![]() I'm a housewife, so I don't read for work. But I don't think I'm anywhere near ready for that. I like the idea of reading in context what I would read in English. Someone laughed and wanted to know where in the world I got the term for grocery store because no one uses that term anymore. I ran into that myself on Lang-8 when I wrote a post in Japanese about going to the grocery store. I've read a lot of complaints about materials written for language learners that use very outdated or very formal sentence structure. Yes, that's what I meant when I mentioned native Chinese materials. To me, "native Chinese" implies "Chinese written by and for natives" (whether that's 3-year-old kids just about to start kindergarten, or folks with doctoral degrees reading up on the latest research on their highly specialised and technical area of expertise). Here context is very useful to learn when to use which translation, to learn the nuances. there's no exact equivalent of 'and' in Chinese, it may be 和, 也, 又, etc. Context is mainly useful to learn words that are different in L1 and L2. Oftentimes exactly the same sentences can be made with pear, orange, banana, coconut etc. I mean an apple is an apple, context won't make a big difference to the understanding of apple. ![]() Nevertheless I feel sometimes that context is exaggerated. In principle I agree that context is king in learning vocabulary. If I encounter words that I want to study and are not in the deck I add them manually with the label 'prio' to add them to my study queue. I think not that different from the instantaneous addition from looked up words in pleco some people adore. Nowadays I pretty much use it as a dictionary, look up the vocabulary I encounter and want to study, label it as 'prio' and it's added to my queue of vocabulary to learn. At first I did study lists, started with HSK1, then HSK2 etc. I started out with several decks that over time have been merged to a single large deck with close to 40000 cards (some duplicates). I've the impression there's a bit of a misconception about pre-configured vocabulary decks and learning in context. The best thing is to find something that would be completely fascinating to you in your native language, and then you'll find it's only slightly less fascinating when it's written predominantly using only the n hundred most common words of a foreign language. With that said, I'm still very much sold on the idea of graded readers, though they don't necessarily have to be fiction. I'm not sure I should blame that on the storytelling skills of the author, more likely it's simply the constraints imposed by the medium. The only Chinese Breeze book I ever read all the way through was 《我可以请你跳舞吗?》, and I didn't find it all that much fun to read. To be honest though, I can't really offer much of a personal recommendation. The beauty of Chinese Breeze and other graded readers is that they're written by natives, but not for natives. Thanks for the suggestions! I don't post much but love reading these forums. Any suggestions on a favorite vocab deck that includes traditional characters? Or is there an easy way to add traditional characters to a simplified deck? The issue is that I need it to include traditional characters, as that's what my daughter uses. I just finished this deck ( ) which includes 500 words and am not sure which deck to download next. Last week I tried to have a conversation with a friend from China and quickly stalled due to lack of vocab. I'm just about to finish up YoyoChinese's beginner course and will start their intermediate course next week.ĭoes anyone have a favorite Anki deck for learning vocabulary? I feel that my grammar is progressing faster than my vocabulary. We're adopting a child from Taiwan so I've been learning Mandarin and am having a lot of fun with it. I posted here a few months back asking for some advice on getting started.
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