Thoughts on some Chinese The Hard Way articles
One article I’ve appreciated reading, is HSK 6 gets you halfway by Chinese The Hard Way.
It explains what realistic results you should be expecting, if you have learned all material expected to be understood at HSK 6 level.
It also gives you an idea of the characters you may need to learn for comfortable reading without a dictionary (by this I mean, about 1 new unknown character per page of text). “If your goal was to have no more than one new character per page of text, you’d need to recognise 99.8% of all characters on the page.” The number of characters you’d need to recognize is 4,400 for imaginative texts. This 4,400 character number comes from the JunDa character frequency list for imaginative texts. Because I would eventually like to read chinese novels for enjoyment, this frequency list is a useful reference to me.
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Yes, 4,400 is a lot. But its also realistically feasible to accomplish. 4,400 characters is an easier goal to tackle than say... 20,000 words. So you aim to learn the HSK 2,200ish characters, 5000ish words. Then you continue learning words as they come up in material you read/watch/need to say. And you learn the next 2,200 most frequent characters either as a part of that, or in a more structured way (like repetition, SRS, mnemonics, whatever you like). At least it’s not as daunting as something above 10k. Generally, a lot of language learners have set off to learn languages by learning “The 10k most common words” or sentence mining “10k sentences with useful words/grammar.” It usually takes people a couple of years if they’re dedicated, or several if they have less time but still remain consistent. So, after X years it takes to get up to HSK 6, you’ll be halfway there. And thankfully, at that point, you will be knowledgable enough to engage in your desired goals to some degree. As in, you will be able to read if you’re willing to use a dictionary, you will be able to write and speak (and on specialized topics with a dictionary), you will be able to listen to discussions and pick up new words/knowledge. You’ll... be halfway there, with the ability to use what you’ve learned to help you practice, and keep improving to where you want to be.
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Also in general I just like a lot of the advice they give on this site. In the past I’ve read many of their articles, and ended up applying a lot of their advice to my own study plan. For example, they have another article called Train what you want to learn. The things mentioned in that article, are a major reason I ended up deciding to practice attempting to read and watch chinese every so many weeks as I studied. Their advice, in short, was: “If you’d like to be able to do X, the best way to learn it is by doing it.The reason for this is that by doing the thing you want to learn you’ll quickly bump in to problems that are holding you back.”
I agree with that sentiment wholeheartedly. By doing what your goal is to do, you actively start developing the specific skills you need to do it, and you immediately notice the areas you need to specifically study and work on in order to be able to do it better. It is very helpful in gauging your specific goal setting needs, your study needs, and in making you practice the things you need to practice the most in order to accomplish your goal eventually.
