I have been reading 祈祷落幕时 by 东野圭吾. These are Japanese murder mystery novels (Agatha Christie style). I have read 5 of them now in Chinese and would really recommend them to someone looking for their first full length novel. Aside from the Japanese names which can be hard to keep track of, these are very straightforward and compelling reads.
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
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Completely missed this! That sounds awesome. Thanks for the rec. Just started reading 許三觀賣血記 as my first novel, it's been going OK so far but I feel like DuChinese has drilled me a lot regarding murder mysteries/detective kind of vocabulary so those might be easy in that sense haha.
Also a very good choice for first novel!
I'm currently going through DuChinese (as usual), but also listening a lot to "Learn Taiwanese Mandarin" which is an awesome podcast all in Chinese for intermediate learners. Interesting topics and I love the Taiwanese accent.
How good is DuChinese as paying vs free user? I just started and already ran into a paywall. The premium seems quite expensive.
I never used the free version that much, I found it too restrictive. I've been reading around 600 lessons so far, so I think I got my money's worth for sure. It provides a clear path and the app is really well designed. But that's not to say you can't find other reading material elsewhere, it depends on how much effort you want to put in. If you want really nice, but old, reader, I'd very much recommend John DeFrancis Chinese Reader series (Beginning Chinese Reader, Intermediate Chinese Reader, Advanced Chinese Reader) which is packed with Chinese. It's available on the web. It's really amazing and will with spaced repetition progressively introduce you to 1200 unique characters and 8000+ compounds.
Sinolinguas graded readers are also available on the web if you don't have the ability to support their work.
But for DuChinese, If you're a student you're eligible for a student discount. And I think they, similar to The Chairman's Bao and Skritter, do huge discounts during like CNY and stuff? You can always try emailing them and ask when the next discount will be, or maybe they might even give you a discount just by asking :)
Thanks for the reply. I'll check out John Defrancis for sure! Not eligible for the student discount sadly. I'll try mailing, seems like a smart idea. I also considered doing the same for HelloChinese, as I ran out of free stuff there and missed out on the CNY sale there too.
Thanks a ton again!