How I've been teaching myself to read Chinese literature

[laurenth]

Imron suggested  that I post a write-up listing the Chinese books I've read up to now, how, in which order and with approximate difficulty ratings. Here's a very long post about my experience, for what it's worth.

 

As a disclaimer, please note that I *can't* read Chinese literature fluently. I can't just open a book and start reading. It remains difficult, sometimes impossible. If I start a novel, I'm never sure I'll be able to make it to the end (one thing you won't see in the list below is the list of books I started and could not finish). Though the parts I can read without a dictionary slowly tend to become longer, I still need to look up words on most pages, in particular toward the beginning of the book. Most of the 珠穆朗玛峰 is still beyond my grasp. There, you're warned.

 

The background 

 

I like reading, and reading is the only one of the four language skills in which I've been able to make noticeable and encouraging progress these last few years. The fact that I've been reading some Chinese prose and learning some Chinese words practically every day for years is certainly the single most important factor contributing to this. On the other hand, my speaking skills barely deserve an A2, and if my pathetic listening skills do progress, it's at such a slow pace that I'll be dead long before I am able to understand the introductory remarks of a 锵锵三人行 episode.

 

In fact, even though learning characters looks like a scary challenge when you start studying Chinese, reading may be the easiest of the four skills to acquire when you're learning outside China, i.e. in a non-immersive environment: you're in contro    l of the content and the pace, you have plenty of time to decipher and reread, look up words and study them if you so wish, after the fact or even beforehand if you prefer to do some preparation work.

 

The Plan

 

 

Also, my reading endeavour is the only aspect of learning Chinese where things are more or less going according to plan, albeit ever so slowly.

 

The reading plan went like this:

1. text books
2. readers
3. abridged versions/comics/books for kids/translated novels (already read in another language)
4. native material, starting with authors/genres that have been described as easier in this forum or for which there are explanations in this forum.

 

Of course, there's been some overlap. In fact, I've continued reading readers and abridged versions even after I'd started to read native material, either because I was tired or I wanted more extensive input, or as a preparation for something else. For instance I read an abridged version of Ba Jin's 家 as a preparation to read the original version; I recently read abridged versions of 三國演義 and 水浒传 because, for obvious reasons, I'm unable to read the original books; I read DeFrancis's textbooks and readers because I wanted to teach myself traditional characters.

 

More specific comments for each level:

 

Readers: I read everything I could find at the time, right from my first year of study, mainly the Chinese Breeze series (all books of level 1 and 2, plus the one level 3 book that existed at the time) and the first three books of the "Sinolingua Graded Chinese Reader" series. The popular Mandarin Companion Graded Readers did not exist at the time.

 

Here's a mega list of resources I wish had existed when I most needed it.

 

Kid material: I've not used a lot of kid material because (1) books for children are surprisingly hard; most of them are written for kids that already speak and understand the language fluently; (2) I'm just not interested.

 

Translations: I've kept the use of translations to a minimum: the reason why I'm learning Chinese in the first place is not just the language, it's the culture. Reading The Old Man and the Sea (I read part of it) or Harry Potter (I read two episodes) or the Gospel (I read some extracts) in Chinese is ok, it will be easier than 老舍 or 鲁迅, and it may teach you some interesting language, but you will learn nothing about China. I much prefer reading some Chinese equivalent, though it's not always easy to find.

 

Comics: I do like comics but haven't found something I really liked in Chinese. The few comics I read were translated from Japanese and… see previous paragraph about translations.

 

Abridged versions: I used that resource extensively and I wish there were many more such books. I read all four books published in the Abridged Chinese Classic Series (three by Ba Jin and one by Qian Zhongshu), etc.

 

Another way of making things easier is to choose novels that were discussed on this very forum. There's a wealth of collective knowledge around here. In the list below, I added several links to interesting posts and threads about books.

 

The method

 

There was some gradation also in the tools I've used.

 

Around 2011-2012, I badly wanted to teach myself to read the news in Chinese. For several months, I used Google news like this and a tool called Learning With Texts  to that effect. LWT is a little bit hard to set up but extremely useful and versatile to teach yourself to read Chinese.

