Recently I was reading a discussion about learning to read Mandarin and someone suggested a book. I was interested because the story was supposed to be at a level for people who've learned about 300 characters. I think I know more than that, but this seemed like a good way to see how I do reading an actual story.

Dream of the Red Chamber doesn't ( Read more... )

I have this strange dual personality when it comes to historical dramas. On one hand, history can be fascinating. I'll start reading about a time and place and get lost in it all. You don't actually have to add things or change history to make an interesting story or drama ( Read more... )

How is it that I never noticed that 熊 "bear" is pretty much 能 "can" with like a fire radical underneath it?


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When I first started learning Mandarin, I felt I had a choice to make. I didn't know how many characters I would manage to learn (and remember), but I was pretty sure I didn't want to do it twice. What if I only learn 2000 characters (which might be optimistic since I've been lazy about practicing)? Should I start learning traditional characters, ( Read more... )

We had a good time talking about food yesterday. My reading of product labels was sometimes okay, but sometimes I would get things mixed up. Here's an example...


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I realized yesterday that I'm starting to get confused with all the words that sound like yuan. Some of these are easier to distinguish, but others... I'll be like... okay, "hospital" ends in which one again?

So I'm going to try and make this clear to my head again. I think I need to go write each of these a few dozen times and maybe then I'll ( Read more... )

Sometimes I see a word, and it just makes sense because the parts make sense. Even if I don't completely understand what they mean, they have personalities. At one point in Romance of Red Dust, Hong Fu says:

(Chinese sub) 在黑暗世界里他是我唯一能感知的东西。
Zài hēi'àn shìjiè lǐ tā shì wǒ wéiyī néng gǎnzhī de dōngxi.
(English sub) In this dark world, he's the only ( Read more... )

This week I realized I'm still confusing these two pairs.


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This is neat: hanzijs.com

You enter a character and it breaks it down into component parts. Not just the radical, but little pieces. You can then break those pieces down to see what else the character is made of.

So for example if I enter 然, it says this is made from 匀,,犬,灬

I'm not sure how often I'll use that, since I tend to work from radical upward ( Read more... )

I found a link to chineselevel.com and thought Okay, testing myself on my reading level sounds fun. You mark the words you don't know and it comes up with a score.

Only I don't trust the results, because:

"You know around 3,478 Chinese words. And should understand about 74% of a Chinese newspaper."
That is so not me. I would have estimated that I 认识 ( Read more... )