When to start "intermediate" learning?

[Strawberries513]

I was wondering how good your Chinese needs to be before you start the "intermediate learning". What I mean is, reading an article, and looking up, writing down, and learning every unknown word. Because Its hard to tell when you're ready for that level. Otherwise you're just looking up every third word. So when are you ready for that?

Well, I hope I made sense, I wrote this in a hurry.

-CaoMei

Oh, I forgot to mention, the type of material I am reading (or trying to read) is Harry Potter in Chinese, and some some texts specifically for beginners.

[shibo77]

I think it depends on the difficulty of the reading material. When I read 红楼梦 I had to look up a character every three or four lines also. But this isn't necessary when I'm reading the daily evening newspaper, or my favourite 故事会 short story magazine. In my case, looking up characters while reading 红楼梦 is more useful for improving my Chinese knowledge. Maybe you can read materials that are a bit higher than your present Chinese level, that requires you to look up maybe 5 to 15 new characters every chapter? If there are too many new characters that you have to look up in a dictionary, then you probably won't be able to remember all of them.

-Shibo

[gato]

You might try some of these texts, which are graded by level of difficulty:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/%7Edporter/sampler/sampler.html or

http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://www-personal.umich.edu/%7Edporter/sampler/sampler.html

A Chinese Text Sampler

An Annotated Collection of Digitized Chinese Texts for Students of Chinese Language and Culture

[Koneko]

As a general rule of thumb, a basic knowledge of 1,000 to 1,500 characters should breeze you through any intermediate tests easily.