I completed the last lesson in my beginner-class book today, which means that I should now know 1000 words. An 11th-century Chinese dictionary reportedly contained 53000 characters.* I might be here a while.
Ha, just kidding. Luckily, 'literacy' in Chinese falls somewhere in the 3000-4000 character range. That does not, however, mean that I'll be at full-literacy levels in another 6 weeks. For one, the intro paragraph is misleading -- I know about 1000 words, but not anywhere near 1000 characters. I've started off by gaining speaking vocabulary, so while I can say what I want to within the 1000-word range, I can't read or write all of those same words. Secondly, a lot of those words share certain characters, so even if I could read and write all 1000 of them, it would probably only involve about (I'm guessing here) 300-500 characters. Thirdly, at least half of what I've covered so far has been review (I took a year of Chinese in college way back when... when the Internet was ruled by Archie and Veronica and didn't have pictures, I mean), so progress will certainly not continue at the same pace. I did, however, today learn the word for "Internet", which I'm pretty sure did not exist (the word in Chinese, not the thing Al Gore invented) the last time I was sitting in Chinese class.
*Oh come on, what percentage of words in the OED do you think you know? And I mean the 20-volume edition, not the dinky 2-volume one.
Anyway, my point (I did have one, back at the start of this post) is that I'm supposed to know 1000 words. The tricky part, of course, is remembering them all. I went on a week-long hunt for index cards (which, by the way, are incredibly hard to come by here -- I finally found blank business cards that served the purpose), and developed a color-coded, alphabetized flashcard system, because I am a nerd. I then gave up on this as an effective means of studying after I covered 100 cards with one day's worth of new words. It just didn't seem like it was going to be a good long-term solution.
Instead, I have embraced my inner techno-geek, and am now databasing my vocabulary. In addition to being able to sort by multiple fields (without having to re-sort 400 cards), this has the added (paradoxical?) benefit of actually making me concentrate on the task at hand. See, I could write out the flashcards while watching TV, or chatting on IM; it only required superficial brainpower. Having to input 8 fields into a spreadsheet means that I actually have to think. Who knew data entry could be so rewarding? Anyway, I just came up with this idea yesterday, so I have a long way to go. Good thing I can spend my weekend populating; I have a test next week!