CHINESE SCHOOL: So You Want to Get Back Into Reading Chinese

[adisgracetothescholars]

Introduction

moggiesandtea: I had a Chinese teacher who strongly urged the class to read books in Chinese as a way of mastering the language. She had done the same with English, she told us: she sat down with a Chinese-English dictionary and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and by the time she reached the end of book she had a much better grasp of English. To that end, she assigned us a bunch of short stories from the canon of modern Chinese literature.

I am 100% sure she didn’t mean go explore the wonderful world of Chinese webnovels, AND YET.

kitsunec4: ...and yet my recent Chinese webnovel dive has probably done more for my reading comprehension than however many years of Chinese School on Sundays.

lunatique: There is no motivator quite like desperation. I started looking into this topic when I fell headfirst into the NIF pit and there were maybe 3 English fics available at all. Into the Chinese side of fandom I dove. 12 years of actual Chinese school did little for me, but thankfully we have technologies today that help.


READING

moggiesandtea: As to where to get your fix, there are a number of Chinese webnovel sites, such as JJWXC that provide a platform for authors to upload their writing. Usually the first ten or so chapters are free, then the remainder are available at the VIP subscriber level.

Browser:
moggiesandtea: Once you've found something you'd like to read, you can install the Chrome browser add-on Zhongwen, or the Firefox browser add-on Zhongwen.

lunatique: ZhongWen is a super helpful add-on that pops up a litte windows with the pinyin as well as a dictionary definition. This is how I painstakingly read a 42 chapter fic before I discovered the text-to-speech functions on other apps. Now I just love to have it always on and be able to hover over any Chinese characters I don’t know even when I’m idly browsing the web. I like that it will automatically pick up the more common 4-character idioms, which is neat and really useful.

Pleco:
kitsunec4: Everyone needs a good dictionary when reading, and Pleco is one of the best options out there. Pleco is a dictionary app available for both iOS and Android platforms with a ton of features. The most impressive part has got to be how well the app handles idioms and the whole simplified/complex insanity that is the Chinese writing system. The free features will be enough for a lot of users, and I would encourage anyone feeling a little put out by the limitations of something like Google Translate to check out the free features of this dictionary app.

Then for those seeking a few more features (additional dictionaries, OCR, better text to speech, etc), the smaller paid bundle/basics bundle of add-ons will be worth the money for the majority of users. A decent number of the Disgrace collective have Pleco on their phones, either just using the free features, or have paid for the basic bundle for Pleco due to how useful it is…I don’t know anyone who has the professional bundle with its six dictionaries.

moggiesandtea: If you do pay for the basic bundle, this comes with both live and still OCR, so if you are trying to read an actual print book, you can use your mobile device’s camera to look up words without having to write the character and inevitably mess up the stroke order.

iPhone/iPad:
tammaiya: Apple devices have built in dictionaries which, though they are not as good as Pleco, are still pretty handy if you just want to look up the odd word. One of the major benefits of the Apple in-built dictionaries is that they’ll show hits from multiple dictionaries simultaneously, so if you have both the Simplified Chinese-English and Chinese-Chinese dictionaries installed, you’ll get both the English translation of the word and the native language dictionary entry for it, which often gives more context.

You can install the dictionaries by going through Settings - General - Dictionaries and tapping to download the ones you want. Alternatively, if you try to look up a word (highlight the word, tap the arrow to go right, hit “Look Up”) and it doesn’t exist in any of your installed dictionaries, there’s an option to Manage Dictionaries that takes you to the same screen in settings.

This is unfortunately useful, because for some reason if you have multiple dictionaries installed, they will periodically uninstall themselves. I have yet to figure out what triggers this or how to fix it, so if anyone finds out, please let me know, because reinstalling 8 dictionaries on a semi-regular basis is real annoying. Also, you can’t use it in the gdocs app, and I have no idea why. It works in every other text based app I’ve tried. OTHER THAN THAT THOUGH, pretty handy.

Ask Professor Google:
tammaiya: No matter how good your dictionary is, there are going to be things it just can’t help you with: slang (especially net slang) and obscure mythology are right at the top of that list, in my personal experience. And just like you would in English, the best thing you can do is generally google it.

If you google [word] + 意思 (yisi / meaning), your top hits will generally give you a fairly good overview of whatever the thing is. Baidu and Baidu Questions are China’s answer to Wiki and Yahoo Answers, basically, and will probably be somewhere on the first page, but there may be other helpful/more succinct results as well, which is why I’d suggest google over going straight to Baidu. Obviously this will require a bit of effort to understand, but if you’re reading web novels or fic online, you should be able to apply the same principles to interpreting a forum discussion. As I said above, this is specifically good for those terms that are so specialise, modern, or otherwise obscure that even Pleco can’t help you. Definitely try Pleco in the first instance.

