I started learning Mandarin in Fall of 2018, and I took 3 years of Mandarin at UCI. I loved my teachers, and I was definitely (somewhat basically) conversationally fluent. I kind of stopped practicing from late 2021 and beyond due to finishing undergrad, doing masters, starting my job, etc.
I’ve been trying so hard to get back into it throughout this year. I was using iTalki for a lot of last year and some of this year. This year I watched 甄嬛传 this year b/c my boyfriend recommended it (SUPER FIRE SHOW BTW!!) and I was happy that I could understand parts of it here and there. It took me YEARS to finish Meteor Garden (2018) on Netflix, but I also finished that earlier this year.
Now, I’m trying to read books. So, I’ve picked up 活着, and I found an audiobook to help me progress through it. My boyfriend’s softly keeping me accountable lolll.
I’ve also started watching 甄嬛传 recently! It is crazy how much more difficult it is to understand compared to news, podcasts, or more real-life dramas because of how different (and dense!) their classical phrasing is. It’s a pretty entertaining show, though sometimes the dramatic suspense is too much for me to bear, so I find myself skipping ahead sometimes.
Recently I’ve been scrambling for different reading material. A lot of people online recommend “anything from Yu Hua”. So, I started reading 活着 and PHEW!!! Every sentence I have 1 or 2 words that I have to look up and write down. It took me about 3 hours to read 4 pages. That said, I like the narrative so far. It’s just rough and I have no idea how long it’ll take me to read the book lollll. I wanna push myself, but my back hurts from writing all that last night LOL.
I wanted to find a good translation of Harry Potter in Chinese because everyone I know here read it between 3rd and 5th grade, but people say it’s better to read a Chinese-original story.
Any suggestions on books that are like… just a little above HSK5 maybe? would be super c00l.
Studying method here: I try to read out loud, look up words I don’t know using the Kindle built in dictionary or Pleco, write it down, continue reading. After finishing reading, I actually reread certain parts out loud to try to recall the words I just learned, and try to comprehend what I’m reading out loud. Definitely a taxing mental exercise but worth it.
I found reading manga to be very beneficial. I never read manga before I started learning Chinese, and I’m not that into anime or other ACG stuff, but still found it pleasant enough. However, getting manga in simplified script - legally or otherwise - is not something I’m too familiar with. Out of curiosity I went on Bilibili to check things out since they have a subscription service or something, but it looks like their manga section is region locked to China. For comparison, it is pretty easy to buy Taiwanese (traditional script) editions on Kobo or something regardless of where one lives. I’m sure there is some way to buy simplified script copies somehow, though.
The usual recommendation for Japanese learners is to read Kotsuba, so I read that in Chinese (四葉妹妹) as my first native text.
Besides manga, the first book of Harry Potter was another early text that I read. Some will argue that it is a bit harder than native texts because they have to translate things into Chinese, but I didn’t find it to be too big of a deal. Either way, it is definitely something gradeschool children read and thus appropriate for learners at similar levels, so I think it may be worth a shot. When I go to bookstores in Taiwan the entirety of the fairly popular “young adult” section is all Chinese translations of English YA fiction, anyway.
It’ll definitely be easier than 活着, I think.
Rereading is a great strategy and I think criminally underlooked! Contrary to expectation, the second read is almost always more enjoyable because you can start to breeze through it at a much faster rate. I also recommend rewatching or relistening to things for the same reason.
When I was a kid I was a huge comics and manga fan. Looking back I believe that reading comics was a major part of my english language learning, as I could only easily find the latest scans in english. ahah
So, recently I have been trying to read some manga in mandarin and it has been a great experience! It is not as practical as reading graded readers, but it is more involving and enjoyable. The process of looking up words and sentences is also kind of exciting.
I use the bilibili app with no issues at all. They have way more chapters of well known classic mangas than I could ever read at my current level for free. Finding this resource was truly a game changer!
Nice! It’s a journey that never really quite ends… even for native speakers!
The silver lining is that even with 1k characters under your belt, you already know 90% of the characters you will come across when reading a book or newspaper:
I’m taking a really ambitious stab at learning the vocabulary for 活着 again, two other Xua Hua books(许三观卖血记, 骆驼祥子), and even Three Body Problem. I found a really insane way to analyze what words I do and don’t know.
Methodology:
Basically, I download the words and characters I know from HH as CSVs. Unfortunately, the CSVs don’t include skipped items, but that’s not too bad.
I find the .txt files of these books online in Chinese, and feed three lists into Chinese Text Analyzer (using a 7 or 14?? day free trial at the moment so it is GO TIME to get all the books I can for vocab learning); (known words go into one section, book txt files go into another). It finds the differences, and then I take the export of the differences back to excel where I do a runthrough of vocabulary to verify words that I don’t know (deleting the ones that I do that still made it through. For single character words, I do a join (or VLOOKUP for excel fans) on my characters list from HH to the words from the book and filter out the characters that I do know.
THEN, I take the full list of things I don’t know, and go to HH to enter it via the dictionary lol.
We’ll see how that goes.
Section 2: Other learning
I’ve been trying to keep up a journal a few times a day, using Deepseek to help me correct my entries and make it sound more natural. I also am making (a massive) effort to use HelloTalk again. The time difference is rough (California), and admittedly I get a little bored (mostly bc of the time difference). But I need to keep practicing.
I found this helpful too (at least when I’m don’t forget to post). Although I post mine to https://langcorrect.com/. You post work in your target language and it gets corrected by native speakers, in return you’re expected to correct a few post in your own native language (same as old Lang-8 if you remember that).
I then often throw the corrected sentences into my SRS of choice as study material since I know it’s a useful sentence (since I literally tried to use it) and also something I got wrong and need to drill.
(PS: Chinese Text Analysers is also a 1 time purchase that’s only like $20 or something crazy low so if you’re free trial version runs out not a huge deal to just buy it lol)
Throwback to the old lang-8!!! I literally don’t understand it at all today. Also, super awesome to know that it’s so cheap. I didn’t bother looking because so many softwares are hundreds of dollars. I’ve heard of langcorrect! I definitely need to try it out
