For just over a year now, I've been making a leisurely but relatively serious effort to learn Chinese.

My preferred learning vehicles have been Domino and Memrise, which both have the advantage of allowing learners to study in short bursts.

That awesome old bird Duolingo now has a beta version of a Chinese course, too, so I use that for revision. And when I have time (which has not been the case for many, many weeks) I supplement these with Popup Chinese.

You'd think it would be helpful that I live in Malaysia. Actually, not so much... I am learning the simplified Chinese characters (as used in China and Singapore), whereas Malaysia (and Taiwan) still use traditional characters. In some cases they are the same, but often they are massively different. And of course the Chinese I hear around me is often not Mandarin but Hokkien or Cantonese (although Mandarin is gaining prominence among young people).

According to Memrise, I have learned 1290 words. I find this highly unlikely... We're planning to head back to China for our fifth trip next year, and I'm hoping to do better than last time. But I'm certainly not expecting any miracles.

Regardless of my prowess, I'm enjoying the process. I take no responsibility for what follows, as the subject is complex, and I'm not an expert. But here are some of the things I find intriguing.

For a start, I love the way the words build up.

Disregard the exuberant introductions that (misleadingly) promise extremely rapid Chinese reading ability. Actually, not that many Chinese characters work in this highly pictographic way (two trees = wood; three trees = forest).

The vast majority are phonetic-semantic, which means that one part of the character gives the meaning and another the pronunciation. So the character for "ocean", for example, is made up of two components: "water" + "sheep". The "water" bit (obviously) points to the meaning, but the "sheep" bit is indicating the pronunciation (yang2) rather than some obscure strand of meaning. (The numbers are tone indicators, by the way. Tones are another little challenge...)

But despite the predominance of the phonetic-semantic mode, it is still true that many Chinese words have undeniably cute combinations of meaning:

Home = pig under roof; safe = woman under roof; good = woman and child

Lift = electric ladder; phone = electric speech; computer = electric brain

Take care = small heart (reminiscent of hati-hati in Bahasa)

Apart from all this construction (with the related exultation when you spot patterns), another thing that constantly entertains me is my Chinese keyboard.

In goes the pinyin (Chinese written in Roman characters), and out pops the character. Magic!

Of course you have to be super-careful. One pinyin syllable can have many character-equivalents, and therefore many meanings. Pick the wrong one and you've conveyed nonsense (or worse). But it all involves the same kind of sleight of hand that entranced me when I made my brief excursion into Korean.

A further source of interest is the way foreign place names are rendered into Chinese characters. Countries (especially older ones) have names that not only reflect the pronunciation of the original language, but also express flattering things about the polity. So France is fa3guo2, which means country of law. Germany is de2guo2, or country of morality. England is ying2guo2, or country of heroes.

Younger countries get more phonetic renderings, and the word strings are not designed to carry much meaning (although I believe they strive to avoid rude or disparaging combinations). So Malaysia is ma3 lai2 xi1 ya4 (horse come west Asia), and New Zealand is xin1 xi1 lan2 (new west orchid)...

Some characters are frequently used for this process of phonetic transcription.

Take a look at the bag (above) that I acquired from Nottingham's Chinese campus in Ningbo. The first two characters, unsurprisingly, read Ningbo (ning2bo1, which means peaceful wave). The next three are nuo4 ding1 han4, a phonetic approximation with no particular import (promise robust Chinese). (Ding1 is also a component of ding1ding1, the Chinese rendering of Tintin, and han4, for obvious reasons, is ubiquitous.) The last two characters on the bag are da4xue2 (big school, which of course means university).

Here's xue2 again, this time in a zhong1guo2 gong1xue2 (China public school), one of the Malaysian "sekolah jenis kebangsaan" (or "national-type" vernacular primary schools) that aim to foster the languages and cultures of the country's ethnic minority groups.

The character xue2 is made up of the characters for child, small, and roof. And right now, in my virtual school, I'm quite enjoying being a small child under the roof of this ancient knowledge.