Thanks for sharing! I think reading and/or listening to content you’re truly interested in is essential, but if it’s relatively difficult, it works best as a small part of the overall study routine, as you say. I have spent way too much time trying to tackle very hard content and regret it; it feels like I spent most of the time looking things up and that’s not a very efficient way of learning a language. In my defense, there wasn’t as much graded listening and reading content around when I started learning Mandarin and it was harder to find, but I did not make proper use of it.

Anyway, I was enchanted by this cartoon….but there were no Chinese subtitles, and at that point in my studies, I couldn’t understand even the gist of a story without Chinese subtitles.

So I began the plodding work of listening, stopping the video, writing down as much as I understood, replaying, ad infinitum. It took days. I would then have my Chinese tutor listen to the video and correct my transcript. I remember the delight I felt when I could understand the whole video. I went on to write transcripts and have them corrected for many more duck detective videos. I definitely threw myself into something over my head, but I was motivated by delight at these take-offs on Miss Marple mysteries. As a result, my listening comprehension and vocabulary shot way up.

One take away is that one should try to do it with a subject matter that really motivates you to learn it. For me, it’s like desert—not the one and only, and not the main, course in my studies.

I find it easier to practice character recognition by having at-mt-level material because I spend less time looking up every other character and more time interpreting the context.