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Towards Mandarin fluency - Team 鹊 TAC’14

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69 messages over 9 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 7 ... 8 9 Next >>
Ninibo
Diglot
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Germany
Joined 4017 days ago

88 posts - 116 votes 
Speaks: German*, English
Studies: Mandarin

 
 Message 49 of 69
07 March 2014 at 9:33pm | IP Logged 
I'm at about half of 第十二夜-天方夜谭 and Zhong Chenxuan did make an appearance. This one is mostly set in Iran and has a Arabian Nights theme. Cheng Qisi's 表哥 went missing in Iran looking for a treasure. So his mother phones Chen Qisi who immediatly boards a plane to look for him. We'll see where this goes.

Other than this i've been watching some dubbed episodes of Detective Conan/ Case Closed online. The quality is surprisingly good. No chinese subtitles, though. I watched that series years ago when it aired here, watching it now makes me somewhat nostalgic. I'm enjoying it immensely.


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Ninibo
Diglot
Groupie
Germany
Joined 4017 days ago

88 posts - 116 votes 
Speaks: German*, English
Studies: Mandarin

 
 Message 50 of 69
08 March 2014 at 11:03am | IP Logged 
第十二夜-天方夜谭 is done and i think this is one i liked the least of them. I'll take a break from this series to read one or two other books and then come back to this. Out of all the books in this series i've read i like the fourth the best, so she's definitely improving.
I am now at 1604 pages.

The next book will finally be 撒哈拉的故事 by 三毛. Took me long enough.
There is one thing i've noticed in the course of this project, apart from increased reading speed: there is so much i want to read in Chinese. In the beginning i was afraid all i had to read were translations of book i had already read in other languages, but now that i dug a little deeper i realized how much interesting stuff there is. Sure, i've read some translations, but they were all new books (and all from Japanese). My reading list gets longer and longer and i'm especially looking forward to reading a few books by authors that are at this point in time still too hard for me. And then there's Wuxia, which will be something for 2015.

The first book i read this year was 我读 by 梁文道 and he has a tv show in which he reviews books in about eight minutes. Here's a youtube playlist. It's a little old, for newer episodes i'd go to a Chinese site. I've watched a handfull so far and added some books to my list. He also reviews non-chinese books.
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Ninibo
Diglot
Groupie
Germany
Joined 4017 days ago

88 posts - 116 votes 
Speaks: German*, English
Studies: Mandarin

 
 Message 51 of 69
15 March 2014 at 8:20am | IP Logged 
I'm a little behind with everything and i'm pretty sure that's how it will stay for the rest of the month..
I'm through with 撒哈拉的故事, which puts me at 1914 pages read. I'm actually a big fan of essays, no matter the topic, so i really enjoyed this. Sometimes her opinion or what she did struck me as rather weird, but that has probably to do with a difference in age and culture. I have another of her collections, so maybe i'll pick that up next, i haven't decided yet.

I tried out Lingocracy, because it has the one lingq feature i really liked, so i'll be testing wther this is something for me. I doubt i'll read full novels online, because i prefer reading on a page or ereader, but i added an essay collection by 张小娴 with really short essays. Apart from that i plan on reading newspaper articles and such. I'll try it will the end of april and decide then if i'll continue using it.
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Crush
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1622 posts - 2299 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto
Studies: Basque

 
 Message 52 of 69
15 March 2014 at 3:52pm | IP Logged 
Wow, you finished it already? I've been reading it for three weeks and am only halfway through :P

I'd also rather read a book, but i just can't do that with Chinese. With virtually any other language it's fine, i can read and even if i don't know a word can sound it out and have a good idea how to pronounce it. With Chinese not knowing a character means i can guess it's meaning but not it's pronunciation. I'm really not sure how to get around that. EDIT: I meant a paper book, that's why i'm using Lingocracy. I agree it's probably better suited to shorter texts and articles, but i want to read books and it seems to be the best solution for me. The dictionary feature on my e-book reader is really slow, especially when i'm still looking up so many words.

Edited by Crush on 15 March 2014 at 3:56pm

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Ninibo
Diglot
Groupie
Germany
Joined 4017 days ago

88 posts - 116 votes 
Speaks: German*, English
Studies: Mandarin

 
 Message 53 of 69
16 March 2014 at 10:37am | IP Logged 
@Crush
My reading speed highly depends on the writing and if there are unknown words i cannot guess from the context. With Sanmao a lot of the unknown words are things like names/ transliterations/ food etc, so i usually don't bother to learn those. I also don't look up every single word i don't know, if there are few unknown words i'll look all of them up, if there are, say more than five a page i'll try to find out which are important. If there are more than ten the book is too hard for me.
When you are done with Sanmao you could give Liuliu's essays a try. Her writing is really accessible and each essay is rather short, so you should be able to get through it fairly quickly. Besides, if you pick up another of Sanmaos works after finishing 撒哈拉的故事 you'll probably a lot faster than now.

I picked up another crime novel this time, it's written by Higashino Keigo 东野圭吾, who also wrote 放学后. I enjoyed that one, so i have high expectations. The book is called 嫌疑犯X的献身 and seems to be one of his best known works. I really look forward to more crime fiction, because even though the genre doesn't really grab me in English or German, i really liked what i've read in Chinese so far.
Really, my Chinese reading list has gotten incredibly long..
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Crush
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Senior Member
ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5866 days ago

1622 posts - 2299 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto
Studies: Basque

 
 Message 54 of 69
16 March 2014 at 4:09pm | IP Logged 
Thanks, there are definitely more than 10 new words a page for me :P

I'll also check out 六六's essays after 三毛, though i still want to look at the 第十二夜 series :)
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Ninibo
Diglot
Groupie
Germany
Joined 4017 days ago

88 posts - 116 votes 
Speaks: German*, English
Studies: Mandarin

 
 Message 55 of 69
16 March 2014 at 7:07pm | IP Logged 
@Crush
I'd start with the fourth volume 第十二夜XYZ谋杀案, that's the one i liked best so far. You definitely don't have to read the others before this one to understand whats going on.
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Ninibo
Diglot
Groupie
Germany
Joined 4017 days ago

88 posts - 116 votes 
Speaks: German*, English
Studies: Mandarin

 
 Message 56 of 69
22 March 2014 at 12:13pm | IP Logged 
Just a pretty short update: I stopped reading 嫌疑犯X的献身 for the moment, because i'm going to London in a few days and i want to bring something that will suck me, so that i'm hopefully giong to read something.

In the meantime, i finished two other books: 梦里花落知多少 by 三毛 and 谢谢你离开我 by 张小娴, both essay collections, both very good and easy reads. 2449 pages read.

I'll be a little more active when i'm back in April, i swear. See you!


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