Hi!

Thanks for the suggestions! I’m aware of most of them already, but not all. I also spend a lot of time reading and mostly follow the same principles, i.e. I only use a dictionary when not knowing what a word means really stops me from understanding what’s going on, which isn’t all that often.

I was under the impression that Chinese Children although they can speak and understand Chinese will only know a limited amount of characters compared to adults. Therefore I thought that books targeted to children would contain fewer unique characters than other literature.

I don’t think I have claimed that children’s books contain more unique characters than other forms of literature? What I did say what that they are harder than you’d think if you compared the situation in Chinese with that in English.

My own experience was that I completed my study in Integrated Chinese, only to find that the volume of vocabulary was sadly lacking, so I have gone back to the very first lesson in New Practical Chinese Reader and am working my way through this series. Only, this time I am also studying with a tutor which has been a great help to my Chinese level.

Pretty much the whole time I was studying Chinese intensively, I used multiple textbooks at the same time. I studied PAVC 2 on its own, but PAVC 3 was paired with 今日台灣 Taiwan Today and Far East IIB. PAVC 4 was paired with 20 Lectures on Chinese Culture, Mini Radio Plays with Talks On Chinese Culture (an ICLP book which I found used). Then while I took a newspaper-reading class (using the newspaper, not a textbook), I studied 思想與社會 on the side. Then while I took 思想與社會 (it’s a lot of material and I felt like a review would be good), I studied parts of 從精讀到泛讀 The Independent Reader on the side and read an intro book on 古文字學 (which was my first real book, and reasonably easy for me by that point).

And on the side of all that, I studied 文言文, starting with Fuller’s An Introduction to Literary Chinese when I was taking PAVC 3, using Shadick’s A First Course in Literary Chinese as a reader after that, and then moving on to selections from 古文觀止 and Taiwanese high school 國文 readers.

It’s tiring just thinking about all that! But it was very effective. I went from the beginning of PAVC 2 (which as you know is very much a beginner’s textbook) to starting work as a freelance translator in 15 months. It isn’t something that’s practical for most people to replicate. I was on scholarship and my only work obligation at the time was tutoring English a few hours per week, so I was very lucky in that regard.

In retrospect, however, I did focus a bit too much on textbooks. After 15 months at the MTC doing everything I listed above (plus the occasional TV show w/script and various other things), I started to realize that my Chinese was a bit stilted, and a bit old-fashioned. As one of my former teachers put it, textbooks in Taiwan tend to teach 「蔣氏王朝的中文」. Some of them are excellent, but they need to be balanced out with authentic, modern material. At any rate, a year of working as a translator followed by a year of grad school in 國文研究所 (with classes in 口譯 on the side, which were enormously helpful) fixed that.

I know, I agree, but can you find more interesting material at the same level anywhere else? Of course, if the frustration is strong enough, it might be worth looking into material which is way too hard, which is definitely possible with pop-up dictionaries and so on, but that’s frustrating in another way.