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.
To my understanding, a heritage language is a language someone is exposed to/learns in early childhood (e.g. from your family speaking it at home) but that does not go on to become the person’s dominant language, usually due to that language being non-dominant in the society they live in. Instead the person becomes more competent in a different language (typically, the majority language in their location). However, because they had early exposure to the heritage language, they may still retain some ability or relationship with that language, making their experience with it distinct from a fluent native speaker, and also distinct from a completely new non-native learner.
TIL. That applies to me. I can pass on as fluent in basic conversation but I am far from being able to sound eloquent.
How about yourself?
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.