Some material for reading practice, beginner to just above...

[Shadowdh]

Hi there all, I was just compiling some stuff to do some reading practice with, some beginner stuff and some thats more advanced (but not by much) and thought others might like to look at it... its in two formats.. one is the utf 8 text file that works with Pleco 2's reader and the other is word... hope this is useful to someone.

*edit* it comes from here http://www.uiowa.edu/~chnsrdng/Chinese_reading/Beginning/beginning.html

Chinese reading practice.txt

Chinese reading practice.doc

[ABCinChina]

Just my level!

[Shadowdh]

Glad you like it... I thought much the same... cheers

[megafrenzy]

This information is outstanding.

[skyblue]

thank you.

[Ania]

This is definitely useful!!!! My Kindle is gonna love it!!

[Shelley]

Amazing brilliant excellent i could go on but you get my drift

Thank you

[simpleasy]

Just what I was looking for! Thank you!

[tijana93]

omg this is amazing thx~~

[Mr John]

I had just started thinking about how I could collect enough reading material at my level so that I could spend more time reading and less time searching. Then, lo and behold, I found this. Greatly appreciated!

[Mati1]

So I have decided to give Chinese Text Analyser a try and just installed it.

I loaded the Chinese reading practice text of this thread and CTA shows me that only 69,41 % of the total words are contained in the HSK list up to level 6.

What am I missing?

(I assume that CTA ignores non Chinese characters to not mess up the stats.)

 

The text contains a beginner section and an intermediate section, but is it really getting extremely difficult towards the end?

Can someone more qualified judge the level of this file or point out my mistakes with CTA?

Thanks!

 

(My line of thinking is that if this is a 10000 words level text, the thread should have a different name ^^)

[imron]

What am I missing?

You are missing the fact that the HSK lists are only a general approximation, and unless content has been specifically tailored to an HSK level, there will usually be a large number of non-HSK words in any text.

 

 

 

I assume that CTA ignores non Chinese characters to not mess up the stats.

You assume correctly.  The statistics are only obtained out of entire words determined by the segmenter (e.g the words you can see in the All/Known/Unknown tabs).  Note also that the 69.41% is total words (including repeats).  If you look at unique HSK words, then HSK 1-6 only make up 35.34% of all unique words in the document.

 

What this means, is that you're going to be far better off learning from context than you are from an HSK list.

 

 

 

Can someone more qualified judge the level of this file or point out my mistakes with CTA?

I think the file starts out easy and a quick look shows it's definitely more difficult towards the end.

 

There don't appear to be any mistakes in how you are using CTA.

[Mati1]

Thanks imron, good reply!

 

From a "beginner to just above" point of view, just looking at the stats of this file makes one very unhappy.

I agree that context is the key. I now believe that learning words from lists only makes sense if one has one or more accompanying texts.

In the future, when I want to read something on a screen again, I will check out this text and start from the top (with the help of CTA) until it gets too difficult for me to continue.

I might start printing some of this text with annotations / word list for easier reading; will have to take a closer look at CTA's abilities and the CTA thread (there is no dedicated help page or support section, right?).

[imron]

there is no dedicated help page or support section, right?

Not yet, but it's coming - it's about half way written at the moment but other things have been taking up my time unfortunately.

 

One of the main things that CTA can do for you is to export the top X unknown words sorted by frequency used in a text.  So for example on any given day, you could export the top 10 most frequent unknown words in whatever it is you are reading, and slowly build up your vocabulary that way.