Hey all - I have been really enjoying reading Chinese lately. I have found out there an author ( 倪匡) who writes sci-fi/mystery type novels which are quite short 100-200 pages and are easily accessible (maybe 4-6th grade reading level), I have been particularly enjoying his novel "地图“. The benefit of this is that with a quick google search it is quite easy to find multiple copies of most of his novels, which gives an insane amount of free extensive/intensive reading practice.
If anyone would like reading with me, or helping organize a type of group where we can meet on Skype/Discourse/some other messaging app to discuss this book, or books of a similar level, I think that would be a fun way to meet other learners and maintain motivation. Personally speaking, I am also concurrently reading a Mandarin book on blockchain/cryptocurrency and a programming book I picked up on my last trip to China. To give you a reference point for some of my other reading interests in case anyone wanted to recommend reading something non-fiction/technical.
Or - if that isn’t interesting to you, I highly recommend this author, as well as the casual vocabulary course I’m putting together with the words I want to learn from this novel. These words are non-HSK words especially 成语, and words with characters that are not in the HSK1-6 lists (from my flawed memory, there may be some redundancy but quite limited). I think the gist of a few of his novels I checked at random can be understood by the HSK 5 level, though you obviously miss some of the nuances which make novels so entertaining.
uh, I don’t have the time for a reading club, but wanted to mention you forgot to post the link… rather curious about how far i can bring it with just reading…
If you like I can make Pleco dictionaries. Best then to decide which books you want to read and in which order, then I can make one dictionary for all the books. I’m not reading anything at the moment, I’m slowly watching 武林外传.
Can you walk me through the method you use to make dictionaries? I use Pleco flashcards a lot now so that sounds like it would fit in well with my current learning.
I recently took a trip to China and brought back a copy of Harry Potter (book 1) with me - currently about 10 pages in…
Making a dictionary takes me no less than an hour I think, outside from the waiting on Pleco and Excel. I recommend you take a look at the scripting feature in cta. I was a bit daunted by that and what I do works so I haven’t spent the time to try to write something. I think I have Harry Potter as well, so I can make a dictionary for you as well if you like.
I’ll make a dictionary for all the 7 books if that’s okay. I’ve very quickly looked through the file I have for that and it looks okay I think, except that it sometimes still has the page numbers.
As Harry Potter has a combination of short and long paragraphs, I was thinking I would include a larger number of paragraphs, but cut off the result to a number of characters. The longer paragraphs have 300-600 characters, so if I would make it for myself, for use on my tablet, I would perhaps go for 10 paragraphs max and 1500 characters max, so it could accommodate up to n short paragraphs or at least three long ones. What do you think?
Sounds pretty sensible - all 7 to accommodate the large pool of shared vocab but also motivation to read the whole series! Your idea of restricting the long paragraphs sounds logical to me, especially as a lot of the time when looking at example sentences for context I often am drawn to the shortest one
