Chinese on Jiewawa's blog

Rating Chinese Books by Enjoyment and Difficulty - 21-30

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been nearly a year since the last time I wrote one of these and I am still working through the backlog. Here are 10 more Chinese books that I’ve read with a bonus DNF that I may get back to one day.

闯荡江湖二十年 by 龙乘风 | Roaming the Jianghu for Twenty Years by Long Chengfeng

This was my final book of 2023 and I read it in only a day or two. I heard about Long Chengfeng being a Gu Long imitator from Wuxia Wanderings and it definitely fit the case here. I definitely liked the book less than the previous Gu Long book that I read and it suffered from my least favourite Wuxia trope - characters new or old showing up any time our current characters have any conflict.

Enjoyment: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ / Difficulty: ⭐ ⭐

紫川4 - 帝都赞歌 by 老猪 | Zi Chuan 4 by Lao Zhu

The fourth volume was the longest in the series so far and it was probably my least favourite of the whole series. I found as though one of the main points of conflict was resolved off the page and a lot of the content from the second half of the book was just ignored in the final volume as the author wanted to wrap things up.

Enjoyment: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ / Difficulty: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

射雕英雄传 1 by 金庸 | The Legend of the Condor Heroes 1 by Jin Yong

I took part in the Chinese Forums Book of the Year read-along in 2024. We read what has been referred to as “The Chinese Lord of the Rings”. I remember really enjoying the book and not finding it too difficult to follow along. I found this quote I made on the forum post and I agree with what I wrote at the time.

I’ll be starting chapter 8 today. It’s very exciting, but I’ll agree with previous sentiments that fight scenes are my least favourite section.

Enjoyment: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ / Difficulty: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

射雕英雄传（二） by 金庸 | The Legend of the Condor Heroes (2) by Jin Yong

I DNF’ed the second volume of Legend of the Condor Heroes. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have read two books from the same series back-to-back. It’s a rule I now follow in English and Chinese and have found that it helps prevent burnout. I may restart the second volume again at some point as its impact is still undeniable.

I’m up to Chapter 14 and have been finding it a bit of a drag recently. I’ve been lacking motivation to read and I’ve been reading other stuff instead.

For some of the authors I’ve read multiple books by, going back to their writing is like wearing a pair of old slippers, but not with Jin Yong. I feel like I need to get used to his writing all over again after only a short break.

Enjoyment: DNF / Difficulty: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

坏小孩 by 紫金陈 | The Bad Kids by Zijin Chen

This is the most disappointing of all the books on this list. I had watched and somewhat enjoyed the TV adaptation before reading this and the same author had written my book of the year the previous year. However, I found that this book felt the need to recap information every chapter and spell things out very clearly. Overall, I much prefer the adaptation, and I wouldn’t recommend the book over it unless you are very early in your Chinese reading journey and think that being treated like a child will be useful for your comprehension.

Enjoyment: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ / Difficulty: ⭐

紫川5 - 一统天下 by 老猪 | Zi Chuan 5 by Lao Zhu

The final volume of this series took some departures from where things had been going in the previous volume. I feel as though the author had more ideas but then decided that he wanted to wrap things up. I really enjoyed the ending and in particular the dynamics between two of our main characters.

Enjoyment: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ / Difficulty: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

雪刀浪子 by 龙乘风 | Snowblade Vagabond by Long Chengfeng

Considering that this was as short book, it took me a lot longer to read than it should have. This book has the worst example of my least favourite Wuxia trope that I mentioned earlier. It seemed as though characters would appear out of the blue all the time. The best thing about this book is its Gu Long like prose.

Enjoyment: ⭐ ⭐ / Difficulty: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

猫城记 by 老舍 | Cat Country by Lao She

This is another books that I had high hopes for. It was a political satire by one of China’s greatest authors. Unfortunately, while I liked some of the allusions, I found the story to be very uninteresting. This was another book that took longer to read than it should have.

Enjoyment: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ / Difficulty: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

尸语者 by 法医秦明 | The Speaking Corpse by Qin Ming (Fayi Qin Ming)

I listened to this book via TTS using the Readest app at the same time as reading on my e-reader. It was a good experience, but this isn’t the sort of book that I typically enjoy. This is a very popular series of crime scene investigation novels. Others might enjoy, but I prefer crime to be more mysterious and psychological. The use of many medical terms was quite difficult.

Enjoyment: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ / Difficulty: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

解密 by 麦家 | Decoded by Mai Jia

This book had been on my e-reader for a long time, and I am glad that I read it. I enjoyed the first half of the book much more than the second. I liked watching the loner genius and seeing his interactions with others. After he became an adult, I became much less interested in the story.

Enjoyment: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ / Difficulty: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

血海飘香 by 古龙 | Perfume in the Sea of Blood by Gu Long

It would have been hard to live up to 流星蝴蝶剑 as that is one of my top 5 Chinese books, but this didn’t do it for me. However, out of all the books that I read in this slump, this along with Legend of the Condor Heroes are the ones that I would consider revisiting.

