So what's up with that wall you got there?

I honestly had no idea that my wall of characters would provoke so much reaction. One of my classmates upon seeing it remarked, "Alex, are you crazy!?" Well perhaps I am. haha

I had this idea for displaying Characters I was learning/ wanted to learn since I was in Taiwan, just over four years ago. It took me so much time (granted I wasn't doing much Chinese Character studying back in Chicago in the interim period) mainly because even though I had conceived of the idea I still had no clear idea about what I wanted to have posted.

The main reason I had for wanting to do this was that I am a terrible memorized, I have to think of things visually and spatially, and I wanted to set out before me all (well, one small bite) of the characters I wanted to learn. I am very interested in the forms of Characters and I love looking at and comparing radicals and etymology. Since my Chinese is pretty basic I have to stick with my own amateur dabblings in Character evolution and etymology. For anyone else so interested I find the charts at zhongwen.com wonderful to look through.

The problem with a traditional dictionary, even a marvelous electronic one like pleco, is that you can only really look up the characters or words that you are looking for. One may browse a dictionary by flipping though it and stopping on a randomly selected page, but it is harder to scan the whole content of the dictionary looking for patterns and connections.

They way I see it, each Character has three distinct pieces of information which must be learned and which could be displayed: the sound (pinyin + tone), the English definition, and the image of the character itself. I could display all three, just one, or a combination of two on the wall. In the end I chose to display the Characters under their pinyin headings, all in alphabetical order as one would find in a Chinese-English Dictionary.

One can buy many posters for teaching Characters and words to Children here. They are fun and helpful but since they are really intended for children they focus mostly on nouns and a few basic verbs and adjectives, they are of limited use. I only really found use for the fruit and vegetable ones, since I like to cook for myself and am always shopping in the outdoor markets. Even the few posters that focus on commonly used Characters never have more than 200. My goal was much more ambitious.

I didn't even really know how many Characters I wanted to display. (In retrospect I think I could have gone though the HSK lists of the most common Characters to find what I was looking for. I may do just that for my second go round. This whole project is continually evolving and I'm sure it will go though many permutations.) Since I didn't really know where to start exactly I picked up my Oxford English-Chinese Dictionary, opened to 阿 (a1) and stated copying down all the Characters I felt I needed to know or should know or wanted to be included on my wall. This was pretty subjective and haphazard way of going about things but I figured I needed to jump in and start somewhere just to get things rolling.

I filled seven and a half pages with approximately 2500 Characters. (I counted them at one point to know how much paper and how much wall I would need, as well as how big I could make each Character to fit them all on one wall. I could go back for an accurate count, but I'm just not that kind of masochist.) From there I figured how big my wall was going to be and how big I could make all the Characters. I wanted to make them as large as possible to make all the components of even the most complicated Characters distinct. The box containing each Character is 2x2 inches. I ended up using the Chinese chess grid already printed on my little work table as a template since it was handy and about the size I was looking for. Each sheet of paper is then seven squares by eleven squares.

(I know all you smart guys and gals out there could go and multiply 77 by the number of sheets of paper I used to find out the exact number but then you would have to subtract all the boxes not containing Characters. Of course I messed up a few times and skipped putting in one or two headings so even that wouldn't be completely accurate, and really I guess an exact count just doesn't mean that much to me in the end.)

Even with all this figured out I still had to decide upon the layout. I chose (perhaps I just like being geeky and difficult) to lay out the characters in the traditional manner (in vertical columns reading right to left). Originally I wanted to have this layout over the entire wall as if it was a single piece of paper, it would have been much more aesthetically pleasing but would have two major drawbacks. First if I ever were to transfer these characters to another wall that new location would then have to share the same dimensions of this wall. But what really did in this idea was that in treating all the separate pieces of paper as one any singe mistake would destroy the whole wall. (I did come up with a way of getting around this but I required me to basically create a second wall to use as a template for the final one. This project was crazy enough as it was and I didn't need to do that to myself.)

So the final layout of the wall is that the Characters are in alphabetical order according to their pinyin (and by tone 1,2,3,4 within that) they are arranged on each paper starting in the top right corner and then moving down the page, reading right to left, top to bottom. Then when I reached the end of the row of pages I skipped down to the next row, and so on. I'll put a diagram up once I upload more pictures.

My next step is to color code all the Characters by tone. My pleco has this feature and I think it would add just enough information without going over the top. So I will soon go out and buy several boxed of either cheap colored pencils or markers and get started. I imagine it will take many hours.