Instead of spending an hour a day simply studying Chinese, I find myself buying yet another thing to help me–even when I know that time and discipline is the key. But yesterday something happened that seemed to promise good fortune.

I received a box from Amazon with a set of Chinese flashcards (I knew that I would never make my own). I pulled out a few cards from one of the paper-wrapped stacks and flipped them over, not reading them but just looking at how they laid out the character on one side, the English and the transliteration on the other. Then it struck me: I knew the characters. I’d just seen them in the wonderful little book I’ve been reading. The top card was the character for up or above, and the second card was for down or below. And I had read them! I’d read, for the first time, words in Chinese.

There are said to be 80,000 Chinese characters, and one needs 3,500 characters to be able to read. The box of Level 1 flash cards contains 448 cards, so it was serendipity or fate or whatever you choose to call it that I recognized the first two that came to hand. But however I look at it, I feel encouraged.

Unfortunately I don’t yet know how to put Chinese characters into this blog, but that’s something we’ll be working on.