Improving your chinese on the web
In the past few weeks, my main strategy for learning chinese has been to saturate myself with input. I’ve been reading books, and going through lots of understandable example sentences on a couple of websites. One of them is dict.cn, which has plenty of example sentences for every word i look up, and it also has a nice pop-up definition thing whenever i highlight a word. Another is nciku.com, which is similar in that it has an abundance of example sentences. One difference is that they have a little app that will do handwriting recognition so that you can draw characters with the mouse. This saves me tons of time when i’m reading a paper book and i want to look up a character quickly. They also have a question-and-answer section where both english speakers and chinese speakers ask and reply to questions.
Normally what i do to study is to just look up things that i’ve read elsewhere and try to find more examples of the same thing. You can’t really get good intuition for a word until you’ve seen it in several different sentences. The dictionary definition for it is some times vague, because many words have different meanings in different contexts. I’ve found that the best way is to just find lots of different example sentences that use that word, and then to make a bunch of flashcards in Anki for those sentences. That way when the cards come up again, i get reminded of that word (and any others in the sentence) in the proper context. The flashcard part of this process ensures that i’m not going to forget any of these new things that i just learned. I don’t have to keep track of any of them myself, or flip back through old notebooks. I just have to review whatever Anki decides to give me each day and it does the other work for me.
The last piece of the puzzle is finding some understandable content that’s interesting. Lately i’ve been using Project Syndicate. It’s sort of a centrist liberal-capitalist newspaper site where they translate their english language articles into many other languages so that they can be reprinted in foreign newspapers. The content is similar to the vapid pro-capitalist analysis found in mainstream north american newspapers, with the occasional mildly critical article, but the great part is that absolutely every article has a chinese translation. It’s great having a chinese newspaper article with a precise native-english translation that i can read side-by-side. Any time i come upon a new word that seems sufficiently interesting or useful, i take it to the aforementioned dictionary sites and find more examples to get a firm understanding of it. I’m hoping that if i can consistently do 20 new words this way every day, then i can gradually make significant progress in my reading.
Ride hard, ride free