r/xiangqi

Disclaimer: I know this is probably a tired topic but I'm hoping my question is slightly more nuanced than the posts I found when I tried searching the topic.

For those of you who have zero knowledge or familiarity with Chinese languages and their characters, how long did it take for you to gain 'fluency' in recognising or identifying pieces?

To be clear I don't just mean learning and memorising which symbols represent which piece, but moreso how long it took for you to get to a point where you could look at or 'scan' the board and quickly identify the layout of the various pieces on the board.

I've only just begun learning to play xiangqi over the past few days, and was honestly surprised at how quickly I was able to learn to memorise and identify all the different pieces. Researching the various origins and meanings of the characters definitely helped a lot (e.g. the character for eorse including the four small dashes to represent it's legs, the elephant character signifying an elephant on it's hind legs etc. etc.)

I know it's still early days, but despite being able to recognise and identify a piece when I look at it fairly quickly, I feel like I'm a long way off from being able to look around a board and quickly comprehend the entire layout.

In chess, I'm familiar with the various silhouettes of the pieces to the extent that I can understand the composition of the board without even really thinking about it or focusing on actually 'identifying' pieces.

Right now when I play xiangqi, it only takes a few turns before I'm having to spend a lot of time slowing down to make sure I'm identifying pieces correctly, understanding where all the various pieces are located in relation to each other, which ones are defended and which aren't etc. just to piece together the most general concept of what's happening on the board.

it 'feels' to me as though the characters are inherently less intuitive to recognise compared to both the physical pieces of a chess set or the silhouette symbols used in online chess. To be clear, I know this can't actually be the case, there wouldn't be billions of players worldwide if nobody was capable of reading the board like I can in western chess, I'm just explaining how it feels to me right now subjectively.

I also struggle with visualising the various pieces 'vision' (I think that's the term, the positions which they can move to and/or capture on). Obviously I'm used to the western chess board and thinking in terms of squares rather than points, but I don't have the same (biased) perception that playing on the intersections rather than squares is 'less intuitive' to the extent that I do with identifying the pieces/characters.

So yeah, just curious how long it took everyone to reach the kind of level of comprehension I'm describing here.

Also, fwiw, I know that you can play with chess-like silhouettes online or even buy a physical set with chess-symbols on the tiles, but I find that these look kind of ugly and lack the charm of the proper characters, so I'd rather not play with them.

A friend got me into Xiangqi a few months ago. I’ve played chess for years, so I figured it’d be easy. It wasn’t.

The main issue was getting into it. The Chinese characters on the pieces were intimidating and the English resources I found were pretty scattered. Honestly the only reason I stuck with it is because my friend kept playing with me. Once it clicked, I actually started to really enjoy it.

So we ended up making an app to make the early part less confusing and Xiangqi more accessible, mainly just trying to help new players.

I’d really like feedback from people who actually know Xiangqi. We didn’t grow up with it, so if something feels off or missing, I’d like to hear it.

If anyone’s open to taking a look, I’m happy to share.

Is there any good xiangqi app for ios or windows?