Most of the folks I know there who speak well never bother learning to read and write characters. I can't blame them. It's a huge commitment to learn a non-phonetic language. But it was funny to watch them be as clueless as me when we walk through a supermarket

I do know one guy who became so fluent that he earned their equivalent of a green card (almost unheard of).

Are you a Wechat user?

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It seems doable, I can probably recognize around a thousand characters or so at this point, and using pinyin as input means I can skip learning how to write the characters which seems to be the hardest part. And I'm not on Wechat.

[–] AfricanExpansionist@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Damn that's impressive character vocabulary!

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 years ago

I mean it's just a matter of practice, I just spend half an hour a day practising using an app and stuff ends up sinking in eventually.