Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, gave an interesting presentation during a TED Talk last year. The talk was called, “Smash fear, learn anything”, during which time he explained how he learned Japanese, Swimming, and Tango using a specific method. There is a lot that can be said about him, and his accomplishments, but I am not going to deal with that now.
The reason I am writing about his talk is to share his method for ‘mastering’ Japanese, and to see if people think it can be applied to Mandarin Chinese.
In this TED Talk, Ferriss describes his experience learning Japanese, and claims that he tried every book and method on the market (by the way, this is the really short version!)***. Nothing seemed to work until, one day, he discovered the 2000 (ish) most used characters used in Japan. Many publications try to limit themselves to these characters, while others are required to for literacy purposes.
He notes that, after discovering this list, he ‘took off’. In less than a year, he was able to read the national newspaper, and ended up doing translation work at the age of 16.
After seeing this talk, my buddy started thinking about Tim’s study methods, and wondered if you could take a similar approach to Mandarin. To do this, he went on a quest for the most commonly used characters in China, and managed to find a list, in order, of 3000.
He sent me the list, but I have not spent a lot of time with it, but I wanted to bring it up since I have more free time to dabble (finished my marathon). Just thinking about it, it seems it would have been much better when I was starting to learn, as I am not sure how much I can benefit from memorizing single characters, but who knows?
If you are interested in this idea, or just want to see the list, you can access it online here. You can read about the character selection here. I think you can also get a PDF on the site, but I can’t seem to find it, so I included it here: Common Chinese Characters.
