Here’s a Chinese resource that looks pretty cool: The Internet Chinese Text Archive.
The biggest problem with the site is it doesn’t set the proper encoding information!! So you have to manually set the encoding to “Chinese Simplified” very time. It’s really, really annoying. I’ve tried everything on the browser such as setting my preferred language to Chinese with no luck. Ugh… One trick I came up with is to mouse over each link and just read the url on the bottom bar of the browser. It’ll tell you what you’re looking at (in English no less) without having to reset the encoding every time. Then you can finally set the encoding when you get to the text you want.
Anyway, while this site looks cool, the material is far too advanced for me to make any recommendations. I thought I’d try to tackle some short stories first but it’s slow going.
Ooh la la, the 色情性爱 category looks interesting. Could be a good motivator to study Chinese.
Any good suggestions for people like me learning Chinese? Preferably something interesting, not too difficult, and as modern as possible.
大家有什么好建议吗？
KTNXBYE
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dporter/sampler/sampler.html
This site has a wide variety of short stories, song lyrics, idioms, speeches, and other interesting stuff. I wouldn’t call these “modern” though.
http://www.clavisinica.com/voices.html
This site has short essays about life and current events in China. It also has audio.
Finally, for something more advanced, Chinese-translated Japanese light novels such as 涼宮ハルヒ can be found by searching Google or Baidu. Usually these are legitimate Taiwanese tranlations that are converted into Simplified Chinese and put online for Mainland Chinese fans to enjoy. For example, you can search for 「凉宫春日 轻小说」. 轻小说 is the Chinese word for “light novel.”
hehh, happened to find this
these ‘yellow novels’ are basically illegal in mainland’s cyberspace
how do you find it?
你好 我刚用Google Reader订阅了你的博客
没事教你说说中文怎么样 哈哈
@Paul
Sweet! I already read 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱 so reading the Chinese version might really help! I don’t think the publisher would be very happy about it though!
@safarinew
Really, wow I knew China censored stuff but didn’t know they were that harsh. I guess it everything changes once you put it on the “internet”.
The site that is hosting the Chinese Text Archive it is: http://www.ibiblio.org/
They are a site for digital archives and is my host as well. This blog is running off their machines, in fact.
I don’t know if they’re fully aware of the type of literature that is on there, though. 🙂
So are there any works on the site that you would recommend?
Hmm… I’m not familiar with this usage of 没事. Are you saying it’s no problem to teach me Chinese? Thanks, looking forward to any tips about Chinese! 请多指教
嗨，
你写的日文语法手册真的帮了我不少的忙。有机会我可真想好好地报答你。
Perhaps this might be helpful for your Chinese studies. In Singapore, we have a bilingual paper which is written in simplified characters. The Chinese articles comes with explanations for certain words that are rarely used.
Oops, I forgot about the url… hahaha
http://www.mypaper.sg/
@THT — I read mypaper on the way to work daily, but I don’t think it’s really suitable for beginners to Chinese because the Chinese articles are not written in a simplified way, and to be able to read news in any language requires advanced proficiency.
The Chinese stories are also not the same as those published in the English section, so one can’t try to understand the Chinese through English.
As for the sporadic translations of English words into Chinese, a dictionary would do better.
@taekk — I’m not too sure what your standard of Chinese is, though I’d suggest trying non-fiction in a familiar topic, so you can more or less infer the meaning of the text using your background knowledge.
If you want short stories, you can try those by San Mao. She expresses herself using simple language.
Maybe it can be found in the Chinese text archive.
Thanks!
I got plenty to read now that I’ve got the Chinese version of 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱 online thanks to Paul. It should be manageable since I own the Japanese versions.