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A Resource for Reading Practice: The Chinese Reading World

I wanted to share a resource for reading practice that I stumbled across recently. It’s called the Chinese Reading World, and it was a project led by the University of Iowa.

The site was put together from 2005 to 2008, so it’s not super up to date. However, there is a ton of content! Everything is sorted into 3 levels: beginning, intermediate, and advanced. 

Each level has 30 units, and each unit has 10 lessons. The lessons begin with a vocab pre-test, then there is a reading with some comprehension questions. Lastly, there is a vocab post-test, which is the same as the initial test (at least for the lessons I’ve done so far). There’s audio for each lesson text, but unfortunately it can’t be streamed—you have to download it. There is also an achievement test at the end of each unit.

My experience has actually been that I already know all the words on the vocabulary tests, but the reading passages contain other words that I’m not familiar with.

So far, the readings I’ve encountered are not very long. This is nice since reading longer pieces can be frustrating at times. With shorter readings, you can just read 1 or 2 on some days and read more when you have more time/patience. I believe the readings are taken from Chinese newspapers.

Also, every unit has a theme. With 90 units total, there are bound to be themes that interest you. Example unit topics:

Directions and Asking Direction 方向和问路

Sports and Outdoor Activities 体育和户外运动

Chinese Music and Musicians 中国音乐和音乐家

Chinese Minorities and Local Customs 地方习俗和民族风情

Chinese Sports and Olympic Games 体育和奥林匹克

Contemporary Chinese Literature and Writers 中国当代文学和作家

The 3 levels also each come with 5 proficiency tests. They seem to be based on vocabulary knowledge, so expanding your vocab is clearly a huge focus of this site. The only thing I’m unclear is about is I’m not sure exactly when the proficiency tests are meant to be taken. After completing all units? Or are they spaced out so you are supposed to take test 1 after the first few units, test 2 after the next few, etc.?

I’ve started working my way through the advanced section this week. With 300 advanced lessons alone, it really feels like I have an infinite number of articles to go through!

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Want to learn something new in 2022??

Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)

40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)

Excellent basic crochet video series

Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)

Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)

How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)

Another drawing character faces video

Literally my favorite art pose hack

Tutorial of how to make a whole ass Stardew Valley esque farming game in Gamemaker Studios 2??

Introduction to flying small aircrafts

French/Dutch/Fishtail braiding

Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)

Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)

Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)

Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:

Calculus 1 (full semester class)

Learn basic statistics (free textbook)

Introduction to college physics (free textbook)

Introduction to accounting (free textbook)

Learn a language:

Ancient Greek

Latin

Spanish

German

Japanese (grammar guide) (for dummies)

French

Russian (pretty good cyrillic guide!)

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Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

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Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

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“…Noblewomen appear in twelfth-century texts as both active subjects and passive objects, in complex ways, pursuing political ambition, as religious, pious wives, mothers and daughters. Such views of women depend very much on genre, date of composition and context of entry of a female character into the narrative. It is important to recognise that medieval writers wrote within convention. When Étienne de Fougères wrote his Le Livre des Manières in 1160–70, he described good and bad women, and used the countess of Hereford as his model of female courtly, aristocratic and ‘good behaviour’.

In the early twelfth century, Baudri de Bourgeuil wrote of the beauty of his subjects within a convention which dated from the poetry of Maximillian; therefore he wrote of eyes that shine like stars or teeth like ivory. Orderis Vitalis’s view of women’s power in the context of their political and warlike activity, like his view of men, is ambiguous, and by no means monolithic. For example, Orderic described women actively engaged in the military campaigns of their husbands. Isabel of Conches rode out to war ‘armed as a knight among the knights, and she showed no less courage among the knights in hauberks than did the maid Camilla’.

His story focuses on the disagreements between Helewise, the wife of William, count of Evreux, and Isabel of Conches, wife of Ralph of Tosny, who caused their husbands to take up arms against each other. Although the female warrior may well be no more than a ‘well-worn literary motif ’, it is striking that Orderic ascribes different personal qualities to each woman. Isabel is praised as a generous, daring and gay character who was well loved. Her opponent Helewise is by contrast ‘clever and persuasive, cruel and grasping’. He later commented on Isabel’s retirement to a nunnery, where she ‘worthily reformed her life’ and repented of her ‘mortal sin of luxury’.

