Feeling locked out is the best way I can describe my first few weeks living in China with next to no knowledge of the Chinese language.

In the summer of 2018, I moved from my native London to work as an English teacher in Beijing, with the intention of learning Chinese at the same time.

Initially, I had to put a blind trust in those who were able to help me decipher everyday and important language, from advertising to the many official forms required to live and work in China, or labels on food in supermarkets. Once, near the beginning of my time in Beijing, I realized that I didn't know my own address despite having lived in my apartment for two weeks.

After a few months of one-on-one tutoring, I was able to read simple texts in a jerky, child-like way. In fact, reading Chinese is one of my biggest pleasures gained from studying the language; I love the sheepish feeling of pride I feel when I discover that I understand something new, be it as mundane as the instructions printed on my washing machine or the navigation app on a cab driver's smartphone.

Finding the logic

China's geographical size and huge population result in a plurality of languages and dialects. To be specific, it's Mandarin or putonghua that I've spent a year and a half studying, the most dominant form of what foreigners call "Chinese." It has the highest number of native speakers of any language in the world.

The Chinese character system means that there's less of an opportunity to unpick new words using their phonics as is possible with English. Most Chinese characters instead comprise of smaller, simpler symbols known as radicals, which can give an indication as to meaning or sound. To read, you need a decent memory and a lot of patience.

One rule of thumb is that you need to be able to recognize at least 2,000 characters in order to read a newspaper. Depending on how intensively you study, memorizing this many could take several years. Full words are usually made up of at least one character.

Radicals can give clues as to meaning. For example, the character for "water," shui, can be simplified into a radical consisting of three dashes. This, on the left hand side of a character, suggests that its meaning is associated with water, such as the Chinese word for "river," he.

Meanwhile, a horizontal line with two vertical dashes in the middle is a reduction of the character for "grass," cao. This can be found on the character for "medicine," yao, for example, as this would traditionally have been made from plants.

Elsewhere, radicals can indicate sounds. The character for "work," gong, looks like a Roman capital letter I. It is part of the character representing the color "red," which is pronounced similarly: hong.

Slow progress

Studying Chinese by rote is crucial if you want to get anywhere. When I started learning, my teacher introduced roughly 10 new characters to me every week, leaving me to memorize for homework what accumulates to several pages' worth. I would grab any down time to pore over these, or else carefully trace them out in a notebook known as a tian ge ben, literally "field grid book" because of its square printed pages.

In reality, I don't need to learn how to write Chinese by hand. I can type pinyin, a system of English letter phonetic approximations of Chinese words, into my computer or smartphone and the corresponding characters will appear. But, writing practice serves as a way of ingraining the intricacies of written Chinese into my mind.

The slow, systematic learning process feels poles apart from my experience living in Beijing more generally, a life characterized by its convenience and use of technology for instant gratification.

Updating an ancient language

Chinese is one of the oldest languages in the world still in use. There is debate as to how many characters it comprises of exactly, though it has been said that there are 3,000 in everyday use.

These have evolved throughout history, a major change in living memory being the simplification of characters by the Chinese government in 1956. But, traditional script which requires more strokes is still in use in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

As a learner I can only read certain fonts comfortably, essentially the equivalents of Arial and Times New Roman. Anything more fun and it's confusing.

Sometimes, Chinese characters gain a new meaning in the modern world. One character, jiong, is an archaic word for "window." But, given that it looks like a downcast face, it has been repurposed online as a character-emoji hybrid, expressing awkwardness, embarrassment or sadness.

The experience of learning to read Chinese as an adult has made me feel like a child again; everything has the potential to be a curiosity or a distraction.

A journey on Beijing's metro system usually involves me paying close attention to random bits of text I see to try and figure out they mean. The metro map itself serves as character revision; I often find myself reading place names as a way of piecing together different parts of language I've learnt. This, or deciphering that a well-known pizza chain has a 30-percent discount on Tuesdays, count as small, everyday triumphs.

(Cover photo: A night view of Nanjing Road, the main shopping street in Shanghai, China, on September 11, 2019. /VCG)

GIFs by Zhang Wanbao, Pan Yufei