Media relating to Chinese

August 17, 2020

Over the course of the summer, I have had many opportunities to check out media related to Chinese. It is not as easy as I thought to find things that really spark my interest (and work for my purposes), but I came to the conclusion that the best course of action would be to write about the materials I use to learn Chinese, as well as what I found this summer. This is going to be a bit long.

The most significant piece to me was a book called Modern Chinese Lexicology by Ge Benyi. It was a bit advanced (not the Chinese so much as the vocabulary in general), even though it had been translated into English only recently. It brought up every point I wanted to hear, everything that textbooks and online articles couldn't provide. The author writes with knowledge, and seems to cover just about everything from idioms to loanwords to the role of vocabulary in the Chinese language.

When I start learning words, I always write them down along with their pronunciation and definition before anything else. Around early June, I finished doing this for the HSK (proficiency exam). For reference, the entirety of my studies in that test were composed of 5000+ words. As I neared the end (the last half, which also happened to be the sixth and final level), I noticed more and more idioms, loanwords, and all sorts of things I'd never seen beginning to crop up. Many of these idioms included historical references- ancient and classical Chinese references. Textbooks and word lists alone couldn't convey the meaning, as you needed to know the reference to understand. This meant many hours spent looking through primary source, ancient Chinese documents trying to understand a single term. I even found myself once pouring through the Confucian Analects.