What are you reading?

[Lu]

During the past week, I read short stories in Dutch translation by Yang Mu ('Well and lantarn', philosophical and poetic), Li Qiao ('The man who turned into a ball', escapist story), Han Dong ('Practicing characters', the story of a young boy and his family during the Cultural Revolution, told in fragments, very well written) and Yu Hua ('I don't have a name of my own', also good).

[laurenth]

I've just finished reading Mo Yan's 《师傅越来越幽默》. It's a novella about Ding Shikou, a model worker who, one month before retiring, is sacked when his old, dilapidated factory goes bankrupt and closes. Ignored by petty officials who had promised to help, and not knowing what to do for a living once all his savings have been spent in medical expenses, master Ding wanders alone in the city. He suddenly discovers a fast modernising China that he had ignored until then, with, among other modern wonders, paying toilets, heaps of rubbish and couples who make love in the open air. Which gives him an idea...

 

Spoiler

With the help of his apprentice, he silences his conscience and refurbishes an old bus to transform it into a kind of brothel. 

 

And soon master Ding starts earning quite a lot of cash and even finds a new youth. But then he feels pangs of guilt again: 

 

Spoiler

He feels he's going crazy and his guilt seems to take the form of ghosts.

 

I enjoyed that story quite a lot - not to mention that I'm proud to finally be able to read a Nobel prize winner in frigging Chinese. Let's call that a milestone. 

 

The novella is full of funny observations and sarcastic details about the modernisation of the country, and the material and moral shock it caused, especially to older generations. 

I'm not sure I liked the very ending, though, as it seems to fall flat. On the other hand, since I've closed the book, I'm haunted by this ending and I can't help thinking about its meaning. Probably Ding's conscience created ghosts. I also find it very sad that the apprentice is convinced that his Master Ding would "do anything for a laugh" (I think it's the title of the English translation of the book) as it shows how they fail to understand each other and how it's impossible for Ding to truly adjust to the real world.

 

Whoa, I'm splitting hairs, probably.

[imron]

1 hour ago, laurenth said:

I'm proud to finally be able to read a Nobel prize winner in frigging Chinese. Let's call that a milestone

Congratulations!

 

1 hour ago, laurenth said:

I'm not sure I liked the very ending, though, as it seems to fall flat.

I haven't read this novel, but I have read one of his other novels《蛙》and felt much the same way about the ending.  Perhaps it's a recurring theme.

[murrayjames]

Laurenth, congratulations!

 

How hard is 莫言 to read? Compared with 余华, say?

[imron]

If you've got a few 余华 novels under your belt I'd say give Mo Yan a go.  I don't recall him being particularly difficult to read and they cover a lot of similar topic matter. 

[laurenth]

You could also feed electronic versions of a novel by Yu Hua and another by Mo Yan into Imron's CTA and check the stats. I've never done that myself but if you filter out, say, HSK 1-6 words (or, better, your list of known words if you've used CAT before) and compare the difference, the result may be significant and point to a difference in difficulty.

 

10 hours ago, murrayjames said:

How hard is 莫言 to read? Compared with 余华, say?

 

Subjectively, I had the impression that 师傅越来越幽默 was not impossibly difficult, but it's hard for me to provide a clear answer to your question. I read my first Yu Hua novels over 4 years ago (许三观卖血记 and 活着). It was a tedious process involving lots of dictionary lookups and there were many places where I had to make do with barely understanding the gist. In fact, you could say that that was not "reading" but "deciphering".

 

Comparatively, Mo Yan was easier but, in between, I've read dozens of short stories, a dozen novellas or so and 14 other novels, which probably amounts to several million characters in all. Hopefully my reading ability has improved in the process :-)

 

The difficulty level also varies from one book to another: while I managed to read (or decipher) Yu Hua's 许三观卖血记 over four years ago, last year I was unable to finish 没有一条道路是重复的 by the same author: the first stories were easy enough but the last part of the book was more about literary theory. Very interesting but far beyond my abilities. I couldn't finish the book.

 

Hence, as I was tempted, but feared, to tackle a book by Mo Yan, I devised this strategy:

• I wanted something relatively short - but not too short (reading short stories, IMO, is often more difficult than reading novels, because you have to get accustomed to a new set of vocab, maybe a new style, new proper names, etc. with each short story; longer novels tend to get easier with each paragraph);
• I wanted an electronic version so I could feed it in my Kindle, to make dictionary lookups easier (but not too easy: I only have a ZH-ZH dictionary on my Kindle, and selecting characters on a Kindle is a pain; when I use Pleco reader, I tend to tap too fast on apparently unknown words, without thinking much, which is a mistake);
• I wanted something which has been translated into French, so I could check the translation if I got stuck. Turns out I didn't need that.

师傅越来越幽默 fit the bill. But you could apply a similar strategy, depending on your current level, to whatever it is that you're interested in reading.

 

Edit: <bragging mode> I just checked my list, in fact that's 18 novels. Let's make that 20 if I add Mo Yan's 师傅越来越幽默 and 王小波's 黄金时 代.</bragging mode>

[imron]

3 hours ago, laurenth said:

I've read dozens of short stories, a dozen novellas or so and 14 other novels

Nice!

[Lu]

I recall Mo Yan being impossibly difficult (read the story 拇指銬 in class, chengyu upon chengyu upon chengyu), but that was some ten years and numerous books ago, so perhaps I'd feel differently now.

4 hours ago, laurenth said:

I wanted something relatively short - but not too short

May I recommend the 中篇小説 :-)

[imron]

4 hours ago, laurenth said:

I just checked my list, in fact that's 18 novels

Care to do a write-up in a new thread listing all the books you've read with an approximate difficulty rating and also mentioning which ones you liked and which ones you didn't?

