Memorizing the Card Catalog

I'm immersed in studying Chinese. I love it.

It's hard to convey to people who've never studied Chinese what it's like. For those of you who've studied French or Spanish or German, I would say that it's nothing like studying a language related to English, because it's not.

Here's the best that I can do. If you are old enough, you might remember the wooden card catalog at your elementary school. Well, once you learn how to use it, it's not a big deal. Just look up whatever book you need and then you can start looking for it on the shelves.

Well, learning Chinese is sort of like that. Except you have to memorize the card catalog. Unlike those other languages above, you can't really make associations with cognates, because there are none (except email, which is pronounced "yi-mei-er", and aspirin, which is pronounced "a-si-pi-lin").

Of course, perhaps there's another way to describe it. Perhaps it's like visiting a little village in a fantasy novel, like in Lord of the Rings. You meet all these new people and see things you haven't seen before, and have experiences that you haven't seen before, and then after you've been there for a while (and you think you know it), more is revealed to you and you realize there is a little pond you've never seen, a quiet elf who never goes to the town square, a path behind the tavern that goes to a meadow in the woods....