 

As a surprising number of Chinese literary texts are available online (though scanning glitches are quite frequent), I've also used e-readers on Android, mostly Pleco. I don't have to explain why, it's the Swiss army knife of Chinese learners. Of course using e-readers makes looking up vocab and storing unknown words for later study a breeze. However, I realised that, in my case, it encouraged my natural laziness, as looking up the same word a dozen times on an e-reader is still much easier than learning it properly… I could probably use Imron's CTA, which was designed  from the ground up to avoid that. In fact I probably *should* be using CTA. Unfortunately, most of my reading happens during commuting or at lunch time, i.e. away from my computer. I can only use my phone, so CTA is mostly out of the picture.

 

Anyway, as I was becoming more and more aware of my vocab laziness problem, I made a conscious decision to revert to paper, at least in part, which makes reading slower and harder, but also (in my case) more productive, as looking up the same word more than twice quickly gets irritating.

 

I also use a Kindle, not only because e-ink is easy on the eyes, but also because I only have a ZH-ZH dictionary and selecting characters on the e-ink screen is hard: as looking up words takes some effort, hence it's an incentive to properly learn your vocab.

 

Finally, I've been using the method suggested by Imron : the first ten Chinese words or so I look up on any given day while reading or getting some other form of input are added to Pleco lists for later study. After that, I keep on reading but the words I look up are not saved. If they are important, they will come up again anyway, sooner or later. Though I didn't plan to do that in the beginning, I tend to delete my SRS queue every few months, when the review queue starts to get unwieldy.

 

The annotated list

 

= 2012 =

 

After many readers, and apart from a few translated comics (哆啦A梦 and名侦探柯南) and lots and lots of snippets of news, the first "real" literary text I read was a short story called 遍地白花 (written by 刘庆邦), which I chose because I'd read an abridged version in the Sinolingua Graded Chinese Reader. I intended to read more such stories in their full version, but never did it. That year, I also read:

• Saint-Exupéry: 小王子 (link in Librairie Le Phénix). Translated from French. I own a bilingual edition. Not that I would need  it: I read the original several times and know it almost by heart. Keep it simple.
• 哈利•波特与魔法石, translated from English of course. I'd read it before in French, probably in English too, seen the movie, etc. Again, keep it simple.
• 王强: 圈子圈套 I: I started that one because it was advertised on this very forum as beginner-friendly. In fact, it was much too hard for me at that stage, but I managed to read it to the end, somehow. BTW, I've tried twice to read episode II but never managed to get past page 40…
• 余华: 许三观卖血记. Yu Hua deserves his reputation of being relatively easy to read. Not to mention that his books are good, though often harsh. I knew I'd probably like it, because I'd read a translation of his 兄弟 before. I'd bought a translation to help me if need be, but I never used it.

• 余华's 活着, for the same reasons. See this thread.

• Zhao Benfu's 天下无贼: a wonderful novella I wanted to read because I'd seen the movie, so I thought I would know the plot. Turned out that the movie is quite different from the novella. The novella is even better. I read it more than once.

 

= 2013 =

 

• 王小波's 黄金时代: I started it because, again, it was advertised by Roddy as "not too challenging". In fact I struggled to read it, but liked it very much. I read it again a few months later.
• Having noticed that reading novels took me a looong time, I thought that, maybe, I was not ready yet to tackle full length novels. So I decided to devote the rest of the year to shorter texts, and so I read a dozen short stories, mainly coming from the site chinese-shortstories.com. However, in a way, reading short stories is harder, because, with each new novel, you have to get used to a new vocab, style, names, etc. But as they are shorter, it's easier to really concentrate on the text. If anyone's interested, I read 赵本夫 《天下无贼》 and 《七个和一个》; 余华 《我没有自己的名字》; 裘山山 《下午茶》; 西西 《像我这样的一个女子》; 萧红 《手》; 阿城 《炊烟》 (a horrifying 1-pager; run, read it); 曹寇 《挖下去就是美国》; 北北 《总之还要住下去》; 赵树理 《小二黑结婚》. I also read some ancient tales like 《孟姜女》etc.

