Thanks for the interest everyone! My original post was poorly written and kind of ambiguous. My bad. I wanted to form a group to work through reading Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology, but I would be down for a "Chinese language learners" group. I just don't have a clear idea of what that would entail, given different levels of fluency. Perhaps we could read something like 活着 together as captain_starry_vere is. And then we could have another channel for...idk, sharing resources/answering questions? also if anyone is interested in working through the anthology lmk!

Hi, I've got Chinese lamguage textbook that's been unopened for a couple of years, so IDK that I'll be learning anytime soon...but I'd be interested in joining too if you accept observers. Also, I have a GC for East Asian / SE Asian Adventure Books. If that'd be something you'd be interested in, shoot me a DM (there's just 2 of us in the GC right now).

I would love to. studied it in college but let it lapse

I'm currently learning mandarin atm but it's slow going. I think it would be a great idea to form a group. If you do it please add me. I'm currently using the fluent forever book. I find it helpful but a bit meandering at times.

Me. Working on reading 活着 since I see it suggested everywhere as a good first book. If you learn ~2k of the most frequent words in the book it is quite readable.

kunst

10 months ago

I've been wanting to take a crack at 活着 for a while now. I can read DuChinese stories based on a 1500 vocab without much struggle, and those based on a 2000 word vocab somewhat easily. Is 活着 suitable for this level? Are you able to just read naturally, guessing missing words from context clues? Or is it more of a laborious process?

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captain_starry_vere

10 months ago

I don't think you could just jump into 活着 right now and understand it. But I think you could start working towards it. I was at about your level when I got bored of DuChinese and wanted to read a full-length novel.

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captain_starry_vere

10 months ago

As for the reading process, I decided I wanted to feel like I was actually reading and enjoying the book as I worked through it for the first time; I didn't want to learn the words as I went. So I decided to learn the most frequent 95% of words in the book before I even tackled page 1. This took a few months of learning 20-40 new words every day (adding them to space-repetition software). Now that I've reached that point, reading is pretty easy. On each page there are maybe 1-2 words I don't recognize and I can usually guess via context.

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captain_starry_vere

10 months ago

I bought Chinese text analyzer so lmk if you want the word list and the .txt file for the novel lol.

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kunst

10 months ago

pls send both!

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sol3il

10 months ago

I just downloaded Du chinese to check and we're about the same level, although I have a hard time studying with study content which slows down my progress terribly. I compensate by watching slop only in Chinese. My grasp on spoken language is better so I wanted to start with theater plays, I have 雷雨 lying around and I can try to find a pdf file if you want.

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