When I arrived in Beijing without knowing any Chinese, I figured out pretty quickly that I’d never encountered a learning experience like this one before.

Sure, I’d studied Spanish and gotten pretty good at it academically. But Spanish is different – it has the same alphabet and plenty of cognates. Pronunciation is relatively simple. An English speaker will have the basic skills to start reading, writing, and speaking with only a few days instruction.

Chinese is something else entirely. It was the first time in my life where I started learning something with no reference points whatsoever.

Starting out is like planting flags in unknown territory. Learning is building, slowly, a set of data points, making connections between them, and creating a web. Then we’re able to deepen and grow that web. That body of knowledge allows us to navigate the language and the culture. This learning process can be abstracted to this:

  1. Foundations: establish fundamental reference points
  2. Web: Build connections between those reference points
  3. Follow those reference points to new knowledge
  4. Repeat

Foundations – 基础 I’m going to teach you one of favorite Chinese words.

Let’s go on a nerdy journey to explain why the word above is so cool and to show you how this process of learning works.

First, I’ll give you some reference points. Chinese characters are frequently made up of a number of smaller characters called radicals that have their own meaning.

The first character above 基 is really two characters stacked on top of each other. The bottom character is 土, pronounced “tu”, and it means “earth” or “ground.”

The top character 其 is pronounced “qi” (sounds like CHEE from “cheese”) and is a pronoun of sorts. This character gives an indication to the sound of the whole character, which is “ji”.

The second character 础 is made up of two characters. The first character is 石, pronounced “shi”, and it means “stone” or “rock.” The second character is 出, pronounced “chu” (like CHOO) and means “to go out.” It gives the sound to this character, which is pronounced “chu”.

So, we have two characters, one meaning “earth” and one meaning “rock.” The first happens to look like a medieval tower, at least to me. The word 基础 put together means “foundation.”

Building associations Now, we can pick a node and pursue it further. Let’s choose 石 and see where that takes us.

Here’s a short list of hundreds of words that contain 石 and their meanings:

石油: petroleum or oil – the second character 油 means “oil”. So literally, “rock oil” or “oil from rock” 玉石: precious stones – the first character 玉 means “jade” 矿石: ore – the first character 矿 means “mine, mineral, ore”

You can see how easy it is to get lost in the language, chasing one character into many different words, and how the Chinese language starts to become a deep, interconnected web of meaning.

To take it one level further, another favorite phrase of mine uses one of the characters above – 加油！It means “get after it!” and literally means “add oil” like adding oil to a fire.

加油！