The story was full of twists and I enjoyed the prose once again, but the characters felt weaker.

Enjoyment: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ / Difficulty: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Overview

For these ten books, I found myself in a bit of a Chinese reading slump. That was probably also due to me getting back into reading English books. If you want to see what books I have read since, you can check out my Chinese reading log, and feel free to reach out by email if you want any difficulty ratings.

Tools for Studying Chinese with Emacs

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In my 20 years of studying Chinese, I have tried countless tools for helping me learn efficiently.

Recently, I have seen a growing overlap between Chinese learners and Emacs users. Therefore I want to share some of the tools that I have found or developed since switching to our beloved editor.

On AI/LLMs

It’s probably quite shocking to find no AI packages on this list. While I don’t fundamentally have any issue with people using AI for language learning, I find that many people now automatically reach to LLMs as their first port of call.

LLMs need to be considered a tool, and for my particular use case there are better tools for the job.

Paw

Paw by Damon Chan is one of the most impressive packages I have seen. I think that for language learners and knowledge workers, it has the potential to be considered in the same vein as Org-Mode and Magit as a killer Emacs package.

Paw manages to combine many Emacs packages and command line applications into a cohesive environment. It can manage known words and annotations, it can access online and offline dictionaries and it can be used as a front-end to LLMs for your language learning needs.

The author primarily developed it to work with English and Japanese, but I have worked on adding basic Chinese support. There is still work to be done, as the package is being actively developed. There are some new features such as live annotation that I haven’t even tried yet.

jieba

Any Chinese learner should use a tool that segments text into words, rather than just breaking it down character by character. There are emt for Mac, ewt-rs for Windows, emacs-chinese-word-segmentation, but I settled on the cross platform emacs-jieba as the rust implementation of jieba is both fast and actively developed.

CC-CEDICT

CC-CEDICT is a Creative Commons licensed Chinese to English dictionary that is built into many popular Chinese dictionary applications such as Pleco. I have added a few words over the years, but it’s definitely something that I want to contribute more to in the future.

It is really useful having a dictionary that is so thorough and has such consistent formatting in a plain text format. In fact I use the Emacs package cc-cedict.el as the base for many of my own functions in which I need the pinyin or definition of a given word.

pinyin-convert

I have been using pinyin-convert to convert between pinyin written with tone numbers and diacritics. I mostly use it in conjunction with cc-cedict.el as that dictionary uses tone numbers like zhong1guo2. Running pinyin-convert--string-to-tone-mark will convert it to zhōngguó. This is a small package but it works really well. It’s definitely worth trying out.

Typing Chinese

Before I switched to Emacs, I was using fcitx5 and rime for typing in Chinese, so naturally emacs-rime was a logical choice as my input method editor. It works really well and I like how it allows regular keys to be used in normal mode for both evil and meow. Nowadays, this is the only way that I type Chinese on my computer. If I want to type in another application, I do it via an pop-up Emacs buffer.

For systems where librime is not available, pyim is another alternative. I have never needed any alternative to emacs-rime so haven’t tried it out. The user TomoeMami reached out to me to suggest sis for using OS-native input sources and Emacs-native input sources.

zh-utils

I wrote the zh-utils package to collect all the Chinese related functionality I have written over the years. It is easier for me to manage now that I am treating it as a package instead of various functions in my init.el, and other learners can take advantage of it.

As of now it is capable of the following:

Convert Chinese characters to Pinyin
Check if a string is Chinese or not
Return the most likely Chinese word at point using segmentation
Return which part of speech a given string belongs to

Check out the readme for more details.

Tone Colours

Pleco is definitely the best Chinese dictionary on mobile, and one feature that I didn’t realise was so useful when I started using it all those years ago is having characters coloured based on the tone associated with it.

I found that when I think of a character, I quite often would picture it in red, green, blue, purple or grey depending on its tone. My zh-utils package includes some code that utilises org-mode links to achieve the desired result.

For example [[t3:][我]] would be rendered with the correct colour. I even wrote a tool that converts a CC-CEDICT dictionary file to make use of this format.

The code below is for having nicer colours with Modus themes, and in fact I have even changed the Pleco app to use the same colours as well.

(defun my-modus-themes-custom-faces (&rest _)
  (modus-themes-with-colors
    (custom-set-faces
     `(t1-face ((t :height 1.9 :foreground ,red-intense)))
     `(t2-face ((t :height 1.9 :foreground ,green-intense)))
     `(t3-face ((t :height 1.9 :foreground ,blue-intense)))
     `(t4-face ((t :height 1.9 :foreground ,magenta-warmer)))
     `(t5-face ((t :height 1.9 :foreground ,comment))))))

(add-hook 'modus-themes-after-load-theme-hook #'my-modus-themes-custom-faces)

Anki

I have known about the power of Anki for a long time, and I have kept up the habit of making and reviewing flashcards on and off over the years.

