Any Resource Can Be a Great Learning Tool
Told through my experience with a Chinese graded reader.
When I began studying Mandarin, I did a dozens lessons of Assimil and watched hours of The Voice of China daily. My Mandarin listening skills back then, in 2013, were miles ahead of today.
That’s despite my knowledge of Chinese having skyrocketed since then.
The reason? I watched each episode at least a few times, with only Mandarin subtitles, and concentrated a lot on the lyrics from each song. Today, I barely listen to Chinese twice a week.1
My reading skills of Mandarin, however, are much higher than they used to be. My Japanese skills have skyrocketed enough to positively impact my understanding (or at least guessing) of Hanzi (Chinese characters). I’ve read tons of short articles, text messages, or movie subtitles, and even studied some mock tests of HSK4’s reading section after already getting most questions correct.
I recently took up reading a Graded Reader I had never stuck with in Mandarin. It’s quite simple but the stories are long and, apart from 3-4 words per pages, there’s no translation provided anywhere in the book. What it has is pinyin written above the characters. Very convenient. But it also came with something to hide said pinyin for those who want to do so (me! me!) Finally, it came with the audio version of each of the 4 stories.
I began reading one story and got most of the meaning, but was often unsure of the pronunciation of words so I decided to start from scratch and read it as I was listening to it. Suddenly, I didn’t understand much because the sound was overtaking my brain’s energy to fit each character to each sound.
It was a lot.
So I decided to read the full story slowly without the audio before rereading it with the audio.
I’m now starting to go through it once more with the audio but pausing at the end of each sentence to practice shadowing them.2
It’s taxing. Exhausting even.
But the fact I now know the story also allows me to concentrate on the flow of the language and improve my own pace of speech—which is currently soooo verrryyyy slooowww.
I’ve also created this podcast about the short story with NotebookLM, a good way to hear about the story in a different way.
All this to say.
What truly matters isn’t the resource you choose to use.
It’s how you use it.
Experiment. Find what you like and don’t. Discover how far you can push one single resource. I hate Duolingo but even it can be useful if you make it your own.
Cheers for reading,
Mathias
Although this is slowly changing!
What reader?