城乡简史

Shadowing

Extensive and intensive reading.

Chairman’s Bao

Finished 白蛇传

陈奂生上城

More 白蛇传. This is definitely the harder BCLUP reader it’s taking me twice as long.

白蛇传 this morning and then CGR: 1000 Words at lunch.

CGR: 1000 Words. Finished the first story (夜之随想曲）It was about two older Chinese friends talking about the differences of city life compared to the country life. The city dweller is fed up with the city, so he wants his granddaughter to be able enjoy the fresh air and food of the country side and play in nature, but the country dweller is much more of a realist and knows the toils of living there.

Intensive reading

Chairman’s Bao

白蛇传

白蛇传

Different content. Mostly chairman’s Bao and started the Pleco collection of short stories which is the 1000 word count one. This one is a very comfortable read. I like how it’s more modern stories set in China,

Shadowing and more 白蛇传

白蛇传。I really prefer paper graded readers now. Ebooks are convenient but you can get tap happy with the pop up dictionary which I find slows you down haha. It’s so satisfying guessing the correct sound for a new character by recognizing the phonetic component or even guessing the sound of a character because you heard the word before but now you are seeing it in context. For example I knew 湿 means damp from listening only and now I saw it few times in the book and knew the character had to be it. Also, Olle you need to review BCLUP’s graded readers! I honestly love them since their based on Chinese tales and history and the fact they use Chinese to explain new words. It’s a great step up from Mandarin Companion.

Finished Jekyll and Hyde today. It’s amazing how fast my reading speed improved in only a month. After I finished I started on BCLUP’s 白蛇传。

Finished 嫦娥 and then starting reading Mandarin Companions Jekyll and Hyde, since I only read it once so far. It’s crazy dropping down to easier level to the see improvement of reading speed.

Chairman’s Bao on my lunch break

嫦娥

Shadowing

Another chapter of 嫦娥奔月，but then got too tired again and it stopped making sense so I switched to reading All Set Learning’s Boring办公室 and binged all of them in an hour.

Another chapter of 嫦娥奔. Much easier reading in the morning. It’s really satisfying being visualize stuff happening in the story and the new words being absorbed from context.

Chairman’s Bao at work. Particularly thought an HSK 4 article about a worker tying a problematic costumer to a tree was very funny.

Started reading 嫦娥奔月 a 500 字 reader. This one is fairly easy to read, though near the end my brain was sleepy and it started losing comprehension. I noticed this when reading Chinese at night when I’m tired, regardless the difficulty. First, I just see sentences, then words, then it’s just a jumble of characters, and then finally I know it’s time to go to bed.

Chairman’s Bao. Liked the one about Liziqi breaking the Guinness record for most subscribed Chinese youtuber because I’m a big Liziqi fan. Even though it was HSK 3 I still picked up something useful vocabulary. Like 博主：(blogger ) and a chengyu that I decided to learn because I’ve been actually avoiding them haha. 成千上万: (myriads or countless numbers of people.) The context was “这个女孩正在影响成千上万的人” ， (this girl is influencing countless numbers of people).

Shadowing practice

Finished reading BCLUP’s Level 1 500 character story 黄梁梦. I really, really like these graded readers. I find them much better than Pleco graded rainbow bridge readers because the language and vocabulary like Mandarin Companion is consistent. Even though they are only 50 more characters than Mandarin Companion Level 2 they are much more difficult which is good thing. I might say I might like them a bit more than Mandarin Companion because they use simple Chinese on the bottom of the pages to explain new words. One issue I ran into is sometimes comprehending the vocab and grammar is sometimes hazy, but that might be I’m just not yet familiar with the words used more in a more historical setting and the writing does seem to be bit more literary.

Did some reading combined with shadowing this morning. My goal is to try to shadow material everyday since it’s such an insanely efficient use of time.

Different stuff on my lunch break. Enjoyed an HSK 4 article on Chairman’s Bao about this year’s most popular baby names.