A part of me has been pretty miserable the last two weeks. This is because it's the time i hate, having to choose my next textbook. It's always a big decision because no matter which book I get, it's something that will be a part of and influence the next 500 or more hours of my chinese studying. Already these past two weeks I have been at the book store three times trying to figure out which book is right for me.
The actual problem is that I think there isn't any next book for me. Not that my Chinese is amazing or anything, but just that it's gone above that of even the most advance text books. However this is a scary thought, because having a book helps me keep a schedule, provide guidance, and most importantly shows the progress I have made.
For these reasons there was one book that I was sure would be my next book. It is the book that all chinese schools have last on their list as the most advanced, and final text book students will use. This book is mainly just 52 academic articles with some vocab and light grammar illustration, and of course some discussion questions. The whole point of this book is to be the last bridge to getting the student to be able to read any chinese material on their own. The problem is when I knew i wanted this book, my level was of course worse than it is now. I just recently finished a book that was a lot like this and i think even better, so this book isn't appealing anymore. Although I must admit that with almost two years of hard work, a part of me really wants to have that book so I can think "look at me, i'm doing the last book, look how great i am!"
However I know that I am beyond that book, and also it's articles are kind of boring. Not to mention if it's purpose is to help students get out to reading on their own, if i can already read on my own, why not do that? So this got me thinking that I should read the newspaper. I went to test out this ability, and shockingly I could do it. Which of course led me to think, that if i'm going to read the newspaper why not just get the newspaper textbook which is newspaper articles but has the vocab too, so i don't need to look it up on my own. I had previously done the first level of this series, but now it seems like the highest level 3 could also be too easy for me. Or perhaps not, but i don't like not being able to choose the articles, at least with the real newspaper I can choose which articles interest me.
Finally, a friend could have solved this problem for me. She gave me the book above, which is ten short stories (30 to 50 pages) written by taiwanese writers about some aspect of life in Taiwan. I like it because the way they write is more like dialogue and they write about everyday things and issues. Reading the way people speak, improves me speaking, and vocab about everyday things also helps me speak. Best of all though it's a book where one page has Chinese and the other page has English. This is great because one of the things that is very frustrating when reading Chinese is how difficult it is to look up words. So this way if I can't guess what the word is, I can look over at the next page to see what it means and then get back to my reading.
But at least the way I do it now is that i read each page three times. First i read in Chinese and highlight the words I don't know and just guess what they could mean. Then I read in English to see how right I was and get the meaning, then I go back and read the Chinese again. Later I look up the exact meaning of the highlighted words and make flash cards.
So there you have it, the problem of the next book is solved. But what will I do after I finish this book? Well I might have the answer to that question tomorrow.