Previously, I had been using simple Front/Back flashcards. Now having watched Daniel Evensen’s recent video explaining how he sets up Anki for language learning, it really clicked to me that I should be using my own note layout with multiple fields to generate different types of cards based on the same note.

In the images below, you can see an example Anki note, and a preview of a card based on said note.

I wrote an org-capture template that calls a function I wrote for making a flashcard with a single key stroke. It automatically generates audio for the word, and fills in all the fields for the note type. It uses several of the zh-utils functions and is able to guess what word I want based on context.

(defun my/create-flashcard (word)
  (let* ((cc (cc-cedict word))
         (pinyin (pinyin-convert--string-to-tone-mark
                  (cc-cedict-entry-pinyin cc)))
         (definition (string-join (cc-cedict-entry-english cc) ", "))
         (sound (format "[sound:%s.mp3]" word))
         (level (zh-utils--get-hsk-level word))
         (grammar (zh-utils--get-word-grammar word))
         (coloured (zh-utils-tonify-word word)))
    (zh-utils-tts-make-audio
     "zh-CN-YunyangNeural"
     (format "%s %s" word word)
     word)
    (format
     (concat "* %s %s\n"
             ":PROPERTIES:\n"
             ":ANKI_DECK: Chinese::New\n"
             ":ANKI_NOTE_TYPE: Jack Chinese\n"
             ":END:\n"
             "** Chinese\n%s\n"
             "** Pinyin\n%s\n"
             "** Definition\n%s\n"
             "** Grammar\n%s\n"
             "** Sound\n%s\n"
             "** Coloured Characters\n%s\n")
     word
     (if level (format ":%s:" level) "")
     word pinyin definition grammar sound coloured)))


(defun my/create-flashcard-from-context ()
  "Create flashcard using context-aware word selection."
  (let ((word (zh-utils--org-capture-flashcard-get-word)))
    (when word
      (my/create-flashcard word))))

(push '("c" "Chinese Flashcard" entry
      (file "~/notes/new-flashcards.org")
      (function my/create-flashcard-from-context))
    org-capture-templates)

To make the coloured characters in Anki match the colours of Modus Themes, I add the following CSS to the card’s styling.

.t1 {color: #e30000;}
.t2 {color: #01b31c;}
.t3 {color: #150ff0;}
.t4 {color: #8800bf;}
.t5 {color: #777777;}

.nightMode .t1 {color: #ff8080;}
.nightMode .t2 {color: #80ff80;}
.nightMode .t3 {color: #8080ff;}
.nightMode .t4 {color: #df80ff;}
.nightMode .t5 {color: #c6c6c6;}

Fonts

The two Chinese fonts I like to use in Emacs are Adobe Fangsong and Sarasa Gothic. I often toggle between the two of these, but I didn’t think that this was worth including in my zh-utils package. You may find it useful as a starting point.

(defun my/set-han-font-fangsong ()
  (set-fontset-font "fontset-default" 'han
                    (font-spec :family "Adobe Fangsong Std"))
  (setq my/han-font "fangsong"))

(defun my/set-han-font-sarasa ()
  (set-fontset-font "fontset-default" 'han
                    (font-spec :family "Sarasa Mono SC"))
  (setq my/han-font "sarasa"))

(defun my/toggle-han-font ()
  (interactive)
  (if (equal my/han-font "sarasa")
      (my/set-han-font-fangsong)
    (my/set-han-font-sarasa)))

(set-fontset-font "fontset-default" 'han
                  (font-spec :family "Sarasa Mono SC"))
(setq my/han-font "sarasa")

More Chinese books I've read - 11-20

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been over a year since I wrote about the first ten Chinese books I read, so I think it’s time for an update. I tried only reading books in Chinese in 2023, and I was doing well until I hit a bit of a reading slump and started reading English again. A list of all the books I’ve read can be found here.

《悟空传 - 典藏纪念版》今何在 - Wukong Biography by Jin Hezai

This is considered to be one of the first Chinese web novels, from the time before they were thousands of chapters long. I approached the book the wrong way as I initially thought it was a modern retelling of Journey to the West, and could have been read as a simpler version of the original. While the language is definitely simpler than the original, it was still quite literary. Also, I was only vaguely aware of a few of the main characters from the original Journey to the West, so when you meet all the other characters, it probably means a lot more if you are familiar with the original characters.

Do I recommend it? Requires prior knowledge
How difficult was it? Probably the hardest Chinese book I’ve read

《灵幻文论》by 杨夕文 - Psychic Literary Theory by Yang Xiwen

I bought a copy of this book years ago while visiting my wife’s family. It is a book on magic theory by some of China’s top magicians. I found the theory and psychology parts easy to follow, but struggled with following precise instructions and finger placements for sleights.

