I recently read How Will You Measure Your Life by Clayton Christensen on recommendation and now I’ll propagate the cycle by also proselytizing the book. It’s an accessible, self-reflection provoking read with great insights for cookie-cutter career-conscious yuppies. I was personally galvanized by the discussion around “Investing for Future Happiness” and “The Risk of Sequencing Life Investments.” Through a combination of myopicness and inertia, we often underinvest in the drivers of our long term satisfaction (family, relationships, health) because progress in short term satisfaction (career prestige, money) is so tangible. Even when our mental calculus explicitly recognizes this tradeoff, we convince ourselves it’s ok. We falsely believe that it’s a sequencing problem and we’re just deferring the investment. In reality, this mentality promises failure because future happiness requires consistent, intentional investment starting today.

Turning this lens on myself, I realize my future relationship with my family is curtailed by my ability to speak Chinese. As a heritage speaker, most of my Chinese ability comes from Chinese school and family exposure as a child. My language ability (at best native elementary school level) has been attenuating from chronic underusage. In conversation with fluent speakers, I come off as either a simpleton or a heavy Chinglish user. As I become older, connecting with my parents and passing this cultural heritage to my future children resonate strongly with me. There’s also the “Chinese business career angle” that isn’t personally meaningful enough to sustain this motivation. I anticipate this will be a multi-year investment to re-learn Chinese. The time to start is today (metaphorically, I actually started earlier this week).

After some research, I’ve noticed that the existing Chinese language apps are too simplistic for heritage speakers, most of whom already have both the fundamentals and a good ear for Chinese grammar. Conversely, learning Chinese through a native elementary school curriculum is inefficient because there’s so much culture and language fluff. I think back to how I developed my English voice – the biggest accelerators were reading and immersion. As a first step, I’ll need to build out my Chinese vocabulary – inadequate vocabulary turns reading into tedious torture. For immersion and practice, I luckily have many patient friends who speak Chinese at various levels.

My plan is to build a HSK5 level vocabulary (2500 characters) and then start voraciously reading. The HSK is the Standard Chinese Proficiency Test, with levels from HSK 1 – 6. Chinese speaking jobs usually require HSK6 certification, the comparable language proficiency of a 12 year old native-speaker. My functional vocabulary is currently ~500 characters (HSK3). I’ll need ~2500 characters to read newspapers and consume other Chinese media. Vocab lists are a dull business so I instead intend to power through the Coursera HSK Chinese language courses, which are reasonably interactive. I’m budgeting 35 hours over 3 months for these courses (4 HSK courses * 7 weeks/HSK course * 5 lessons/week * 15 min/lesson). If I’m lucky, I’ll finish my first Chinese book before end of year.

I fully expect progress to be slow and incremental – here’s to planting saplings.