ONE MILLION CHARACTERS

Since receiving an offer late last year to join the terrific music faculty of NYU Shanghai, I’ve wanted to improve my Mandarin. So at the beginning of this year, I made a resolution to read one million Chinese characters in books and articles in 2019.

To meet my goal, I read Chinese every day. I read 3,000 characters a day, or a few pages of a paperback book, on average. This took me around 20–30 minutes. I read mostly 20th-century Chinese literature, and also Mao Zedong’s lectures on art, IBM articles on personality research, an undergraduate thesis about jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt, and a translation of the entire Holy Bible.

In total, I read 1,051,339 Chinese characters in books and articles this year. And my Mandarin improved.

List of works read this year:

  1. 《三八节有感》by 丁玲 (2,370 characters)
  2. 《我在霞村的时候》by 丁玲 (10,754 characters)
  3. 《在延安文艺座谈会上的讲话》by 毛泽东 (18,276 characters)
  4. 《自杀日记》by 丁玲 (4,567 characters)
  5. 《我没有自己的名字》by 余华 (8,416 characters)
  6. 《手》by 萧红 (7,477 characters)
  7. 《牛》by 沈从文 (8,097 characters)
  8. 《彭德怀速写》by 丁玲 (693 characters)
  9. 《我怎样飞向了自由的天地》by 丁玲 (2,176 characters)
  10. 《IBM Cloud文档:Personality Insights》 by IBM (25,098 characters)
  11. 《夜》by 丁玲 (4,218 characters)
  12. 《虎雏》by 沈从文 (46,945 characters)
  13. 《在巴黎大戏院》 by 施蛰存 (6,181 characters)
  14. 《分析Sonny Stitt即兴与演奏特点——以专辑《Only the Blues》中曲目 《Blues for Bags》为例》 (5,483 characters)
  15. 《一个女剧院的生活》 by 沈从文 (61,154 characters)
  16. 《致银河》 by 王小波 (17,715 characters)
  17. 《在细雨中呼喊》 by 余华 (132,769 characters)
  18. 《熊猫》 by 棉棉 (53,129 characters)
  19. 《1988:我想和这个世界谈谈》 by 韩寒 (81,547 characters)
  20. 《偶然事件》 by 余华 (20,226 characters)
  21. 《第七天》 by 余华 (84,847 characters)
  22. 《圣经》 (新译本) (1,055,606 characters; 315,144 read in 2019)
  23. 《樱海集》 by 老舍 (83,649 characters)
  24. 《河边的错误》 by 余华 (23,090 characters)
  25. 《变形记》 by 王小波 (3,477 characters)
  26. 《地久天长》 by 王小波 (21,474 characters)
  27. 《猫》 by 王小波 (2,367 characters)