Great widget for quick, highly efficient reading practice and vocabulary acquisition

[johnvaradero]

The Baidu app offers a widget called "热点资讯" that displays two headlines of news articles or videos on your home screen which keep changing over time. I think using this widget can be very beneficial for more advanced learners. 
 
First of all, it is very motivating. If you put it on your home screen, you will see it multiple times a day, you notice when the content has changed and you will automatically read the new headlines. It’s constant, automatic exposure to Chinese. 
 
Secondly, there are specific benefits in reading headlines. Headlines of news articles or videos contain very dense information, there are almost no filler words and they contain the most important words of the article of the video. So headlines largely consist of specific, not super frequently used words, which are however still very important words for achieving fluency in Chinese. For these reasons, the difficulty of reading and understanding the headline of an article often is higher than the difficulty of the article itself, meaning it is an extremely efficient way to practice reading comprehension and acquire vocabulary while taking only very little time. Reading headlines allows you to encounter in context a wide array of words you already learned that you might not see very often outside of news and also allows you to encounter important words that you don't know yet and you can look them up and make a flashcard. It also is a very good way to practice recognizing names of people, companies, places, etc., including the transcription of foreign names. 
 
Besides the advantages the widget offers by just displaying the headlines on your home screen, it also invites for more in-depth study by clicking on the headline and reading the article/watching the headline. 
 
Obviously just working with the headlines won't help much with building reading stamina etc., I consider this method just a small, bite-sized but highly efficient addition to other reading, particularly suitable for short moments that you otherwise wouldn't use to improve your Chinese, like when you are standing in line somewhere for a few minutes.

[Woodford]

Great widget! I remember my former days of trying to browse Baidu for reading material, and I always had a hard time singling out the articles that were most worth my time/effort.

 

And...wow, the Meng Wanzhou incident is finally over. I learned about it here first!  

[malazann]

nice tip! on my android phone its called "百度资讯“ and doesn't look quite as ... ergonomic. will be fun to compare the headlines though! 

 

[alantin]

Good points about news headlines!
I didn't think of them before but now I can see good uses for sentence mining!