Study Chinese Online From China

Reading a Newspaper Online: Can You Do It?

September 22, 2006 on 12:43 am | In Studying |

READING THE PAPER - I have to admit I still can’t read a Chinese newspaper. Sometimes there’s a life article that I can sit down, read and enjoy. But for the most part the frontpage headlines are just a jumble of characters. Am I discouraged? Should you be?

Most laypeople will judge a person’s language skills with two questions, Can you talk to people? And can you read a newspaper? :

Here’s why it’s probably a separate track to learning newspaper talk than it is to learn conversational Chinese. The words are different. The 1000 most frequent spoken or fiction words are different than the top 1000 in newspapers.

At Chinese Text Computing you can see various lists of Chinese word frequency, for example in fiction versus the press.

http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/

Here’s another list with English definitions and notes, it’s actually a fun list to puruse and sip coffee over. You should be learning words in this order, as these are ranked by frequency.

http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000char.html

If you’d like to try your hand at reading a newspaper, there’s an online site that gives mouse-over popup of recent headline news, and saves you the trouble of copy-pasting into other translation tools.

http://www.newsinchinese.com/

And of course, there’s always browsing the papers.

http://www.xinhuanet.com/
http://fzsb.hinews.cn/php/

Content or info overload is a challenge with all the resources available online. To help parse things down a bit, I found one way to make ’sound-bites’ or rather ‘text-bites’ that I can read. Get a couple of Chinese RSS feeds and view them via Netvibes, a RSS reader. With each entry it gives you a popup of the first 50-characters of text, this is enough to see the topic and keeps you ‘reading’ the Chinese.

At the end of the day, however, it would be nice to sit down and casually pick u p a Chinese newspaper and read it to relax, just like in English. If I figure out how, I’ll post again!

———————————————————————————–
Keywords: www.chinesepod.com, learn chinese, Chinese, Mandarin, online Chinese, study Chinese, Chinese tools, www.aurbo.com/chinese, study in Beijing, China, easy Chinese, schools in China, podcasts, Chinesepod, Ken, Carroll, Jenny Zhu, Chinesepod intermediate transcript, chinese newspapers, reading in Chinese