Chinese in Emojis

Foreword

The entire concept of this site is ripped off from DrDru's Main Experiment. It's a collection of stories written purely in Japanese, supplemented with emojis and simple CSS tricks to immerse the reader in a little world where they can turn off the native-language-speaking part of their brain, thereby being exposed exclusively to Japanese without a translation layer in-between. I found it to be a very useful resource in my own Japanese learning journey.

I think that there is something very raw about learning a language without the filter of translated material. With how different some languages can be in aspects like vocabulary, writing system, culture, etc, it feels like you could never hope to truly understand and grasp a language fully without experiencing it like you did in your mother tongue as a baby--no preconceptions, no baggage, no nothing.

Now obviously we can't age-rewind back to zero, but we can try to simulate it with the best tools we have available! And that's where this resource comes in. It's a series of short stories that contain some basic Chinese words/phrases/sentences accompanied by some crude visuals to illustrate their meanings. I find this easier to implement for more literal and concrete things, so this is obviously only intended to be supplementary material for a Chinese language learner. Something else to note is that this resource is only really usable if you have a basic foundation for some Chinese characters. Maybe like HSK 1 or something. While you can toggle Pinyin on and off above all words, I think this resource will probably not be useful if it lies far beyond the learner's point of "slight discomfort".

Just calling the language "Chinese" also misses a lot of the nuance behind this language. There are over a billion Chinese speakers in the world, but this includes the guy from Mainland China who calls a taxi a "出租车車" as well as the auntie from Taiwan who calls it a "计計程车車". Furthermore there are dialects that are mutually unintelligible and follow (what I'm guessing are) different grammar rules. The variant of Chinese written in this guide could probably be described as Beijing Mandarin, which most people in China are forced to learn. So please bear this in mind while learning, that some of the definitions assumed by this resource can become inaccurate depending on where you are in the world. Most of the basics and fundamentals don't vary too much though.

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I used AI to build the basic layouts and components for this website, but all story content is written by myself. If there are any concerns or corrections that need to be made to this resource, please feel free to contact me by email.