 

Then I delved into a series of abridged versions (Abridged Chinese Classic Series). If you can stand the interlinear pinyin, they are good books. At that stage, I could almost read them extensively:

• 巴金 《家》. I knew I would want to read the original version one day, so I took this as a preparation exercise.
• 巴金《春》
• 巴金 《秋》
• 钱锺书《围城》
• After that, I thought, maybe now I'm ready to try a novel again and I started 老舍's 《猫城记》, because I like sci-fi and the subject was intriguing. I did read it from the first to the last page, but I remember it was very hard and that many parts were opaque. In addition, I thought the book was often  boring, which does not help.

 

= 2014 =

 

• So I reverted to something easier: 哈利·波特与密室, which I'd read in English and/or French before.
• For the reasons explained above, I did not want too many translations, I wanted the real stuff, so I asked for suggestions about teenager Chinese literature on this forum and started to read 张牧野's 鬼吹灯, and it was fun. Refer to that thread for comments.
• I also kept reading a few short stories and readers. For instance "People Education Press readers for 3rd graders". But, much to my amazement, that "3rd grader" level prose felt more complicated than 鬼吹灯. Maybe it was just because it was also much more boring.

• I wanted to go on exploring young adult fiction, so I read 万灵节之死 , by 璇儿. I could read it quite fast. The language is accessible for intermediate learners and the story is engrossing, although there's a sense of déjà vu to it, with a group of people stranded in a very remote, derelict power station and dying one after the other, in some horrible way. I tried to read another novel by 璇儿 (天方夜谭) but found it much less interesting and stopped in the middle. These novels are available online here.

• Gu Long's "流星•蝴蝶•剑". I started that one because it was advertised, on Hacking Chinese, as an “easy” introduction to wuxia. Turns out it was true. See this post and this thread. By the way, this was the first novel I read entirely on paper.

• 三毛's《撒哈拉的故事》. Again, this book is often considered as an "easy one". Hm… I found it was quite hard, compared with what I'd read before. But, from a literary point of view, it's good, and quite original - Chinese authors do not talk much about their experience in foreign countries (as far as I know). So I read it with pleasure.

   

= 2015 =

 

• First I read a handful of folk tales (from 中国民间故事) and of Sci-Fi short stories by 张系国.
• As I had loved 鬼吹灯, I thought I should try 盗墓笔记 in the same vein. The difficulty level was about the same…
• … but I liked 鬼吹灯 better (more whacky, less hollywoodesque), so I went on to read 鬼吹灯, part 2.
• Still in the YA fiction subgenre, I read 病毒 by 蔡駿 (available on kanunu). It's a thriller featuring a mysterious suicide-inducing web page that has something to do with ancient imperial tombs. Plain language, except some parts with imitations of wenyan.
• And finally, a classic, 家, by 巴金 (see this thread). Again, this book is often presented as relatively easy. Nonetheless, reading the abridged version before certainly helps.

 

= 2016 = 

 

• 路遥's 《平凡的世界》. I started it because it was highly recommended by Imron (here). And, yes, it's a very very good book. The only thing is that it took me 3 months to read it, so I hesitated to embark on a 9-month trip to read all three books in the series. But vol. 2 and 3 are on my shelf, and I'll probably read them some day. You'll learn many many interesting things about modern China. There's a certain amount of vocabulary related to the politics of the time and rural life. Other than that, it's fairly accessible.
• Yu Hua's 没有一条道路是重复的. In fact, I stopped reading that book when the ending was in sight, but it's worth mentioning it because the first half of the book is fairly easy while the second half consists of interesting, but much more complicated short essays about literature. If you want an introduction to this style of prose, that book might interest you.
• I wanted to teach myself traditional characters so I read vol. 1 and part of vol. 2 of DeFrancis' readers. Lots and lots of beautifully handwritten texts.

• 林良's 雨天的心晴, which is a 散文, i.e. a collection of essays. That was my first book in traditional characters. As I said here, it's a good book for intermediate learners because it includes very short texts (one page), most of which are written in a very plain language. Each text is followed by a  one-page comment by another writer, which often amounts to repeating/summarizing what's in the short story.

• 三國演義 - 百花改寫版 I (traditional characters). The first part of an abridged version of the classic "Three Kingdoms". Again, this may be a gentle introduction towards a (very long term) objective: being able to read the real stuff. I had to look up quite a lot of words concerning old weapons, war stratagems and the feudal society, but it was worth it as this book is not only thrilling in itself, it's also one of the foundation stones of Chinese culture.

