Slapping Chinese illiteracy with the back of my hand

Thanks to my parents, I grew up listening to and speaking Mandarin and Taiwanese. This was wonderful and somewhat unusual at the time. There were many immigrant parents that held onto the misconceived notion that speaking Chinese at home would put their children at a disadvantage in school. It's now pretty clear that the opportunity cost of losing a language far outweighs any benefits gained from listening to non-native English at home.

That being said, I'm afraid my diligence in written Chinese was abysmal. After attending a weekly Chinese school from the ages of 9 through 18, I learned practically nothing. 2 hours a week of school plus 30 minutes of homework or so just didn't cut it. So for my entire life, I've been able to carry on conversationally but haven't been able to read or write properly.

It's time to show Chinese illiteracy the back of my hand.

After transforming my body to look more badass, it's time to train the mind.

The goal is to learn 4,000 Chinese Characters in 180 days. That's right. That's a little over 22 new words a day. This means, by May 1, 2013, I will learn as many characters as the average educated Chinese person knows. I'll be learning simplified characters at the onset, and relying heavily on Skritter & Pleco in combination with Chinese textbooks.

As most of you know, written Chinese is a logographic system with glyphs that represent certain words / meanings / phonetic elements that can be combined to form other words. To give you a taste of some interesting combinations, I've picked out three that I think are outstanding. See what you think!

1. The Chinese character for busy is:

Heart (xin1) + perish (wang2)

Do you know how many times I've heard this at work? A typical conversation:

Me: How's it going [insert name]?

Colleague: Man, I am Crazy busy. There's this [insert sob story]. How about you?

Me: Chillin'. So what's new?

Colleague: Same old.

Sound familiar?

2. I found a truly apt Chinese name for a badass. It's the character for Liu, a common Chinese surname. Granted, this is with simplified Chinese, but it's still cool. The character Liu is composed of two components:

Culture/language/writing (wen2) + Blade (dao1)

A cultured wielder of blades. How cool is that?

3. Finally, for those of you stuck with a less-than-inspiring boss, the word for boss is two characters:

Old (lao2) + Wooden board / plank (ban3)

I can already imagine that the source of inspiration for this word was akin to the scene in Kill Bill where Black Mamba is learning the three-inch punch technique from Pai Mei and pulverizing her hand.  As she slams the board over and over, he sits atop the board and smacks her with his cane for encouragement. She was probably imaging that that board was Pai Mei's face.