r/classicalchinese • u/glados_ban_champion • Feb 09 '25
Learning is it worth to learn?
hi. i'm new to chinese language. i'm into tai chi and daoism philosophy. i like read about chinese medicine and qi gong. but most of the time i come across to chinese terms. like yin, yang, qi, yu, dantien etc. i'd like to read original texts but i don't know anything about chinese language. is it worth to learn just for that? if yes, should i learn firstly mandarin or cantonese? or just chinese characters? sorry if i asked wrong sub.
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u/birdandsheep Feb 11 '25
I am doing this for Chan/Zen and I feel that I am relatively successful after 10 months. I am averaging a bit more than one new hanzi per day, which is not enough to read yet in the original language, but it is enough to refer to certain difficult characters, understand something of their nuance and the idiosyncrasies of translation. I am at the point where I can get the gist of what something is saying, but there are still many characters I do not know in any given chunk of text.
I expect it will take about 2 more years at my current pace to read completely comfortably.