> I decided to go against the grain of the near-universal advice to "learn to read by reading".

...Why? That advice is universal for a reason. The side adventure with Claude Code strikes me as a distraction from the fact that there is a hard thing you want to do but are avoiding because it's hard.

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kdheiwns 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is a hilariously common thing with studiers of Asian languages. There are countless posts with people spending years, even more than a decade, just trying to memorize every single kanji and how to write it before even beginning vocabulary or basic grammar, then lamenting how difficult the language is and how they can't pass kindergarten level tests. So then they spend loads of money on apps, make custom tools, and find countless other ways to burn time.

Meanwhile others read books and get pretty good at their language of choice in a couple years.

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__patchbit__ 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The polyglot og Chaz Freeman is interviewed on the CGTN YouTube channel and has amusing thumbnail sketches on his language learning journey.

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vunderba 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Lived in Taiwan for years while studying traditional Chinese. This is spot-on. There’s this bizarre almost Pokémon level obsession (gotta catch'em all!) among foreign language learners with a STEM background where they fixate on amassing huge numbers of “memorized words.” Learning words in isolation is exactly what you don’t want to do, you need to see them in their context.

It’s like thinking you can get good at chess by just memorizing how each piece moves. You need the board, the surrounding "context", and not just study in isolation.

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pjc50 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47804903 - they can speak it, but not read it.

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jwrallie 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I agree completely. I will focus of Japanese because it’s the language I have experience with.

With a good order (RTK), optimal reviews (SRS) and putting 30 minutes a day it is possible to learn keyword to Kanji writing in a couple of months to one year. Make it two if you are a busy person. After that you need 10 minutes to maintain the knowledge per day. (I’m assuming 2200 Kanji).

People that did that successfully will recommend it to be done as early as possible as they know the boost in learning it provides.

I think it’s a trap, because it’s possible to get to a very useful level in the language while ignoring Kanji, and most people will be perfectly happy staying there. At that point you will have a much better idea if you really need to go all the way.

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nixon_why69 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm at HSK3 level and struggle to find things to read outside of my actual textbooks with precisely-calibrated texts. If I can't read am average billboard, what should I read to improve?

	▲	coldpie 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I'm at a similar level, maybe a little behind that. I don't have any advice for you, but I'll relate the path I am planning to take. Would be happy to hear others' thoughts, too. My feeling is this level is just too early to read "real" texts, so I am continuing to just use graded readers. I use the Du Chinese app for this, it contains a bunch of short stories at different comprehension levels, and has a spoken accompaniment to each story read by a real speaker (not AI/TTS). I also have some physical books from LingLing Mandarin, I like the challenge of not having a dictionary immediately to hand like I do in the app. My hope is by the time I finish with the Advanced stages of each of these sets of readers, I will be able to start reading "real" texts and fill in gaps with a dictionary app, at which point there is an infinite supply of material. I do worry I'll end up at the "10% missing comprehension" described in the article, though, at which point I guess I'll try to find even higher level graded readers, if they exist. We'll see.
	▲	yorwba 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		1. Take a large collection of text, e.g. from https://opus.nlpl.eu/corpora-search/zh-CN&en 2. Split into sentences and tokenize sentences into words, e.g. using https://github.com/fxsjy/jieba 3. Count how often each word appears and sort sentences by descending frequency of the least common word. 4. Use binary search to find a location in the sorted collection of sentences where the difficulty feels about right. Of course this gives you a collection of disjointed sentences, but you can always go to the original file and look at the surrounding context when you find an interesting or confusing one.
	▲	ragazzina 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		It is normal that there's no native content at HSK3 level. It would be like looking for native content at A1 level in English. But I found the "actual textbooks with precisely-calibrated texts" / graded readers are not that bad. My teacher is a martian was OK, I want to read The Monkey’s Paw now.
	▲	kdheiwns 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Read simple novels and look things up in a dictionary when you see a bunch of words that don't make sense. Watch shows with subtitles and do the same. Chat with people in the language. This is how non-natives learn English outside of school. It's also how non-natives learn Chinese. Ain't nobody downloading stuff from GitHub and splitting things into tokens to learn English like the other commenter is suggesting lmfao. But people are obsessed with bizarre and completely inhuman methods like that when they learn Asian languages. I cannot understand why, and it's seriously just Asian languages.

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teshigahara 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Indeed, his premise is quite flawed. Yes, you will have difficulty understanding everything you read at an early stage, but you aren't supposed to be able to understand everything. You read to heavily reinforce the most common words and patterns that show up constantly, and from that base you pick up bits and pieces as you go along.

Under normal circumstances, even if you grind out "knowing" all the words in advance you will still struggle to read any basic sentence and you've essentially wasted time because it's an unskippable step; to be good at reading you need to read a lot. He seems to already know Chinese though, so this might work for him since he is not really having to learn the language or specific vocabulary, just how it's actually written.

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7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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alex_c 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Did you read part 3? Doesn’t sound like “avoiding hard things” is really a problem for the author :)

https://blog.kevinzwu.com/symbolhead-syndrome/