Do I recommend it to someone who enjoys magic? Yes
How difficult was it? Relatively simple

《开端》祈祷君 - Reset by Qidaojun

This is the book that a very popular Chinese TV show was based on. Without getting into spoilers, it’s a time loop story in which the protagonists enter a loop after the bus they are on explodes. Having already watched the TV adaptation, I think that the team behind it did a great job by keeping all of the best parts of the book, while adding new parts that I think improved on it.

In terms of language, this is one of the easiest books I’ve read. It’s also not very long, so I would have recommended it if I’d read it before the show was out.

Do I recommend it? Just watch the TV show
How difficult was it? Easy

《紫川第二部光明王者》老猪 - Zichuan Volume 2: The King of Light by Lao Zhu

Continuing on with Zichuan, this is now the second volume. Having already watched the cartoon which covered most of the first volume, the story of this volume was entirely new to me. There are a few chapters in this volume that are the best I have read in Chinese and gripped me in ways that not many English books can.

Language wise, reading this after reading the above books was like putting on a comfy old pair of slippers. The author likes to use a lot of the same Chengyu throughout the book which served as great way of drilling them.

Do I recommend it? Yes
How difficult was it? No harder than the first book

《九州-缥缈录 1 蛮荒》江南 - Novoland: Eagle Flag 1: Wasteland by Jiang Nan

This is the second book I’ve read by Jiang Nan and I much preferred it to Dragon Raja. I have read that the Novoland universe that this series is a part of was originally supposed to be China’s answer to Lord of the Rings. I really enjoyed it, and will probably return to the series at a later date.

In terms of language, the author uses a different style of language for each province. For example, this book mostly deals with nomads that definitely feel inspired by Mongolians, and they speak in quite plain language, but I struggled with how they use names. Whereas one of the other main provinces speak in a more classical/literary style which is difficult in a different way.

Do I recommend it? Yes
How difficult was it? Quite difficult

《看见》柴静 - To see by Chai Jing

A nonfiction book that a friend recommended many years ago. In fact, I believe it was the first Chinese ebook that I ever downloaded. It’s a book written by a TV reporter about her times working stories and what it’s like in the Chinese media industry. There are definitely some stories that are more interesting than others, but I wouldn’t say any are bad. The chapters that stuck with me the most are the ones about the kitten stamper, the tiger, and the one about gay people that she interviewed.

In some ways nonfiction books often have more difficult language, and this is definitely the case here. Chai goes into depth on a range of topics and she also likes to repeat certain phrases in different contexts and have them imply different things.

Do I recommend it? Yes
How difficult was it? Some parts are quite difficult

《紫川第三部铁腕统领》老猪 - Zichuan Volume 3 - Iron-Fisted Rule by Lao Zhu

Another good Zichuan book. Not as good as the last one, but it’s still enjoyable. There’s not really any point talking about it here as I’m over a million characters at this point.

Do I recommend it? Yes
How difficult was it? I don’t struggle with the writing style at all now

《阳具森林》九把刀 - Penis Forest by Giddens Ko

I was really looking forward to this book. It was put to me online as a dark comedy by Taiwan’s most popular author in which a group of men wish they had bigger penises, but they never stop growing. It’s a good premise, but the book was so childish, and not interesting in the slightest. The only reason I finished it was because it was so short.

There were other books I wanted to read by this author, but this book really turned me off.

Do I recommend it? Worst Chinese book I’ve read
How difficult was it? Quite easy, but uses some slang

《推理之王1：无证之罪》紫金陈 - Burning Ice by Zijin Chen

Read this book now. I’d watched the TV shows of the author’s other two works, and even though I liked The Bad Kids, I much preferred this. I don’t want to talk too much about it because I won’t be able to stop myself getting into spoilers.

The language is quite simple and I was rarely needing to look up words. Also the author uses lots of short chapters, so it was easy to read a chapter whenever you have a few minutes spare.

Do I recommend it? My Book of the Year
How difficult was it? Simple language and structure

《白马啸西风》金庸 - White Horse Neighs in the Western Wind by Jin Yong

I saw that some members of Chinese Forums were reading this book so I decided to join in. It’s another short book and definitely a good introduction to Jin Yong’s writing. I still would recommend reading Gu Long first as I think is language is even easier.

Do I recommend it? Yes
How difficult was it? Surprisingly not too difficult

My First Ten Chinese Books

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I have been studying Chinese for over 15 years now, but it was only in the last year that I started reading Chinese books. At first, I found it really difficult and I couldn’t read more than a few pages before my brain physically started hurting. Over time, I have managed to build up much more endurance and there are even times when I can read for a few hours straight if time allows.

I regret not starting to read books in my target language earlier as I have seen the impact that it’s had not just on my reading but all parts of my language (I tried speaking in an imitation of Gu Long whilst I was reading his novel).

