Hacker News Reader

Comment by pieq | Hacker News Reader

Polyglot here. I'm struggling with written Chinese (traditional Chinese, as I live in Taiwan). Written (traditional Chinese) and spoken (Mandarin) forms are very different, especially in novels but even in news articles. I've got a pretty decent level in spoken Mandarin (most of my colleagues are Taiwanese, meetings are in Mandarin), I can use traditional Chinese to type when chatting with friends online, but I'm completely lost as soon as I open any news articles shared by my Taiwanese friends.

Any recommendations?

View on HN

Have you tried the Guoyu Ribao, or Mandarin Daily News? Seems like you need extensive reading practice, and that might be a good way to start.

I've also heard excellent things about Outlier Linguistics' resources for Chinese characters, assuming you're still spending a lot of effort learning characters.

Thanks!

I'll try 國語日報, I'm not sure where to buy it though (it used to be available easily in every 7-Eleven out there but it's been a while since I've seen a copy in a convenience store...).

I already know between 800 and 1000 traditional characters. Looking at Outlier Linguistics products, it seems more targeted towards the entry level. Their Pleco dictionary is nice, though. Reminds me of the explanations one could find in Wenlai (a desktop Chinese-English dictionary with a lot of historical explanations for each characters).

800-1000 characters is not enough. Should be about 2500-3000 characters to be comfortable with reading news and random articles online. I am at this level now, but can't handle novels yet. Need to learn much more vocab for that.

I doubt Chinese the written form can be learnt in 12 months...

I have learnt English for at least 10 years, still take some efforts to read a novel, specially in a fantasy setting...

Sorry, my message was not very clear. I've studied Chinese in the past, and I'm using it daily. I already know a bunch of written characters, it's just that reading articles seems really out of reach...

And yes, I know what you mean with English... and yet, I'm lucky enough that my mother tongue (French) actually shares a lot of vocabulary with English!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com