   

= 2017 =

 

• 古龙: 金鹏王朝 (traditional characters). My second wuxia novel. Slightly harder than "流星•蝴蝶•剑", I'd say. Also, there's the added difficulty that the plot is really really intricate. I read half of it on my Kindle in late 2016, stopped, and restarted on paper in 2017 while taking notes in the (vain) hope I could understand the details of the plot.  I posted some comments in this thread.

• 三國演義 - 百花改寫版 II (traditional characters). Second part.

• 水浒传 - 教育部语文新课标必读丛书 (simplified characters). Again, an abridged version of one of the four classics. I'd read the full version in French before. As it's an abridged version, I thought it was written for kids. And yet, it was only at my third of fourth attempt that I managed to read it. Even if the book is abridged, it still full of proper names, words related to martial arts, ancient China, etc. Having read 2 wuxia novels and an abridged version of the 三國 probably helped. It's likely that, in the future, I'll try to find abridged version of  西游记 and 红楼梦. Unfortunately, I doubt there's an abridged version of the 5th classic (金瓶梅) as it contains quite a lot of naughty scenes (I've read it in translation already).

• 莫言：师傅越来越幽默 (simplified characters). See my comments here.  It's a short novel/novella about a model worker who, one month before retiring, is sacked when his old factory goes bankrupt and closes. Guess how he will earn a living and try to adapt to a fast modernising China?

• Two days ago, I started reading a collection of short stories by 莫言 called 白狗秋千架. The first short story (春夜雨霏霏) is fascinating, it reminds me of Buzzati's  Il deserto dei Tartari. But I haven't finished yet that first story. One more thing: I have the impression that I'm just starting to appreciate the style of the author I'm reading, which is a welcome development.

 

Damnit, this post is horribly verbose, let's stop here, abruptly, at least I hope someone will find it useful.

[imron]

Excellent writeup, thanks.

 

4 hours ago, laurenth said:

I have the impression that I'm just starting to appreciate the style of the author I'm reading, which is a welcome development.

A good indicator of progress!

[wibr]

As someone currently working through the DeFrancis readers, honestly, your post sounds a little depressing. Although I know that Chinese will always provide plenty of things to learn for me, to see how much is left until I will be able to enjoy Chinese literature can be frustrating. Great post, though!

[abcdefg]

I'm jealous.

[wibr]

Some questions:

- How did you learn grammar patterns etc.? Textbooks?

- Any readers that you think were particularly helpful as preparation for native content? I checked the Chinese Breeze series and the level 3 is just 750 words, so there is sitll a huge gap to native texts... I assume?

- Now that we have the long list of readers, would you still try to read as many as possible or do you think your level was the right one to make the jump?

[imron]

40 minutes ago, wibr said:

to see how much is left until I will be able to enjoy Chinese literature can be frustrating

If you are currently at an intermediate level, then would say that you can be enjoying Chinese literature within a year.

 

Just pick something, start reading, and then make sure you are learning 10 new words a day.  Every day.  For a year.  You can still look up other words, but don't put any effort in to learning them (or adding them to a flashcard program).  Don't learn more than 10 words a day because then it will start to take up too much time, which will take away from reading.

 

Make sure that you always have a couple of books ready to go, so that when you finish one you can go straight on to the next one without any time spent figuring out what to read next.  Don't be afraid to put down something that is too difficult or too boring and come back to it later (maybe even a year later).

 

Over the course of a year, that'll be 3,650 new words - all learnt from context, and all relevant and specific to what you are interested in reading.  On top of your existing vocabulary, this is probably enough to be reading and understanding native content, though still with quite a bit of help from a dictionary.  For reference, a novel like《活着》has about 4,000 unique words.

 

It's a grind to do this initially, but doing that grind is really the only way to reach that level. 

 

A year might seem like a long time, but it'll be over before you know it, and if you don't do it, then a year from now you'll still be just as far away as you are now.

 

8 minutes ago, abcdefg said:

I'm jealous.

只要功夫深，铁杵磨成针

 

[wibr]

@imron Thanks! Yeah I already have plenty of readers lined up after the DeFrancis readers. I also bought the Mandarin Companion readers, they are quite easy for me to read so that's encouraging :-).

