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Reading Yu Hua's "To Live"


daofeishi

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Great. I've been looking at Wikidots as a possible collaboration tool. Have a look at the example page I've created. I have opened up for anonymous editing, so you should be able to edit the document. Try to play around a bit and tell me what you think. If you want to do any fancy formatting, the syntax is explained here.

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I've almost finished 巴金's《家》 (still 20 pages to go). I planned to read 《空镜子》 once I've finished 《家》, but since I recently also bought 《活着》, I might as well join. I have this edition: http://www.amazon.cn/活着-余华/dp/B004A91D2G

I'm currently quite busy, so I might not be able to keep up with pace, but I'll try anyway.

When do we start?

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FYI for those in the U.S., you can pick up 《活着》 at bookseed.

afriday11 - for something shorter, try 《我没有自己的名字》。

BertR - I am finishing up 《家》 as well. I actually have a big chunk left, but am going to try and squeeze it in before my copy of 《活着》 arrives.

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I'm in, I don't know that I have read something at this level, and certainly haven't read anything this long before, but I would like the challenge and will try to keep up and contribute :) I'm going to read it online, since I'm in spain and doubt ill be able to track down a hard copy. How many pages are the copies everyone else has? If we get through 25 pages a week, how long are we looking at for the whole book? I'll try to divide the online version up the same.

peiruo

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I am planning to read from the online link here that daofeishi sent. Is it correct that there are a total of 10 chapters in the book? Does it make sense to split this up by chapters instead of # of pages? It would probably be easier for those of us using the online version. I'm also planning to use Perapera-kun to assist me. I've never used the software before but without it, I wouldn't be able to participate in this challenge at this point in time. I'm pretty excited to see how it'll all work out.

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No, there aren't any chapters in the book. From time to time there is extra whitespace between blocks of text (on pages 6, 34, 36, 67, ... in my edition) and somethings this corresponds to a new chapter on that website, but not necessary. Also notice that the 2 websites that daofeishi posted split the text up differently.

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I'm really happy to see so many people wanting to do this project.

As BertR pointed out, there are no chapters. I'll try to split the book into appropriate chunks as we go along and give good references to where the cutoffs are. Of course, everyone is welcome to read the book at their own pace, but if we want to collaborate on a word list and have a good discussion it won't hurt if we try to synchronize a bit. I suggest that we start the project the coming weekend (i.e. on Saturday Sept. 17), but since not everyone has a copy yet and other might still join, we'll monitor the progress and we can extend the time we use on the first chunk if we want. How does that sound to you?

As for the speed, I have set that to about 25 pages a week in my edition of the book, which is roughly 1/8th of the book a week. That means, if my math skills aren't completely off, that we will finish in about 8 weeks. If anyone does not think that that is a good pace, please shout out.

Has anyone had a look at the Wikidots page yet? Are you able to see it? Are you able to edit it? Do you think it will be an OK platform to use for the project? Could some of you tentatively agree to help me keeping that page alive by contributing vocabulary and insights as you go along?

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That's absolutely fine. From experience I know that committing to reading a book can be difficult enough by itself, so I don't want to load people with other tasks they have to do additionally. However, if you find the time, maybe you can add some of the more interesting words that you look up in peraperakun to the vocab list?

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However, if you find the time, maybe you can add some of the more interesting words that you look up in peraperakun to the vocab list?

Sure. My problem right now is just about every 3 character phrase or 4 character phrase/chengyu is a vocab! But definitely, if I find some interesting terms / grammar, I'll try to post it if time permits. Like I said, this will be my first time reading a book at this level and I want to see if doing something like this with a popup dictionary can help with my reading. If you know me, I'm usually really conservative with my reading as I usually try to know all the words really well but that's hindered me in terms of moving into more difficult books. So this will be a experiment for me to see how it goes.

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I tend to keep my vocab lists pretty light, but I will certainly share what I collect.

Yes, it's important not to go over board with the vocab list. If we took it to the extreme, we might end up with something close to a word-for-word translation of the book in the end, and that would be pointless. The point is that there are going to be lots of low-frequency words in there that even advanced learners probably will not know (e.g. 田埂), and I can see some value in collecting those words. For those of us who prefer reading a hard copy without perapera-kun, it will also reduce the number of dictionary lookups we have to do if we can pool our words together.

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