#because I barely read that month and I only completed a 1/3 of tianyake

[rigelmejo]

Ok truly tho I cannot believe I didn’t try this sooner.

And/or maybe I just picked up more vocabulary from reading 天涯客 than I thought I did. I did so much intensive reading the past few months, it’s not like I challenged myself with any extensive reading to see my progress.

I just read chapter 1 of guardian. It took maybe 20 minutes, but that’s pretty good for near full comprehension! I could follow all of the details, understand nearly all words (meaning wise), and it was great! I did not need or feel the need to look anything up to figure it out. I can definitely see how reading 天涯客 might’ve taught me a lot of priests favorite sentence structure words (how priest compares things, describes talking, describes movement, describes characters, sets up sentences to describe setting), and often used adjectives.

Reading the translation before the Chinese helps so freaking much in comprehension I wish I had tried this sooner! It is such a different experience than extensive reading with nothing done beforehand!

Also note to myself, I took an hour break in between reading in English and Chinese, so it’s not like you have to read right away together.

Also notes on listening-reading, since I also did all of chapter 1 this way. I did the steps in order: English read, Chinese audio Chinese follow along, Chinese audio English for reference. Then I read the chapter in chinese after to see if I could.

Things I noticed:

1. Step 3, listening to Chinese while using the English text for reference, IS definitely the step I feel the most benefit. Specifically, when I really ONLY glance at the English to help figure out a word/phrase. It’s hard to describe but when I was following along to the English all the way, I was hearing words I knew in Chinese and trying to match them up and not really hearing most of the unknown words. However, it was actually easier when I looked away from the English/closed my eyes for short moments, focused on the audio first, and tried to catch what I heard. And only looking at the English to double check I was in the right spot, or match an audio word I didn’t know to it’s overall phrase/word in the English text. It’s hard to describe but basically... focusing primarily on the Chinese listening during this step/trying to follow IT seems to work better (compared to trying to match the audio to the words I’m seeing). Anyway yeah, in actual listening reading, this IS the step I noticed the most new words/phrases and potential to learn them.

2. Step 2, Chinese audio to Chinese text, at least at this Beginner point, was not very helpful for picking up new words. It really seemed most suited to just keeping up with reading along to text/hearing individual words. I’m hoping, as I do more l-r, I can use this to pick up some new Hanzi and recognize their pronunciation. I realized today my print guardian novel does NOT match up to the webnovel version Avenuex used to make the audiobook recordings (lines were missing in my print novel, some paragraphs were ordered differently, and notably priest changed the end of chapter 1 in the print novel to have guo changcheng see Zhu Hong and her snake tail instead of seeing a ghost with no feet, so I just totally lost the ability to follow along to the audio then). This wasn’t a problem in step 3 Chinese audio/English text, because the English translation went off the webnovel version. This may be less of a problem if I switch to the webnovel link to read the Chinese version. But... at the same time, I enjoy seeing the differences since I do own the print novel and WANT to read it. Regardless though, the step 2 part goes so fast I do genuinely think the suggestion it is best for “getting used TO listening/following along” rather than learning new words is probably applicable to my experience doing it. I DO think, to learn more new words With this step 2, it’s more useful to do it AFTER reading the chapter Slowly in chinese (so you can scan the text more as you listen to the audio - so it has more of the step 3 Chinese audio/English text transcript reference benefit).

3. My print novel has some noticeable differences from the webnovel version, as I mentioned above. For the most part it’s only small changes like different transition words, or reordered sentences in paragraphs. But the whole end of chapter 1 was changed to a different event. And I get why, the drama ended up doing the print novel scene moreso, and the print novel version of the scene makes it introduce SID/Zhu Hong/Guo Changcheng’s fear - whereas the original “he has no feet” webnovel version didn’t introduce Zhu Hong. Anyway I mention this though because, while doing step 2 it confused me and made the step frustrating to even attempt... when I actually just read the chapter in chinese... it was very cool I could follow the new parts just fine. I could read and comprehend enough to read the new scenes, even though I had no audio to give me prior context, and no English translation to tell me what was happening beforehand. So that’s pretty cool to me! Particularly, that I could follow all the details and words of the new scenes! Since finer details are much harder for me to handle when extensive reading! I just thought that was pretty cool, and pretty good progress!