Been trucking along nice and gradually here since January. Had a few weeks of break and some days where I skipped doing reviews and lessons but I’ve been consistently putting in about an hour to an hour and a half a day for just about 8 months now. I tend to be the type of person who struggles with these sorts of long term commitments where progress can only be made gradually so I’m pretty proud of myself for sticking with it.
Posting this mostly as a milestone since I just finished all of the HSK 4 characters and am moving onto the HSK 5 characters. I’m also at around 2000 words on top of that so I’m pretty stoked!
Thanks to the HH team for making this app - I love using it!
@seb Thanks man! Yeah, been doing 20 a day for the most part. There have been just a couple of days where I was really feeling it and fiddled with the time zones to do 40 in one day but its not sustainable or fun for that matter…
Congrats - that’s a huge volume of characters+words, and the consistency in your graph is pretty impressive. Especially since you only started in Jan! Not even a full year to learn 1,500 characters if I’m reading that right.
Out of curiosity what kind of content are you able to manage now your at that level? Still rocking DuChinese and graded readers or can you manage native content?
To be honest I don’t do much reading yet. I spent seven months in China this year and did a ton of speaking practice and some writing as well. Most of my input right now is Hanzi Hero for learning new characters and words and then every week I watch a few episodes of Chinese TV like Battle Through the Heavens, Swallowed Star, and Soul Land II.
I’m able to follow along quite well but I will usually watch the episode a couple times in a row and pause at sections where they use more complex grammar or more ancient ways of speaking (especially in BTTH).
I’m planning on starting reading after HSK 6 and seeing how much I need to pause and look up meaning and pronunciation etc.
How has reading been for you? Do you think it’s been useful for studying and getting more into the language?
So I’m way lover level, which makes my advice probably pretty mute and you should disregard it lol. However for me yes I have found reading useful. The great thing about reading (to me) is that you control the speed - you can slow down to fully understand something before moving on. Sure you can pause and try to read subtitles but I don’t find it the same (especially since I read DuChinese stories which you can just instantly get word definitions or whole sentence translations with zero friction). Especially because spoken dialogue in TV/Movies often isn’t fully complete grammatical sentences. People get interrupted, or change their topic halfway through etc. With written text, every sentence is valid/correct, ever word is exactly where it’s meant to be and the grammar structures they’re using can be examined and copied.
Another nice thing is that it’s also ALL vocab - there is no long pause for effect, or intro credits song or fight scenes with no dialogue etc. The Chinese characters you see per minute with reading is far higher than watching any media. So in terms of just pure volume of content I think reading is far efficient.
Don’t get me wrong I thing listening probably more important overall (for being conversational or consuming tv/movie etc), and I find listening a harder skill to develop because of the real time nature of it. But I do think reading has a place along side it. And I think they complement each other. Reading helps with pure repetition volume of characters and grammatical structures etc which then helps when watching CI videos, and watching videos then helps with reading as you get better than hearing the text as you read etc. So for me since I started reading as well as watching, I think it’s greater than doing either alone.
That makes a lot of sense regardless of level! For me what had been disuading for me was that I felt like the options I had for reading previously were sort of the graded reader type books which I didn’t feel like I had motivation to take seriously.
Your post motivated me to see if there were any books that I could read at my level and looks like there were a couple of interesting choices I found on reddit.
Going to order “1988：我想和这个世界谈谈” and see how it goes!
Yeah I find graded reader type books to be very boring. By the same token, I find the biggest thing holding back reading progress is ironically trying to limit oneself to such things. Not because those things are “too easy” or “not natural” - I don’t think that is necessarily the case - but actually instead because they usually are so boring that it robs the fun out of it.
I mentioned this before on the forums, but I find manga to be great. The grammar is never too complex and it is colloquial in manner (as opposed to some literary books which are written in a more formal manner that does not always correspond to normal speech).
Another thing to keep in mind when starting out with a book or whatever else is that the first chapter is always the hardest. By the time that ends, you will have already done most of the heavy work of looking up words you don’t know or forgot how to pronounce, and those words will usually be used throughout the material. By the third or forth chapter you will find yourself going so much faster than the first chapter that it may be surprising (assuming the material isn’t too far from your rough level). But when switching to a new book, especially if it is in a different “domain”, the same start-up cost will need to paid once more.
