I’m thinking of calling it quits on the Chinese for now, forward progress is *brutal* even though each day I watch TV I catch several words I learned this week. Or decrease the goal to 2500 characters. Then my goal can just be 5 new hanzi a day… maybe review 30 to get the cards into the “mature” stage. Would feel amazing vs grinding right now.
(Mostly, I tried reading an science article recently, and was more okay than I thought with how much I could read without getting super frustrated / tired). I also realized that the 2000 chars = 98% — 98% seems high but that means for every 100 hanzi there are two hanzi I don’t know. And then a single article can be 1500 words (eg https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/simp/science-56397813). Which means while reading it I will have to totally skip over (1500 * 0.02) = 30 hanzi! And if I get to 3000 hanzi (99.7) then I will still have to skip over (1500 * 0.003) = 5 hanzi! Just reading some random newspaper article, I will not be able to finish it all without looking up hanzi in dictionary. T__T (words are a totally separate matter).
Get more research done. Here’s the status.
Other intermediate Chinese study tips.
A better interface for finding BBC Chinese articles that are not (US, China, COVID).
Search for “原文” on BBC Chinese using duckduckgo.
For some reason the articles that are translated from English (and therefore contain a link to the 原文 original (English) article) include a lot of BBC Future / climate articles. This solves the problem where I was going on BBC Chinese, but 99% of the articles are about the US, China, or COVID. And I just wanted some interesting science-y articles to take my mind off things, so scrolling through 100-150 articles was frustrating. This is a much better interface. Plus, I can also quickly skim the English article to see if it’s interesting for me to read in Chinese. HOWEVER the translation does mean there are a lot of awkward phrasing not normally used (but still understandable). Still valuable for character reading practice.
Second “breakthrough” discovery. Magazines (环球科学).
My library actually has a bunch of magazine subscriptions — then on the libbyapp — you can access them digitally, all for free (*paid for by taxes)! Most are traditional Chinese. The others are about stuff like finances. But I did find Scientific American, which is basically perfect for my interests. 环球科学。
Actually after a LOT of searching on amazon, ebay, random bookstore websites to see if there is any way to get a physical subscription, it seems like not. (I even looked up the USPS international shipping rates). Given that I have the e-subscription through my library (https://libbyapp.com/shelf), I may haventhen went and found a PDF version so I can print it out. In retrospect far more environmentally friendly also. But yea, since I am so used to the ease of consumer electronics import from China, I was honestly a little surprised at the difficulty of importing reading materials.