A sea of koi

Douyin you should stop pushing clips from the Saye audio drama to me because this type of emotional roller coaster can't be good for my health but also keep going because I absolutely love Wu Tao as Gu Fei and Nie Pan as Jiang Cheng

Grass sliding (滑草) in Hulunbuir, Inner Mongolia

A hand shadow drama

Song: 大笑江湖 by 小瀋陽

[eng by me]

A music box cover of Saye / Run Wild (撒野) by 凱瑟喵, theme song of the novel of the same name

thank you so much for the rec list!! i appreciate the time and thought you put into typing all that out 🥺

will definitely check em out when time allows, thank you thank you~

np~ 💙💙 Hope you like them!

hello! in light of your recent sayeposting -- what was the book you started out reading, and would you recommend it (or something else?) as a beginner? i'm looking to slowly improve my reading but am in the boat of not knowing many chengyu, and generally being stronger in speaking and listening aha. thank you in advance!!

Hi! Honestly, I would not recommend the novel I started with, because I literally picked one at random and also because I never finished it lol.

I never really read any "beginner" novels, I just read whatever, really. For instance, the first novel I ever finished (我只喜歡你的人設) was because a friend had rec'd it to me and there wasn't a fan translation. I didn't really mind having to keep looking up different terms or rereading a sentence a few times to understand it, even when I didn't understand half of it and it took a long time to comprehend. So, beyond the novels I mention in this post, I don't have any recs for beginners unfortunately.

As for the chengyu, honestly it depends on the novel, like for Saye I don't remember there being very many chengyu.

I would suggest not trying what I did though lol. It was helpful for me but very tiring. Anyone who has recs for beginners though please share!

Hi 👋 I saw your post on Saye and I was wondering if you have any other Chinese books that you would recommend? I’m fluent in Chinese but my reading ability has been receding since I just don’t have that much Chinese reading material on hand. Would love some author or book suggestions if you’ve got some!

To be quite honest, I haven't had the chance to read very many books yet. I did begin reading my first Mandarin novel in 2022, but I didn't start properly reading anything start to finish until maybe mid-2023. None of them are very much like Saye though, and the trashier ones I won't name lol.

That being said, I think the novels 我只喜歡你的人設 and 可愛過敏原, both by 稚楚, could be along the lines of what you're looking for. Both of these are set in modern day (and in the same universe), and aren't particularly difficult. 可愛過敏原 does have a lot of food terms though.

I would also recommend 二零一三 by 非天夜翔, which I'm currently reading, but it's set during a zombie apocalypse, and it does have some more scientific language in it. (When reading it, I also read the comments on each chapter on JJWXC, and since it was written in 2011, it was interesting to see the discussions over the references that the novel made that read differently now). I like 非天夜翔 in general, but his novels vary in difficulty, so that you'll have to check beforehand.

There's also 偽裝學渣 by 木瓜黃, which to be honest I didn't love, but it's a simple story with relatively simple language, and a lot of other people love it, so maybe you'll like it?

Some more general recs that I have (but read in English) would be 全職高手 by 蝴蝶藍, which doesn't seem too difficult, but as an esports novel, it's very heavy with gaming terminology. 小蘑菇 by 一十四洲 is another novel I read in English, and as a post-apocalypse novel, it also has some parts that are heavier in scientific vocabulary. Looking at a random chapter right now, the language/grammar used is also a tad more formal than the other novels that I rec'd above. Same with 全球高考 by 木蘇里, it also seems more difficult, but I'm not quite sure.

I hope this helps somewhat and that you guys find novels that you like! Anyone who has any recs please share too!

I'm also curious how accurate the depiction of Gu Miao's autism is, because it seemed okay to me, but I also know next to nothing about autism (other than what I see here on tumblr etc.)

I just finished reading Saye (撒野) and now all I want to do is spend all my time just staring into space and thinking about it. And then read it again. Because wow. I don't even know what to say other than that was so so good

This novel was already on my reading list for some time because I kept hearing about it and its audio drama adaptation and about how good it was, but I pushed it up the list only after swiping across a clip from the audio drama on Douyin. Then I saw some people on Discord and Reddit say that the language used is fairly simple so I pushed it right up to the top to read next lol.

I actually kept track of my reading time and dictionary usage this time. My reading speed has improved a lot, and I definitely need the dictionary a lot less than I used to. The first time I tried reading a novel in Mandarin in 2022, I had to check the dictionary like four times a sentence, almost half the time just because of all the chengyu lmao. (It was a very lighthearted modern setting, so it wasn't like super difficult or anything either.)

This time, I spent a total of 102 hrs over 900k characters, an average ~8.8k characters per hour. The internet says the average is about 15k characters an hour, so I've still got some ways to go, but I've been spending a lot of time reading and I'm happy with the improvement. As for dictionary usage, this is hard to get entirely accurate, but I think I checked the dictionary about an average of five to six times a chapter, and mostly to double check pronounciation or because of the dialect and the terms used.

I just finished reading Saye (撒野) and now all I want to do is spend all my time just staring into space and thinking about it. And then read it again. Because wow. I don't even know what to say other than that was so so good

I just finished reading Saye (撒野) and now all I want to do is spend all my time just staring into space and thinking about it. And then read it again. Because wow. I don't even know what to say other than that was so so good

Dormmate complaints

[eng by me]

Wearing hanfu. The half-shouldered style resembles what would've been worn for ease of archery and the like during the Tang Dynasty

I was going through some of my stuff and found this from when I went to weekend Chinese school in kindergarten

A lot of time was spent on zhuyin/pinyin/pronunciation tbh, this was some of the only actual written characters that I could find. I did only attend for ~3 years though so

Cosplay of the women of TGCF

[eng by me]

Making Huizhou inksticks (徽墨), famous for its high quality.

Notes:

The characters OP pressed into the inksticks are 山白, OP's username

The "internal heat" referred to in the video is a term in Traditional Chinese medicine referring to a cause of inflammation, swelling, twitching, etc.

[eng by me]

An example of the rest reminders by Douyin. Many of their videos feature a beloved cartoon character or celebrity, in this case Huahua the panda.

(These were rather incessant during the summer months last year, probably due to students being out of school, but I personally have seen pretty much none since then)

[eng by me]