I read Sinosplice regularly in my Yantai and Beijing days, and I took a lot of inspiration and encouragement from John’s accounts of learning Chinese. (My Mandarin skills still tap out at basic restaurant vocabulary, but I did turn that limited language experience into a card game) I really loved reading his recent look back on his language journey.
It was the artistic, cryptic of the Hanzi that pulled me in from the start, well before I was sure if I could ever possibly even make myself understood in spoken Chinese. I loved the (rarely guessable) pictographic representations, the even more unintuitive characters indicating abstract meaning, and the plethora of combinations in a myriad of possible structures that very nearly descended into madness.
Source: Reflections on my Experience Learning to Write Chinese Characters – Sinosplice
