I'm a bit foggy on how this could work so any ideas would be cool (and after we have the ultimate cool idea, our skritterteam can maybe tell us how doable it is from a technical point of view:).

I don't know how it works for a lot of the other users but I have noticed that I hardly get to practice the words that I have learnt. A lot of the skritter users are probably Chinese students who get tons of studying material thrown at you (for better or for worse:). Of course I occasionally get my hands on to some Chinese text but as a general rule I don't understand enough to really keep reading and the few textbooks I acquired throughout my studies are only worth repeating so many times...

I was just thinking that it would accordingly be awesome if skritter would be able to point to a few texts which would more or less suit my level of understanding. If I can get as much as 80% I am more than happy to keep going and it's obviously a great way reinforce what you've learnt. It would also help to give some of the words some additional context.
As things go, it's probably a lot more difficult than it sounds but if skritter had a database of texts based on newspaper articles, blogs, online comics etc. comparing my learnt vocab with what is in the text.

What do you guys think? Interesting idea, but needs changes? Worth pursueing?

David

It's an interesting idea, and perhaps we could hook something up like that, though it sounds like it would be kind of technologically tricky, though cool if we could figure out a way to recommend materials to people that are appropriate for their skill level.

One thing I've been thinking about though is is sort of going about it the other direction by creating lists based on the characters that are in various materials. So for example I would like a list composed of words and characters in a given movie so I could study them, and then reinforce what I learned by watching the movie a few times. This could be done for other things you mention, the newspaper articles, blogs, etc, perhaps.

Once we have custom lists users could create those lists and share them, linking to the materials that they're based on if they are online. I know I want to see if I can make a few lists for Japanese movies for example, if I can figure out an efficient way to do it.

What do you think of that?

Doesn't sound bad at all:)

The point is a little bit that although I have been going (and am soon finished) with my hsk1 list, I can't often use it as a whole. Sure, I recognise a lot more characters than I used to while watching some CCTV4 or SlamDunk but I just don't understand enough...
Sure, there must be texts around which exactly fit what I know...but good luck finding them:)

So anything that helps me use my acquired Chinese (or in this case gears my Chinese towards a specific text) sounds great to me.

Learning vocab of whole movies is probably still a bit beyond my level (and copying down all those characters sounds like a hell of job) but man would that be cool:)

If you can't get users to volunteer to copy down vocabulary from movies or other sources, you can get it done cheaply on Amazon's mechanical turk. I'm a worker there.

:o)

I second the motion!

Baifameizhong, it sounds a silly that you are studying HSK vocab, and yet can't find reading material. What about. . . . The HSK test!!!

There are loads of HSK preparation books and you could just focus on the language comprehension part. With HSK1 you will want HSK elementary material.

I've got an elementary practice exam right in front of me. Comprehension makes up 60min of the 135min exam. Comprehension is broken up into two parts, a short part which involves filling in gaps within a passage (multichoice) and then traditional comprehension. These are short passages followed by questions with multi choice answers and would be good material for you.

Many of the stories are either funny, educational or have a moral message. They all contain cultural insights.
Here are the topics of the passages in my one:
Eating medicine without water
People putting fridges in bedrooms (bad)
Clever thieving monkeys
Funny story about an old man
Proud and honourable orphan who is satisfied with her life (propaganda?)
Group of students visiting Beijing
The decline in sending handwritten letters
Story about how trust is worth more than money
A funny story about newspaper delivery

Here is one short passage (my favourite):
王老先生过百岁生日时, 人们见他红光满面, 身体十分健康, 便请他讲一讲长寿的秘密. 他笑着说 "75年前我结婚的时候, 太太和我约定, 如果我们吵架, 最后证明谁错了, 谁就到院子里去散步. 75年来, 我一直是在院子里散步的.

Ha ha, I wish I could post the newspaper one too, but its too long.

Hope that helped!

One idea could be to link to other resources from "Practice". If for example I practiced writing 找 a link to http://dict.cn/找.htm would directly show some example sentences.

Hey ZachH

Can you tell me which books you're using? So far the ones I got my hands on were just boring by any standards...

David

Hey David,

I don't have any with me now, but all the books I chose were just practice questions.
I borrowed some from my uni library (lots of books there gifted by the chinese), but I found that the best place was my local confucius institute.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius_Institute#United_States
If you have one near you make sure to drop by, they would be happy to lend you books.

If you don't have access to a university library or confucius institute I have no idea where to find HSK books. They are published by chinese universities.

"A New China" (Princeton) sounds like a sweet book. Based on cool vocab items and Nick's stories, I've never read it. Its by Chih-p'ing Chou, maybe check out his other stuff?
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6755.html

Chinese voices project is pretty good too
http://www.clavisinica.com/voices.html

Thanks for the Clavis Sinica link, ZachH - that's a great collection of material.

Hey ZachH

Thanks for the list (already bookmarked the Chinese voices:).
Just also checked the link...it appears that in Switzerland we don't have a Confucius institute so I will see whether I can get my hands on that other book.

David

I am a bit too lazy to find the link right now, but I posted it somewhere before: chinesegeeks regularly translate some Chinese articles into English, and always make the original version available. The Chinese there is usually not too hard, and always quite interesting.