Shanghai Bob

The month-long silence between my return from the Philippines and now was the sound of me studying.  As I mentioned before I went on the trip, I had memorized 500 characters — including pinyin, tones, and hanzi — in a little over six weeks in class.  It seemed like I could do better, so when I got back, I started drilling even more.  A month later, I’ve completed the first-year textbooks and now know 875 characters.  At this pace it will only take…two years before I can read a newspaper.

Studying so much every day really had an effect on my perception of characters.  I had a few interesting epiphanies, for example that the logos for China Telecom

and Bank of China

are both stylized versions of zhōng,

the character that represents the Middle Kingdom.  I had seen that The Bank of China symbol is a version of the old Chinese coins with a square hole, but the resemblance to zhōng was something I hadn’t noticed.  The China Telecom character is supposed to look like a globe, and also like the characters C and T (borrowed from Toyota’s logo?).

I had a bizarre experience while waiting for the elevator.  I was subconsciously counting along with the digital display as the elevator approached my floor:   15, 16, 17…  I only noticed I was doing it because when the display changed to 18, I mentally read it as 旧 jiù, the character meaning old.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 15th, 2009 at 9:54 am and is filed under chinese.