 

As well as general thoughts about how to get in to reading for those people who are maybe thinking about trying to read native content but are a bit daunted by the prospects and don't know where to start. 

[Lu]

During the past week, I read, in Dutch translation, short stories by Ba Jin ('The dog') and Mo Yan ('Breeding cats'), as well as classical stories from the Song dynasty and from the 子不曰. The Song dynasty stories, 'Stories from a broken empire', were about families and couples broken up when the Jurchen invaded. It reminded me a lot of 大江大海 by 龍應台. Mo Yan and Yu Hua and that generation all seem to write many very violent heartless stories about people being horrible to each other. No doubt there are good historical reasons for them writing like that, but after a while it starts to make for unpleasant reading. (Of course, it could be that this is just the selection that has been translated.)

[imron]

Glad to see you appear to be well over your Chinese reading procrastination hump.

[Lu]

Glad you noticed :-) This wasn't a case of procrastination though, I just let the habit slip. Got it back in place now.

[Lu]

Over the past week, I read, in Dutch translation, a short story by Can Xue ('The ox'), animal stories of the Lisu, and a collection of satirical short stories by Zhang Jie. Can Xue is not really my thing, too surrealist for me I guess, although it's good. The Lisu stories were fun, but I especially liked the Zhang Jie stories. She criticised the sluggishness and general ineptness of bureaucracy, where nothing gets done, and if anything gets done it's despite of, not because of the leaders and managers in charge. Written in a way that it's so absurd that it makes you laugh when really it ought to make one sad. The stories were from the 1980s, and some things probably have changed, but probably not nearly enough.

[stapler]

@Ori_A yes after reading it I too came to the conclusion that The Old Man and the Sea was in fact quite a bit harder than something like To Live!

 

Following someone else's comment in this thread, after finishing Factory Girls I'm going to read 江城. Just ordered a copy from Taiwan.

[Lu]

I've been trying to read the Jin Ping Mei, but I'm going to put it aside for a bit. I'm only on volume 2 of 5 and it's just not grabbing my attention. Perhaps it's the translation, which is very thorough but also very academic and a bit dry.

 

So I'm back at short stories in Dutch translation. Read stories this week by Bai Xianyong ('Death in Chicago') and Mu Shiying ('Shanghai Foxtrot') this week. The Bai Xianyong story was about a guy who over time loses himself and everything else in the big city far from home, well-written and sad. I liked the Mu Shiying story even better, it was basically a collection of images of 1930s Shanghai, loosely tied together, but so, so well written.

[skylee]

I have bought Timothy Snyder's "On Tyranny - Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century", and have started to read it.

[艾墨本]

I start my first semester of my 汉语国际教育硕士 at ECNU in a couple of weeks. We were assigned some homework and am working through the texts. I just finished reading three articles on TCSOL. I've attached the three PDFs incase anyone else is interested. 

 

I found all three articles to be informative and was impressed with the authors' ability to maintain a stance of "I think this is important but we cannot over-emphasize it and under-emphasize something else." This was particularly well articulated in the article about pronunciation 《对外汉语语音教学中的几个问题》in which the author looked at several texts from several eras and compared the amount of attention paid to pronunciation and characters in the early stages. On a side note, the author also did a good job of maintain the topic-sentence --> supporting arguments structure of formal academic writing which made reading it much easier that other Chinese articles I've read.

 

I appreciated their argument that spending too much time on character's early on is an overwhelming distraction while also pushing back against a semi-recent trend of completely ignoring characters and studying the early stages through only pinyin. I agree with the need for a few but manageable amount of characters while still focusing on pronunciation at the early stages.

 

From what I've seen of Chinese learners who ignore characters, the transition from mid-low to mid-high without characters becomes an intimidating mountain. Knowing the characters becomes more and more relevant as a learner progresses to distinguish homonymous words like de as well as developing reading and writing habits to support the transition from thoughts that are sentence length to thoughts that are paragraph length. 

 

Now that I've finished these, I'll be moving onto my next big task of 预习 four books. 预习 was clarified today as 浏览 the entire book. This is gonna be a busy two weeks.

汉字教学教什么怎么教.pdf

状态补语的句法语义语用分析在教学中的应用.pdf

对外汉语语音教学中的几个问题.pdf

[Lu]

Over the past week I read short stories by Cao Mu and Jin Haishu, in Dutch translation. I liked the Cao Mu story, about loneliness in the big city (funny when stories are about the big city, they are often about how lonely life is there and how hard it is to make a human connection. I suppose stories about happiness in the big city aren't as literary). Jin Haishu's writing reminded me of Herman Brusselmans.

 

I'm also still reading 北港香爐人人插 by 李昂, which I really like but which is also written in really difficult Chinese.

[Publius]

12 minutes ago, Lu said:

I suppose stories about happiness in the big city aren't as literary

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. So the perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.

[Lu]

On 01/09/2017 at 3:25 PM, Publius said:

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world where none suffered, where everyone would be happy?

I did know that. I guess we need a little bit of suffering to make things feel worthwhile, to make us feel the difference between happiness and sadness. But this is even more true for literature. Even if it ends well, there needs to be some kind of conflict for the story to work.

 

Over the past week I read, in Dutch translation, short stories by Yuan Qiongqiong (a number of stories and I liked them all, she's a very good short-storyteller), Su Tong (about an elderly couple who were once the golden couple of the 1930s movies), Ouyang Zi ('The vase', man tries to control his wife but fails), Shi Zhecun (stream-of-conciousness story about the cripplingly insecure thoughts of a married man on a date with a woman he is in love with), and Mian Mian ('Show me the way to the next whiskey bar', two artistic types share stories about their messed-up childhood).