Now that I have read ten books in Chinese, I thought that I would share some of my thoughts on the books that I read. I will be using a similar system to the one that Olle Linge used in this post, but I will be listing them in the order that I read them.

《家》巴金 - The Family by Pa Chin

Looking back, this book was probably not an ideal first book. The language wasn’t particularly difficult, but a combination of its length, the length of its chapters and the fact that the author used a lot of dialect and some homonyms that are different from what is used today, make it a book that I would recommend to somebody a bit further into their reading journey.

When I was reading it, I remember thinking how amazing it must have felt to be reading it at the time it came out as it felt very revolutionary. The book was a great introspective into Chinese familial roles and it gave me a better understanding of the culture.

Do I recommend it? Yes
How difficult was it? Not difficult, but not a good first book

《凶画》周浩晖 - Xiong Hua by Zhou Haohui

I saw this book recommended online and thought that I’d try it out as it was a short book, and I was interested in trying out some detective fiction. There were two POVs in the story and I found that one of them was much more interesting than the other. Also, I was not happy with how the book ended. The two detectives essentially dumped all the answers on the reader in the final chapter through lots of exposition.

In terms of language, the only thing that confused me was all the terminology related to monks and temples.

Do I recommend it? Not particularly
How difficult was it? Fairly easy

《鬼望坡》周浩晖 - Gui Wang Po by Zhou Haohui

This was my first time listening to an audio book in Chinese and it was a good experience as far as that aspect went. Whilst being a sequel to 凶画, it could easily be treated as a standalone novel. This book only followed the story of 罗飞, who I found to be the less interesting of the two main characters in the previous instalment. Having said that, I had a much better time with this book.

It was an interesting story in which the detective helps a man suffering with amnesia solve the mysteries of his past which seem to be somehow related to several deaths on a small island.

Do I recommend it? More than the last book
How difficult was it? Fairly easy

《活着》余华 - To Live by Yu Hua

After becoming a father, this was my first book back after a long time away from reading Chinese. This book had been recommended to me so many times and it is generally recommended as a good first novel to read in Chinese. The author, Yu Hua, is considered to be one of China’s greatest living authors and as most of the characters he writes about our poorly educated, he writes in a very simple and accessible style.

This book follows the life of Xu Fugui and we see him go from a young man obsessed with gambling and prositutes and we see how the Cultural Revolution affected him and the people around him. It definitely made me want to read more from the author, although I have heard some people saying that Yu Hua’s works can be too depressing for them.

Do I recommend it? Yes
How difficult was it? Easy

《撒哈拉的故事》三毛 - The Stories of the Sahara by Echo Chan

This is another book that had been recommended to me a lot and it was also my first time reading non-fiction in Chinese. In fact, I believe that I have never read any books from this genre in English either.

That is actually my biggest problem with this book. I wouldn’t have read it if it was in English. I felt the need to complete it as it was good reading practice and not because I genuinely enjoyed it. There were some chapters that I really enjoyed. The final chapter, 哭泣的骆驼 was a particular highlight, and there were also some chapters that I found dreadfully dull.

I can see the appeal of this book, but it just wasn’t for me.

Do I recommend it? If you like this sort of book, then yes
How difficult was it? Probably the hardest so far

《许三观卖血记》余华 - Chronicle of a blood merchant by Yu Hua

This was my favourite book I read all year in either English or Chinese. I had not seen this book recommended anywhere near as much as To Live, which is by the same author. I simply picked it up because I thought it had an interesting title.

The book isn’t specifically about a man’s experiences selling blood, it is instead about the general experiences of a man who occasionally sells his blood to the local hospital to make ends meet. This book is set in a similar time frame to Yu Hua’s other book I have read. What really made this book shine for me was the characters and in particular the relationship between the main character Xu Sanguan and his wife and children.

This is a book that I will definitely read again in the future and it is a book that I have recommended to friends who have don’t even have an interest in China. It had that much of an impact on me and it has stuck with me ever since I read it.

Do I recommend it? Absolutely
How difficult was it? Quite easy.

《龙族》 1: 火之晨曦江南 - Dragon Raja 1: The Blazing Dawnlight by Jiang Nan

Jiang Nan is considered one of the top fantasy writers in China and the Dragon Raja series is often considered the “Chinese Harry Potter”, or at least that is how it is marketed.

It wasn’t bad, but I just found the novel to be a bit juvenile and boring. I am no longer at the stage of my life where I would read Harry Potter for fun and I think it is the same for this series. I researched it a bit online before starting reading and most of the people talking about it were remeniscing about how they read it in junior high. This made it seem like a good choice for me as it wouldn’t be too difficult. It wasn’t difficult, but I also hadn’t taken into account that all of the characters would essentially act like thirteen year olds as that was the target audience.

I have heard that the series gets better, but it’s still a big time investment and considering that I didn’t particularly enjoy it, I can’t see myself continuing with the series anytime soon.