On the presence of women at the battle of Ascalon, he states that women remained off the battlefield with the noncombatants and that they are ‘unwarlike by  nature’. The emotional weakness of women is made gender-specific in Orderic’s discussion of the expedition and aftermath of the defeat and capture of Mark Bohemond when campaigning against the Turks. He states that Tancred, the commander in chief, ‘did not give way like a woman to vain tears and laments’ but mustered an army and governed the lands.

Lees verder

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Chinese Slang :  saying that someone is stupid

白目 báimù - stupid. Literally, white-eyed, blind. Here it means not understanding the situation and reacting in a wrong way as a result.

白痴 báichī - Idiot, someone with mental retardation.

250 二百五 èrbǎiwǔ - stupid person/idiot 

脑残 nǎocán - 'Deficient Brain’ - Disabled brain, brain has a problem.

大脑进水 dànǎo jìn shuǐ - water leaked in the brain.

笨蛋 bèndàn - Idiot (lit. stupid egg).

蠢蛋 chǔn dàn - dummy, fool

傻瓜 shǎguā (also 傻子 shǎzi)- dummy, fool, idiot. The term was in use as early as the Yuan Dynasty.

呆瓜 dāiguā (also 呆子 dāizi) - dummy, fool, idiot.

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Ok here's the truth: IF WHEN YOU WATCHED/READ LES MISERABLES YOU DIDN'T SUPPORT THE MILITARY COMING TO KILL THE REVOLUTIONARIES, BUT YOU CURRENTLY SUPPORT THE NATIONAL GUARD COMING TO ATTACK PROTESTORS IN AMERICA, YOU ARE A HYPOCRITE. END. OF. STORY.

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Okay but how the FUCK do people make pretty timelapses of studying... my background... whack... my handwriting... whack... my editing skills... whack

#help #studyblr #studystudystudy #student #timelapse #i am really trying #it aint working #honestly HOW

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Day #6 of quarantine, and we are fighting out here to get good grades (lovely alliteration). I thought since the lighting was good i should go and make some pictures for this blog. Honestly they’re still kind of shitty, but here is my bullet journal’s monthly and weekly spread for you all! You can see i’m not a native english speaker -i’m dutch- but maybe it will be a fun excercise for some of you who like dutch ???? Anyways, i’m still studying for modern chinese history, i’ll probably post my grade here in a few weeks too if i’m still doing this shit haha. On the left you can see the painting “Mr and Mrs Zhao Dechang”, painted in 1885, which is a famous example of late Qing portraiture.

#student #studyblr #studystudystudy #chinese #history #dutch #bujo #weeklyspread

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Hey y’all! We be out here studying for a modern chinese history midterm. I vibe so hard with chinese history that i just applied for a second study in Chinese, starting next year of class :) Deepest apologies for the kind of shitty pictures and notes, but we are trying to stay true to the name haha. Hopefully you’re all safe (for whoever reads this) and may we get back soon to our normal lives.

#student #studyblr #chinese #history #university #covid 19 #coronavirus

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Lmao ignore the amateur ass photograph, but anyways this is what i am doing in corona quarantine time! Honestly i’m so demotivated to actually do work, but even when that happens you gotta do it you know? I’m reading about barbary corsairs again but this time i’m hurting myself by working through this bitchass of a book (who the FUCK invented french?!?!?!)

#studyblr #studystudystudy #coronavirus #history #french language #university #staysafe

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So i’m writing a mandatory paper on the barbary corsairs, and honestly i really wasn’t feeling it at the beginning but now i love those little marauding bastards

#history #studyblr #student #chaotic academia #maghreb #barbary coast

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You know, history really is my passion and i can’t imagine doing anything else, but sometimes uni is so exhausting. The stress wears me down, living far away from my family can be so lonely and the anxiety makes me shake all the damn time and i just wish it would stop for a goddamn minute already

#rant #history #student

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what it’s like to log into tumblr.com and read some of the takes people here have about history

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Honestly i love the dark academia aesthetic but i think the only things “dark” in my aesthetic are the bags underneath my eyes :)))))

#dark academia #dark acadamia aesthetic #studyblr #university #i should kms