RedInkstone wrote:Purangi wrote:Good job! As you are interested in reading novels, I highly recommend 1988:我想和这个世界谈谈 by 韩寒. His writing style is straightforward, simple and quite funny, yet at the same time very authentic. I am about halfway through it now and its definitely not boring.
Hey! Thank you for your reccomendation! When I was in China in 2018 I bought 像少年啦飞驰 by 韩寒, per reccomendation of the Chinese literature club on Reddit. But now that you mention it, I will definitely give 韩寒 a tray after H1 and 活着
May I ask, how did you start reading native material? What was your language level before and how did you prepare yourself for reading more advanced material? Do you read on an e-reader or a physical copy? So many questions, I know.
But I'm really eager to learn from people who are further along on their language journey. Cheers!
I started testing the waters with native materials right after HSK5 (which I passed in 2011, after one year in-country). The thing is, like you already know, the range between two authors can be so incredibly huge, making it tough to find materials adequate for my level. When I first came China I guess I felt more courageous and bought a hard copy of 白鹿原 and 生命中不能承受之轻. What a mistake - way too hard for me. Needless to say, I never finished them.
That's why I prefer shorter, non fiction texts like bloggers or columnists, especially since authors do not tend to overuse
chengyu or classical quotations*. If you are interested in Tibetan issues, you might want to check Woeser column (
唯色特约评论).
Han Han's blog (not updated anymore) is also quite good. Otherwise, I read travelogues and other articles I can find on WeChat. It is only recently that I "rediscovered" fiction. Despite that, 98% of what I used to and still read in Mandarin is non fiction books ad articles in my fields of interests.
*I used to think I was to blame for not understanding the numerous classical quotations you find in some works. The funny thing is when I ask my Chinese coworkers (20-ish-year-old Mandarin native speakers with M.A. in Social Sciences), half of the time they are
as clueless as me! Of course we can "guess" the meaning, but we always end up searching in Baidu... While it does pay to learn some basic foundation in classical Chinese, I would say don't worry too much about it for now, as I doubt anyone can learn as fast as these authors are able to dig out ancient quotations (
sometimes randomly and inaccurately...)