Do I recommend it? No
How difficult was it? Intermediate

《流星- 蝴蝶- 剑》古龙 - Meteor, Butterfly, Sword by Gu Long

I loved this book. It has been called a ripoff of The Godfather in a Wuxia setting, and that is completely true, but I still loved it. This book was my introduction to Wuxia and I am definitely going to read more books from this genre.

This was probably the first book that I read in Chinese that I could consider a real “page turner”. I would often read chapters at a time and just ignore the mental fatigue that comes from reading in a foreign language.

For a language learner, Gu Long’s writing style is great. He uses lots of short sentences, repetition and rhetorical questions. His writing style has also had a big impact on me and I keep wanting to go and read more of his books.

Do I recommend it? Very much so
How difficult was it? Not difficult

《紫川》老猪 - Zichuan by Lao Zhu

This is the longest book that I have read in Chinese. In fact, as it was a long running web-novel, I am only about 20% through the novel, but as the printed version is published in ten volumes, I thought it was worth including on this list (and counting as two entries). When I finish it, it will probably be the longest book that I have read. Period.

The language was not overly difficult and the author tries to keep it light and use lots of humour, but after reading Gu Long, it took me a while to adjust to such long sentences and such a different style. The story was easy to follow and very enjoyable, but I had just watched the cartoon based on the novel before beginning.

I am definitely going to be aiming to finish this novel next year.

Do I recommend it? Yes
How difficult was it? Quite difficult

Conclusion

I am happy with the progress that I have been making recently. Particularly in the second half of 2022.

I spent the last month or so of the year finishing off a few English books that I had on the go, so that I am now able to give Chinese my full attention. I read just over one million characters last year, but I plan to do significantly more than that in 2023. Hopefully it won’t be too long before I publish about the next ten books that I read.

How I track my Chinese reading speed

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this year, I read several interesting posts on Chinese Forums in which users recorded their Chinese speed. It was fascinating to see the progress that the users had made and I was curious to try it for myself.

Most of the users had a workflow that consisted of recording their time in a time tracking application and then manually inputting all times into a spreadsheet. I have come up with my own method which after some tweaking, I now believe to be vastly superior and essentially friction free.

The key to all of this, rather surprisingly, is Org-Mode.

You may be wondering what is Org-Mode. This is a difficult question to answer as it is such a powerful tool. However, it is essentially a plain-text system built into Emacs for managing whatever you may need it too.

Now before you go clicking off, my technique does not rely on Emacs, and I still believe that this system can work well for people who don’t use Emacs. In fact, it was important for me that my way of recording could be portable. I don’t want to have to keep my laptop at hand when I read.

I am a big fan of Beorg, a very useful Org-Mode app for iOS. There is a paid extension for tracking time which is essential to how I track many things in my life.

Even though the way of going about things has changed, the tools that I am using have been a great fit for the job since the very begining. I now want to show you how my technique has evolved and highlight just how powerful and flexible Org-Mode and this technique can be.

The first attempt

My initial technique was admittedly not great. I made a simple Org heading and just kept clocking every reading session as I went.

* 活着

Once I finished the book, I worked out how many characters were in the book and then divide that by the time spent reading for my reading speed. In this case I read ~76000 characters in 472 minutes, giving me a reading speed of 161 characters per minute.

* DONE 活着
CLOSED: [2022-02-23 Wed 13:41]
:LOGBOOK:
CLOCK: [2022-02-23 Wed 12:59]--[2022-02-23 Wed 13:37] =>  0:38
CLOCK: [2022-02-22 Tue 22:00]--[2022-02-22 Tue 22:08] =>  0:08
CLOCK: [2022-02-22 Tue 21:28]--[2022-02-22 Tue 21:52] =>  0:24
CLOCK: [2022-02-22 Tue 21:08]--[2022-02-22 Tue 21:28] =>  0:20
CLOCK: [2022-02-22 Tue 13:55]--[2022-02-22 Tue 14:21] =>  0:26
CLOCK: [2022-02-22 Tue 12:31]--[2022-02-22 Tue 13:12] =>  0:41
CLOCK: [2022-02-18 Fri 07:55]--[2022-02-18 Fri 08:22] =>  0:27
CLOCK: [2022-02-12 Sat 13:47]--[2022-02-12 Sat 15:04] =>  1:17
CLOCK: [2022-02-12 Sat 13:29]--[2022-02-12 Sat 13:42] =>  0:13
CLOCK: [2022-02-12 Sat 11:41]--[2022-02-12 Sat 11:59] =>  0:18
CLOCK: [2022-02-11 Fri 15:33]--[2022-02-11 Fri 15:34] =>  0:01
CLOCK: [2022-02-09 Wed 20:00]--[2022-02-09 Wed 20:09] =>  0:09
CLOCK: [2022-02-07 Mon 21:00]--[2022-02-07 Mon 21:39] =>  0:39
CLOCK: [2022-01-29 Sat 15:19]--[2022-01-29 Sat 15:46] =>  0:27
CLOCK: [2022-01-29 Sat 14:29]--[2022-01-29 Sat 14:36] =>  0:07
CLOCK: [2022-01-29 Sat 13:33]--[2022-01-29 Sat 13:42] =>  0:09
CLOCK: [2022-01-28 Fri 21:30]--[2022-01-28 Fri 21:54] =>  0:24
CLOCK: [2022-01-28 Fri 20:45]--[2022-01-28 Fri 21:23] =>  0:38
CLOCK: [2022-01-28 Fri 16:20]--[2022-01-28 Fri 16:30] =>  0:10
CLOCK: [2022-01-28 Fri 16:13]--[2022-01-28 Fri 16:16] =>  0:03
CLOCK: [2022-01-28 Fri 15:59]--[2022-01-28 Fri 16:12] =>  0:13
:END:

This technique was okay, but there were a couple of problems I had with it.

My main issue is that I don’t like how I need to wait so long in order to get back one useful piece of data. It’s impossible to know if I’m making progress while in the middle of the book. I also used this technique for the second book I read this year, and it took me the best part of a month to realise that I had essentially made no progress.

The second technique

In order to combat this issue, I decided to record my data more regularly, and I was quite happy that I managed to generate 10 data points for this book. I continued using Beorg to record the times and manually copied them over to the following spreadsheet (Yes. Org-Mode can deal with plain-text spreasheets. Also, yes. That is a spreadsheet formula at the bottom.)

** DONE 许三观卖血记
| Chapter | Time (m) | Characters | Reading speed (cpm) |
|---------+----------+------------+---------------------|
|       1 |       30 |       5491 |                 183 |
|       3 |       54 |      10241 |                 189 |
|       7 |       99 |      19298 |                 194 |
|      10 |      126 |      24441 |                 193 |
|      11 |      139 |      26591 |                 191 |
|      15 |      173 |      33558 |                 193 |
|      20 |      226 |      45048 |                 199 |
|      25 |      295 |      67591 |                 229 |
|      27 |      348 |      83303 |                 239 |
|     end |      443 |     105101 |                 237 |
#+TBLFM: $4='(/ $3 $2);N

This new way of doing things wasn’t without its own problems. The main one is that it now required a lot more manual input, and that means that I was much more likely to make mistakes while inputting.

Another problem is that the data is slightly misleading. As the time and character counts represent cumulative counts for the whole book up until that time, the reading speed also represents the speed for the whole book up until that point and is not representative of each reading session. For example my speed for the penultimate entry would have been 296 cpm, but that is not obvious at a glance.

The final technique

The key to my final technique was learning to take advantage of the :PROPERTIES: attribute in Org-Mode. The following is an example of a single chapter that I read recently.

* 紫川
** DONE 第1集 第1章
CLOSED: [2022-08-30 Tue 16:16]
:PROPERTIES:
:characters: 13510
:END:
- State "DONE"       from "TODO"       [2022-08-30 Tue 16:16]
:LOGBOOK:
CLOCK: [2022-08-30 Tue 15:56]--[2022-08-30 Tue 16:13] =>  0:17
CLOCK: [2022-08-30 Tue 15:33]--[2022-08-30 Tue 15:37] =>  0:04
CLOCK: [2022-08-30 Tue 15:13]--[2022-08-30 Tue 15:26] =>  0:13
CLOCK: [2022-08-30 Tue 12:36]--[2022-08-30 Tue 13:20] =>  0:44
:END:

I have written two Python scripts for analysing my reading data.

The first script takes an .epub file as input and returns a skeleton of the book in which each chapter has a character count attached.


*  撒哈拉的故事
** 沙漠中的饭店
:PROPERTIES:
:characters: 2655
:END:
** 结婚记
:PROPERTIES:
:characters: 4239
:END:
** 悬壶济世
:PROPERTIES:
:characters: 4226
:END:
** 娃娃新娘
:PROPERTIES:
:characters: 3874
:END:
** 荒山之夜
:PROPERTIES:
:characters: 6238
:END:
** 沙漠观浴记
:PROPERTIES:
:characters: 4208
:END:
** 爱的寻求
:PROPERTIES:
:characters: 5055
:END:
** 芳 邻
:PROPERTIES:
:characters: 4457
:END:
** 素人渔夫
:PROPERTIES:
:characters: 5586
:END:
** 死果
:PROPERTIES:
:characters: 7161
:END:
** 天 梯
:PROPERTIES:
:characters: 6983
:END:
** 白手成家
:PROPERTIES:
:characters: 14393
:END:
** 收魂记
:PROPERTIES:
:characters: 5054
:END:
** 沙巴军曹
:PROPERTIES:
:characters: 6980
:END:
** 搭车客
:PROPERTIES:
:characters: 8138
:END:
** 哑 奴
:PROPERTIES:
:characters: 8054
:END:
** 哭泣的骆驼
:PROPERTIES:
:characters: 18123
:END:

The second script uses orgparse to extract all the data from the Org document and extract lots of useful information from it.

