(Re)Learning Chinese and reading 米菲在雪中 / Miffy in the Snow

I didn't care about learning Chinese when I was a kid because it was tedious to copy Chinese characters from the blackboard or textbooks. Another difficulty for me, more familiar with English, was that I couldn't map sounds to characters. As a kid, I simply got bored and tuned out.

Fast forward to the 21st century and I'm having another go at learning Chinese. This time around, I've found out the stroke order, which enables me to count strokes correctly and find characters in a dictionary on paper or online (e.g. MDBG allows you to find a character by radical and stroke count or by drawing the character). Mandarin pronunciation has been standardised using pinyin romanisation, so I can (sort of) associate a sound with a character via pinyin.

(Knowing the representation of a sound in pinyin lets me type Chinese characters using Windows' East Asian Input Method Editor (IME). Here are instructions for enabling this feature in Microsoft Vista).

Equipped with a little more knowledge, I challenged myself to read '米菲在雪中 / Miffy in the Snow', which I borrowed from the local library. It's a 32-page bilingual picture book, where Miffy the girl rabbit plays in the snow and kindly makes a house for a bird. It took me a long time (three weeks!) to read it and in the process, I learnt or recalled some things about Chinese:

• Chinese uses classifiers or measure words for different types of objects in a sentence. For example, the phrase 'a little bird' is '一只小鸟' / 'yi1 zhi1 xiao3niao3' / 'a (classifier for bird) little bird'. It's akin to but not exactly like measure words in English (e.g. 'a mob of sheep').
• Some sequences of Chinese characters represent common phrases and only make sense when written together. For instance, 'carrot' is '胡萝卜' / 'hu2​luo2​bo5' but if you translated each character separately, you'd get a weird expression like 'reckless turnip prophesy'.
• Stroke order is critical for finding characters. I couldn't find '还' / hai2 / also, not realising that 辶 was written after 不.

I borrowed another Chinese picture book from the library; I hope I'll get through this one faster!