Advice on learning Chinese for an intermediate level speaker

[Cyath]

I am looking to brush up my Chinese, but I'm not sure how best to do so. :) I would consider myself an intermediate level student of Chinese, having studied it for a few years now. My initial goal was to read Jing Yong novels but I am finding that way beyond my capacity at present.

 

What do you think would be a good intermediate goal to shoot for? Recommendations for books/novels/magazines to read? Currently I am just surfing the Web as well as listening to some music to improve my general comprehension. 

 

I would ideally play video games but there aren't very many good Chinese ones... 

[Wurstmann]

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I would ideally play video games but there aren't very many good Chinese ones... 

A lot of good games are available in Chinese. For example Dark Souls, Journey, the Yakuza series, Bloodstained, LoL and so on. Also look here and here.

 

As for getting better, if you want to do it quite fast: this and this.

[Tomsima]

Start setting some concrete goals. HSK 6 (if you haven't already), read readers/online news and try and collect, say, 300 new words a month. Pick a TV show and watch one episode every evening. Pick a speech or character from a show and record their audio, then shadow it for half an hour every day.

 

 

[Cyath]

Thanks for the replies! Yes I am doing the gaming route by trying to play through the game once in English and then again in Chinese. 

 

I checked the site but it seems the content hasn't been put up? 

[Wurstmann]

7 minutes ago, Cyath said:

I checked the site but it seems the content hasn't been put up? 

It's a work in progress. The videos and the timeline should be enough though. (The videos here don't appear on his youtube. So make sure to watch them too). And if you want to use Anki take a look at this too.

[murrayjames]

If you want to read something easier than Jin Yong novels, check out our excellent “What are you reading?” thread. It contains 68 pages (and counting!) of Chinese book reviews and suggestions.

[Jabri]

On 7/13/2019 at 12:01 AM, Wurstmann said:

As for getting better, if you want to do it quite fast: this and this.

Thanks for sharing, I just checked the link. It seems like the site hasn't update the stage 4 articles yet, it only wrote ‘Coming soon'. Have any idea where can I find maybe a separated part of the articles ? A little bit disappointed and frustrated with this ?. I have been learning Chinese for about 2 years and 8 months and I'm trying to get to 'fluent' level based on the AJATT level. I guess I almost reach that level but I just want to see Matt's opinion about this. Probably I'll learn something new or gain a new perspective about this matter.

[Wurstmann]

5 hours ago, Jabri said:

Have any idea where can I find maybe a separated part of the articles ?

He discusses most of his ideas in his videos. There are also bi-weekly Q&As on his patreon.

 

Edit: he just said that he will shortly begin releasing a lot more videos on the website as sort of a first version while slowly working on well thought out articles with a list of references and so on.

[Enjune Zhang]

This is a good question reminding me of what I had done when I was an intermediate level English learner. I was making English songs and LBC broadcast my BGM when I was reading and walking, trying to read English original nonfiction with Chinese version for bilingual comparison, watching English short videos with titles first then getting rid of titles, practicing translating, English from Chinese or Chinese from English, and then checked with the original text to see what should be corrected and what could be improved. These may work for someone studying Chinese as intermediate learner.

Abundant Chinese listening materials available online could be your best choice, varying from songs on 网易云音乐 netease music to audio books on 喜马拉雅 ximalaya. Keep listening until your ears get familiar with tones and pronunciation in Chinese.

Chinese short videos within 5 minutes available on 网易公开课 netease public course or 哔站 bilibili may help to improve listening comprehension and make it possible for you to watch video without Chinese titles someday.

Try to find bilingual reading materials online. It doesn't have to be those with Chinese and English on the same page but information acquiring from two books, Chinese version and English version, is OK. Try to find what will be the dead zone of your Chinese learning by practicing bilingual translation and the comparison with original text will reveal what to enhance later.

As for your goal of reading Jinyong novel one day, keep hanging on there. Try to read related Chinese materials available online introducing the author and providing an analysis of the novels based on extract of a certain book, so one paragraph or two would ease your pain and anxiety over the whole volume a lot.

Personally, I would recommend watching some TV series adapted from original novel to get the hang of what the story is about, what happens to the characters and how things wind up in them? There are people claiming that the adaptation may make something twisted and unreal about the novel, however, you are not buying the story but trying to make the relationship between characters less complex for you the understand the novel, which is worth a try