[imron]

16 minutes ago, wibr said:

I checked the Chinese Breeze series and the level 3 is just 750 words, so there is sitll a huge gap to native texts... I assume?

The first chapter of 鬼吹灯 has 636 unique words.

 

The first two chapters have 1,074 unique words

 

The first three chapters have 2,003 unique words.

 

The first ten chapters have ~5,000 unique words, but if you knew all the words from the first 9 chapters, you'd have a comprehension rate of 99%.

 

That makes chapter 1 and 2 quite accessible, and if you are learning as you go, then each chapter will make the subsequent chapters more accessible.  How large is your current vocabulary?

[Lu]

Excellent write-up! It's funny to see how many of the things you mention I've also read. Some of them because they were promoted in the forums (圈子圈套) and some quite coincidenally (像我這樣的一個女子). 《炊烟》  is indeed horrible and very good.

[laurenth]

4 hours ago, wibr said:

- How did you learn grammar patterns etc.? Textbooks?

 

Yes, before I started reading readers  (Chinese Breeze, specifically), I'd used Bellassen's Méthode d'initiation à la langue et à l'écriture chinoises. At various times, I also used New Practical Chinese Reader and Chinese Made Easier.  

 

But I started Chinese Reader, if I remember correctly, after only a few months of studying. Reading level 1 readers was hard, but I still remember how exstatic I felt when I finished my first Chinese Breeze reader. The stories in this series may be a bit cheesy, but they are extremely well thought out: good gradation, no pinyin, mp3s and, though that's not advertised, I've often had the impression that each book in the series contained lots of sentences illustrating two or three specific syntactic features of Chinese. For instance, just when I was wondering how you could say things like: "Nobody does this... There aren't anywhere..." in Chinese, I read a Chinese Breeze book which contained many examples of that pattern. I underlined them and tried to understand how it worked.

 

4 hours ago, wibr said:

- Any readers that you think were particularly helpful as preparation for native content? I checked the Chinese Breeze series and the level 3 is just 750 words, so there is sitll a huge gap to native texts... I assume?

 

Yes the gap is still there and I've long had a hard time finding books that help bridge the gap. It remains a problem to this day: I can't read anything I want. As mentioned in my first post, the first few novels I read required a lot of patience and lookups. But, in hindsight, I still feel that the progression textbooks > readers > abridged versions/translations etc. > native content is the best way.

 

4 hours ago, wibr said:

- Now that we have the long list of readers, would you still try to read as many as possible or do you think your level was the right one to make the jump?

 

As for readers, the more the better, in my opinion.

 

As for the timing, I probably made the jump a bit too soon, not only because I was impatient, but also because I couldn't find more readers.

Likewise, if I could have found more books such as the abridged versions of 家、春、围城, I would  have read them. Unfortunately, I could find none.

 

[character]

On 6/30/2017 at 4:36 PM, laurenth said:

I could probably use Imron's CTA, which was designed  from the ground up to avoid that. In fact I probably *should* be using CTA. Unfortunately, most of my reading happens during commuting or at lunch time, i.e. away from my computer. I can only use my phone, so CTA is mostly out of the picture.

Great post @laurenth!  Depending on your situation, a Windows tablet might be a good investment.

[laurenth]

13 hours ago, character said:

Depending on your situation, a Windows tablet might be a good investment.

 

The next time I need an excuse to purchase yet another toy useful device, I'll remember your suggestion  Thanks.

[Yadang]

On 6/30/2017 at 2:36 PM, laurenth said:

I could probably use Imron's CTA, which was designed  from the ground up to avoid that. In fact I probably *should* be using CTA. Unfortunately, most of my reading happens during commuting or at lunch time, i.e. away from my computer. I can only use my phone, so CTA is mostly out of the picture.

 

The genius of Imron's CTA is that it allows you to "pre-study". So you could very quickly* use CTA to give you a list of words to study (from the next chapter or whatever), then import them into pleco and study them on your phone, as well as do the actual reading on your phone after pre-studying. This way, most of your time would still be using your phone.

 

 

*after it learns what words you know. That part takes some time, but is sped up a lot by importing lists (from flashcards, HSK, etc.)