Just curious to see who is actively studying Chinese here or speaks Chinese to some level (whether through study, as a native language, or a heritage language). This community seems a bit inactive at the moment so I am wondering about who might be lurking and have an interest even though the posting rate is a bit slow.
Describing your level/experience with Chinese and info about what language variety, writing system and such you are studying/speak is welcome.
With Chinese, I’m currently just a beginner learner, studying Mandarin. I am mainly in the phase of gathering some study materials and learning some basics. I have been studying Korean for a while, and in Korean about 60% of words are of Chinese origin. So I’m coming in with a little bit of prior exposure to reading and writing certain characters (Korean uses an alphabet but it’s easy to look up the corresponding Chinese character in a Korean dictionary). Chinese is not my current main focus but it probably will be in the future.
As for heritage speaker, I’m a native English speaker and I wouldn’t describe my experience in any language as exactly “heritage”. However I was informally exposed to Spanish a lot as a child (although not at home), without studying it, and I can relate with the situation of being able to have a basic conversation where people might sometimes think I am fluent, but then failing to be eloquent and having some strange uneven gaps in my knowledge that seem weird given my seemingly decent (at first glance) accent and vocabulary.