this book - I go 1 page at a time and do the following:

On a spreadsheet, I type the Jyutping for the words I know on the page; this will generate some suggestions as to all the characters that make this sound and I pick the one that corresponds to the page. If I don't know the sound/Jyutping of the word, then I change up the keyboard so I can draw it out on my screen.

Once I have a page copied onto the spreadsheet, I copy/paste it all and pop it into Pleco - an amazing Chinese/English dictionary/learning app. I scroll through to find the words, phrases, idioms that are unfamiliar to me and I copy those into the spreadsheet with an English translation.

I then apply this amazing free extension/app called Mandarin/Cantonese Tools by Luc Wastiaux that adds Jyutping to my spreadsheet in the blink of an eye!

I am now able to read my way through the page - the Jyutping is super helpful for those new words or phrases, and to help with reading fluency so I am not halting at each word. Even though I recognize hundreds of characters now, the Jyutping helps to reinforce the words I'm less familiar with or see less often.

When I first started reading 西遊記 a month ago, I was doing this translation work paragraph by paragraph. Then I started doing page by page, and now I'm doing it chapter by chapter! I feel very motivated by this progress and super proud of the work I've put in to learning to read this book! I'm also very excited to be learning a Chinese classic. I feel like I know very little about Chinese culture, and absolutely nothing about Chinese literary culture. I am an avid reader (of English books) and grew up very devoted to classic English literature. It's exciting and empowering to now get a chance to access classics of my own heritage culture for the first time and to break the colonialist mold of what it means to be a "classic".