Tut tut Tuttle

We had such ambitions…

When Mandarin Express ended, Chad and I didn’t want to loose any of the progress we’d made over those four months. Since Mandarin Express focused primarily on speaking, and the specter of learning a few thousand Chinese characters loomed before us we decided to do a little study ahead. Looking around a different character books (and reading Amazon reviews) lead us to Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters, Vol. 1: A Revolutionary New Way to Learn and Remember the 800 Most Basic Chinese Characters

We could TOTALLY learn 800 characters in four months! That’s 200 characters a month, a mere 50 characters a week, or just 10 characters a day! Only a lazy bum wouldn’t be able to do 10 characters a day! 2/2 in Mandarin in 36 weeks here I come!

Yeah, so we’re lazy bums. We got through the first 80 characters before ignoring the book completely. But that’s no fault of the book. It has amusing stories to help you remember the meaning and pronunciation of each character, and was excellent at teaching stroke order for writing. Oh yes, we wrote. We even bought awesome college ruled with graph paper notebooks to practice writing in. See!

You can print your own doane pages for free too!

Ah well, it wasn’t all for naught. We started at FSI with more than 50 characters under our belt, which gave us time to work on other things, like our tones, which, as our teachers tell us, we have to focus on/concentrate/pay attention to all. of. the. time.