{"id":7712,"date":"2016-01-19T12:20:51","date_gmt":"2016-01-19T12:20:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/?p=7712"},"modified":"2023-01-17T22:32:58","modified_gmt":"2023-01-17T21:32:58","slug":"how-i-learnt-chinese-part-1-why-i-started-learning-chinese","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/how-i-learnt-chinese-part-1-why-i-started-learning-chinese\/","title":{"rendered":"How I learnt Chinese, part 1: Where it all started"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-7715\" src=\"http:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/2000px-Yin_yang.svg_-300x300.png\" alt=\"2000px-Yin_yang.svg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/2000px-Yin_yang.svg_-300x300.png 300w, https:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/2000px-Yin_yang.svg_-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/2000px-Yin_yang.svg_-768x768.png 768w, https:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/2000px-Yin_yang.svg_-1024x1024.png 1024w, https:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/2000px-Yin_yang.svg_.png 2000w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/>I often receive questions from readers about my personal journey. Why did I start learning Chinese? What phases did I go through and what did I learn from them?<\/p>\n<h3>How I learnt Chinese<\/h3>\n<p>It&#8217;s time to answer those questions! Since this journey stretches over more than eight years, it&#8217;s necessary to divide it into several parts, else the content will be too sketchy to be of much interest. My goal with these articles isn&#8217;t simply to tell a story, it&#8217;s also about sharing observations and insights I&#8217;ve had along the way.<\/p>\n<p><em>Tune in to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/podcast\/\">the Hacking Chinese Podcast<\/a> to listen to the related episode:<\/em><br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/anchor.fm\/hackingchinese\/embed\/episodes\/128---How-I-learnt-Chinese--part-1-Where-it-all-started-e1tkike\" width=\"400px\" height=\"102px\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><br \/>\n<em>Available on <a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/hacking-chinese-podcast\/id1536284827\">Apple Podcasts<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8zODhlYjllOC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==\">Google Podcasts<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/overcast.fm\/itunes1536284827\/hacking-chinese-podcast\">Overcast<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/show\/5iCRv1jg3j3yJZGJlYVYaO\">Spotify<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/c\/HackingChinese\">YouTube<\/a> and many other platforms!<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In this first article, I will start with my motivation for learning Chinese in the first place. It&#8217;s the only article in this series that isn&#8217;t really about learning Chinese, but I still hope you will find it interesting! If you want to skip to other parts in this series, here&#8217;s a complete list:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><a title=\"How I learnt Chinese, part 1: Where it all started\" href=\"http:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/how-i-learnt-chinese-part-1-why-i-started-learning-chinese\/\">Where it all started<\/a> (this article)<\/li>\n<li><a title=\"How I learnt Chinese, part 2: Learning Mandarin in Sweden\" href=\"http:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/how-i-learnt-chinese-part-2-foreign-language-learning-in-sweden\/\">Learning Mandarin in Sweden<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a title=\"How I learnt Chinese, part 3: My first year in Taiwan\" href=\"http:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/i-learnt-chinese-part-3-first-year-taiwan\/\">My first year in Taiwan<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a title=\"How I learnt Chinese, part 4\uff1a My second year in Taiwan\" href=\"http:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/i-learnt-chinese-part-4%ef%bc%9a-second-year-taiwan\/\">My second year in Taiwan<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a title=\"How I learnt Chinese, part 5: Returning to Sweden\" href=\"http:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/i-learnt-chinese-part-5%ef%bc%9a-returning-sweden\/\">Returning to Sweden<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a title=\"How I learnt Chinese, part 6: Graduate program in Taiwan\" href=\"http:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/i-learnt-chinese-part-6-graduate-program-taiwan\/\">Graduate program in Taiwan<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/how-i-learnt-chinese-part-7-teaching-writing-learning\/\">Teaching, writing, learning<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<h3>It all began with martial arts<strong><br \/>\n<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>I believe that random chance plays a more significant role in our lives than many people realise. It&#8217;s easy to look back and create a narrative that takes you to the present day, but it&#8217;s rarely the case that we are aware of that narrative as it unfolds.<\/p>\n<p>In short, the reason I started learning Chinese is a long string of fairly unlikely coincidences. Looking back, they all combine neatly to form who I am today and what I do, but that certainly wasn&#8217;t a strategic goal at the time. To learn about why I started learning Chinese in the first place, we need to wind the clock back almost 20 years.