LISTENING

Browser:
moggiesandtea: Google Translate will read texts to you, but take all of its actual translations with some big ol’ hunks of salt.

lunatique: One disadvantage of Google translate is that it has a character limit (I don’t know what it is exactly, and while it’s a lot, it’s probably annoying if you are trying to read a novel and have to keep copy-pasting chunks into the window). The flow of speech and intonation are surprisingly decent, however.

Instapaper:
rageprufrock: Instapaper is a great option for people who are conversationally fluent in Chinese, but may struggle to read the characters. When you save a document into Instapaper, and then re-access it for reading, you can select the “speech” option in the program (bottom menu, select the “more options/share” indicator currently on the far right and choose “Speak”) and a very nice Chinese robot lady will read the saved text to you.

The one significant drawback is that Instapaper isn’t great about having the Speak function remember where you left off, so if you are halfway through a massive chapter or chunk, and leave the program, there is a 50/50 chance on if it’ll manage to pick up where you left off, or if it’ll force you to the beginning of the chapter again. Otherwise, it’s a fantastic tool and my absolute favorite for reading on the go. As it speaks, the cursor also progresses along the characters, so it’s a great way to “read” as you go, too!

Another thing to note: There are free and premium versions of Instapaper. As far as I can tell, Instapaper free still has this text-to-speech option, but you won’t have the option of creating a playlist (ie: lining up several chapters for reading aloud), but as I mentioned, Instapaper isn’t great about picking up where you left off in reading, so generally, I just manually move from one chapter to the next, so you’re not missing much by sticking with the free service!

(By the way: my guidance here is primarily for people who are curious about reading Guardian. All the other web novels that are being discussed are objects of almost hallucinogenic nightmares for me. Save yourselves. Don’t be these perverts.)

lunatique: A note about Instapaper: the text-to-speech function sometimes won’t recognize the Chinese text, and I’ve had occasions when it tried to read a Chinese text with its English character recognition function and it just. wouldn’t. work. That has only happened a handful of times though. Do also be aware that it doesn’t always handle characters with multiple pronunciations the correct way, so don’t rely on it 100% if you use it to learn/practice pronunciation.

On the plus side, I find the lady robot voice quite soothing (we are good friends now) and well intoned. I especially like that you can set different reading speeds (0.5 is tutoring speed. 1x is a slow articulate read, and my favorite is 1.5x which sounds a bit more natural).

Definitely my favorite thing about Instapaper is that it can sync across my devices, so I can load Chinese fics on my computer, save all pages using the Instapaper browser add-on, and refresh the app for all of it to show up on my phone and tablet. Once downloaded into Insta, the text-to-speech works great even offline.

Pleco:
moggiesandtea: If you have the basic bundle, Pleco will read a text to you via either the Clip Reader or the File Reader. You will have your choice of lady robot voice or dude robot voice, and while it reads somewhat choppily, it does get the tones. One problem is that if a character has multiple readings, it will default to the most common reading, meaning the 沈 in Shen Wei is read “chen2” instead of “shen3.”

Conclusion

kitsunec4: It’s so much less tedious these days to find assistance in reading and understanding Chinese and I’m forever grateful. Even if I can never ever ever explain why I know a certain bit of weird slang or obscure fact.

I really don’t think this is what my family meant by, “you’ll be glad later we made you learn!” (But they don’t need to know that anyways).

moggiesandtea: And hey, the more you read, the easier it’ll get, even if you find yourself really really regretting the fact that you can now read smut in Chinese.

Comments

[tinny]

I would love to use pleco, but I am not on mobile, and sadly they have no Windows/Browser version. :(

I will definitely try the Zhongwen plugin, though!

What also works pretty well is Google Translate's "website" feature, where you don't copy/paste a chunk of text into the window, but a URL, and you will get the whole page translated.

Chrome also has that feature by default in a popup for every web page.

I find this works okay for fic, and it will display the original characters when you hover over the translated words on the page.

Of course, as you already mentioned, google translations suck as a whole, so it's more of a guessing game of what the original text maybe meant to say than an accurate translation. (It will always always get the idioms wrong.)

What apparently most people don't know is that you can enter handwritten characters in google translate, see how to here:

http://fangirlishness.tumblr.com/post/179171456973/the-downside-to-learning-chinese

This works for me, too, for cases where I don't have the characters (like tv shows with hardcoded Chinese subs).

Although it is of course slower than OCR with Pleco. I actually tried to install Pleco on my tablet and make it read off characters from hardcoded subs on my desktop computer, but that did not work well at all. Maybe I was doing it wrong?

[summertea]

LATE TO THE PARTY BUT: the JJWXC mobile apps have text to speech. they're uhhhh not great, like more robo than Google Translate's robot, but honestly it's better than nothing.

AvenueX audiobook

[chirals]

I'm also coming to this very late, but just in case anyone isn't aware:

AvenueX (http://avenuex.ca/) has recently finished recording the full Guardian novel as an audiobook available here: https://music.163.com/#/djradio?id=791802378&order=2&_hash=programlist

As soothing as robot lady's voice is, I have to say that AvenueX's voice is also quite excellent. :D