As I talked about in my blog post 'My First Three Months Of Learning Mandarin' I am going to start learning with the help of Heisig method so I can recognise characters more easily.

Today I bought Heisig's book, after reading though the first section that you can download the Simplified version's First Chapter for free and if it inspires you I recommend you buy the entire book.

Greg at Mandarin Segments has now learnt over 1000 characters in a month and a half using this method as described in his blog.

I recommend this book to you all, and hope to document some of my progress with this method soon. Below are the links for this book in both simplified and traditional Chinese characters.



Also on a side note: before I started learning Mandarin I bought this book: Reading and Writing Chinese: Guide to the Chinese Writing System But sadly it is traditional characters and not the simplified, so if someone can find a good home for it and cover postage, I would be willing to send it on. Please get in touch!!

This Chinese proverb is about letting your mind run away with itself. Even becoming preoccupied or obsessed with an idea. The proverb could also be used to describe someone who often daydreams.

胡思乱想
hú ​sī ​luàn ​xiǎng
to let one's imagination run wild
​

Another couple of English Proverbs with similiar meaning are

A bee in your bonnet; and

Flights of fancy

Both those proverbs have the meaning to let thoughts preoccupy yourself and to maybe even become obsessed with those ideas.

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