<\/p>\n<p>For me, the journey probably started in junior high school, when I started practising Jujutsu (\u67d4\u8853 in both Japanese and Chinese). This led to a more general interest in martial arts, and during a few years, I tried out most of those on offer in my home town Link\u00f6ping in Sweden. I stuck to Jujutsu for a few years, but then switched to Tai Chi Chuan (Chinese: \u592a\u6975\u62f3).<\/p>\n<p>There were several reasons I switched. I found Japanese martial arts to be too rigid with fixed uniforms, a strict grading system and a training environment with numerous rituals. This switch is very important! Who knows, if I had stuck to Japanese martial arts, we might have ended up with Hacking Japanese instead. That would have been cool, too, but that&#8217;s not what happened.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_7716\" style=\"width: 237px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7716\" class=\"wp-image-7716 size-medium\" src=\"http:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/img_1133_fixed_men_77kg-227x300.png\" alt=\"img_1133_fixed_men_77kg\" width=\"227\" height=\"300\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-7716\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>This is one of the few photos I have of myself in a Tai Chi setting. It&#8217;s from Swedish Open 2005 when I won the -77 kg men&#8217;s fixed step pushing hands.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n<p>This was around the year 2000, when I noticed some other people practising another martial art. It looked sort of Jujutsu, but was more fluid, had a less fixed repertoire of techniques and where everybody just wore plain t-shirts. It looked a lot more no-nonsense than anything I had seen before. This appealed to me a lot. In case anyone is interested, the style is called <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Wudang_t'ai_chi_ch'uan\">Practical Wudang Tai Chi Chuan<\/a> (\u6b66\u7576\u592a\u6975\u62f3) and I practised for five years under <span class=\"st\">Paul Silfverstr\u00e5le and also met\u00a0our head instructor Dan Docherty many times.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>When I later needed to choose a Chinese name, I selected one which was closely related to Tai Chi Chuan, but I&#8217;ve already written about that here:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/how-to-find-a-suitable-chinese-name\/\">How to find a suitable Chinese name<\/a><\/p>\n<h3>Why I started learning Chinese<\/h3>\n<p>The step from practising a martial art to studying the language is not hard to understand, but most people I know who practise martial arts don&#8217;t also learn the language, so there&#8217;s still some explaining to do here.<\/p>\n<p>My interested for the language came from a deeper interested in the philosophy and system of thought behind Tai Chi Chuan, which were already somewhat familiar from Zen Buddhism. I started thinking about and reading up on Eastern philosophy (including Taoism and Zen Buddhism). I studied translations of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Tao_Te_Ching\">Tao Te Ching<\/a> (\u9053\u5fb7\u7d93) and listened and read everything I could find by <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Alan_Watts\">Alan Watts<\/a>, who has had great impact on the way I think.<\/p>\n<p>In 2006, two good friends of mine who studied Japanese and were also into martial arts told be that there was a new course at the university where you could study Chinese language and culture intensively for on year. At this point, I had already studied at university for three years (psychology, education science and English), but I felt that this was good opportunity to take a break from that and learn some Chinese.<\/p>\n<p>So I did. I took a study break from the teacher&#8217;s program and enrolled in the one-year intensive program. I had no goal of becoming fluent and I didn&#8217;t have any strategic plans, I did it simply because I was curious and thought it was a good opportunity to try something else.<\/p>\n<p>My plan was to do that for one year and then get back to the teacher&#8217;s program. I did, eventually, but only three years later, after I had studied Chinese full-time for three years, one in Sweden and two in Taiwan. But this is probably enough for one article, so I&#8217;ll save <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/how-i-learnt-chinese-part-2-foreign-language-learning-in-sweden\/\">the next part of the story for next time<\/a>!<\/p>\n<h3>Why did you start learning Chinese?<\/h3>\n<p>Why did you start learning Chinese? Did you have a clear plan when you started or was it more random, like it was for me? I know that the comments are not working, but please nudge me on Twitter (<a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/HackingChinese\">@HackingChinese<\/a>) or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/HackingChinese\">leave a comment on Facebook<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is the first part in a series of articles about how I learnt Chinese. It covers the very beginning, why I became interested in learning Chinese and how that transformed into an opportunity to actually learn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7715,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[838,743,392,742,1100,568],"class_list":["post-7712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-about-hacking-chinese","tag-how-i-learnt-chinese","tag-martial-arts","tag-motivation","tag-olle-linge","tag-podcast-episode","tag-tai-chi"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>How I learnt Chinese, part 1: Where it all started<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This is the first part in a series of articles about how I learnt Chinese. 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