I plan to cover this in a separate post when I have my graphs in a state where I am happier with them. But for now, I would like to share some simple statistics as I just passed one million characters for the year.

Chars tracked: 1006996
Time recorded: 3 days, 9 hours, and 59 minutes.
Average speed: 205 cpm

Conclusion

I have published the code for both of my scripts on Github. Hopefully there may be at least one other person in the world who may be interested in such a niche topic.

Next time I will talk about my data visualisation techniques for this project and then I will write summaries of all the Chinese books that I’ve read closer to the end of the year.

Chinese on Jiewawa's blog

Rating Chinese Books by Enjoyment and Difficulty - 21-30

闯荡江湖二十年 by 龙乘风 | Roaming the Jianghu for Twenty Years by Long Chengfeng

紫川4 - 帝都赞歌 by 老猪 | Zi Chuan 4 by Lao Zhu

射雕英雄传 1 by 金庸 | The Legend of the Condor Heroes 1 by Jin Yong

射雕英雄传（二） by 金庸 | The Legend of the Condor Heroes (2) by Jin Yong

坏小孩 by 紫金陈 | The Bad Kids by Zijin Chen

紫川5 - 一统天下 by 老猪 | Zi Chuan 5 by Lao Zhu

雪刀浪子 by 龙乘风 | Snowblade Vagabond by Long Chengfeng

猫城记 by 老舍 | Cat Country by Lao She

尸语者 by 法医秦明 | The Speaking Corpse by Qin Ming (Fayi Qin Ming)

解密 by 麦家 | Decoded by Mai Jia

血海飘香 by 古龙 | Perfume in the Sea of Blood by Gu Long

Overview

Tools for Studying Chinese with Emacs

On AI/LLMs

Paw

jieba

CC-CEDICT

pinyin-convert

Typing Chinese

zh-utils

Tone Colours

Anki

Fonts

Further reading

More Chinese books I've read - 11-20

《悟空传 - 典藏纪念版》今何在 - Wukong Biography by Jin Hezai

《灵幻文论》by 杨夕文 - Psychic Literary Theory by Yang Xiwen

《开端》祈祷君 - Reset by Qidaojun

《紫川第二部 光明王者》老猪 - Zichuan Volume 2: The King of Light by Lao Zhu

《九州-缥缈录 1 蛮荒》江南 - Novoland: Eagle Flag 1: Wasteland by Jiang Nan

《看见》柴静 - To see by Chai Jing

《紫川第三部 铁腕统领》老猪 - Zichuan Volume 3 - Iron-Fisted Rule by Lao Zhu

《阳具森林》九把刀 - Penis Forest by Giddens Ko

《推理之王1：无证之罪》紫金陈 - Burning Ice by Zijin Chen

《白马啸西风》金庸 - White Horse Neighs in the Western Wind by Jin Yong

My First Ten Chinese Books

《家》 巴金 - The Family by Pa Chin

《凶画》 周浩晖 - Xiong Hua by Zhou Haohui

《鬼望坡》 周浩晖 - Gui Wang Po by Zhou Haohui

《活着》 余华 - To Live by Yu Hua

《撒哈拉的故事》 三毛 - The Stories of the Sahara by Echo Chan

《许三观卖血记》 余华 - Chronicle of a blood merchant by Yu Hua

《龙族》 1: 火之晨曦 江南 - Dragon Raja 1: The Blazing Dawnlight by Jiang Nan

《流星- 蝴蝶- 剑》 古龙 - Meteor, Butterfly, Sword by Gu Long

《紫川》 老猪 - Zichuan by Lao Zhu

Conclusion

How I track my Chinese reading speed

The first attempt

The second technique

The final technique

Conclusion

《紫川第二部光明王者》老猪 - Zichuan Volume 2: The King of Light by Lao Zhu

《紫川第三部铁腕统领》老猪 - Zichuan Volume 3 - Iron-Fisted Rule by Lao Zhu

《家》巴金 - The Family by Pa Chin

《凶画》周浩晖 - Xiong Hua by Zhou Haohui

《鬼望坡》周浩晖 - Gui Wang Po by Zhou Haohui

《活着》余华 - To Live by Yu Hua

《撒哈拉的故事》三毛 - The Stories of the Sahara by Echo Chan

《许三观卖血记》余华 - Chronicle of a blood merchant by Yu Hua

《龙族》 1: 火之晨曦江南 - Dragon Raja 1: The Blazing Dawnlight by Jiang Nan

《流星- 蝴蝶- 剑》古龙 - Meteor, Butterfly, Sword by Gu Long

《紫川》老猪 - Zichuan by Lao Zhu