If you want to read Chinese ghost stories and tomb raiding novels like Gui Chui Deng, you’ll have to learn the tomb-raiders vocabulary; and what better way to do that than by reading about the ancient pyramids?
Tag: Academic / Science (15)
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History: 黑死病 – The Black Death
This non-fiction article dives into the terrifying story of the bubonic plague – how it wiped out up to half of Europe’s population and, surprisingly, ended up giving the survivors a better deal in life.
Think Columbus was the ultimate explorer? Well, a Chinese admiral beat him to the high seas by nearly a century – and he did it with a fleet so massive it would make any European navy look like a bathtub toy collection. Get ready to meet Zheng He and his legendary treasure ships that sailed from Southeast Asia all the way to Africa.
Ever wondered how birds manage to fly thousands of kilometers without ever stopping to ask for directions? No Google Maps, no compass, no ‘turn left at the next cloud’ – and yet they never get lost. Let’s explore the mind-blowing ways these feathered travelers find their way across the planet.
In this non-fiction essay, we learn why dinosaurs disappeared from the earth.
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Geography: 霍尔木兹海峡 – The Strait of Hormuz
In today’s reading, we’ll tackle an encyclopedia-style passage about the geography and history of the Strait of Hormuz.
This lesson was generated based on a biography of kung fu legend Bruce Lee (李小龙) – I asked the AI to simplify his biography into language that an HSK 1-2 reader could understand. The result is an extremely pared down paragraph about his life, using the simplest possible words.
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History: 纸的故事 – The Story of Paper
You’re holding a book, writing on a notebook, maybe even wrapping a gift – but have you ever wondered who invented the paper that makes all this possible?
This short passage tells the history of the Great Wall of China in the simplest possible language.
A quick history of the Silk Road.
Hey, whaddaya know! A guest post. Been a while since we got one of these. Many thanks to Ryan, who submitted recently. Ryan tells us: “This is a very interesting article about Chinese-Americans that shouldn’t be too hard for intermediate-level readers. The grammar in this article is fairly simple, and I could understand most of […]
Science! A quick paragraph about why peppers come in so many hues. Though the sentence structure here isn’t too bad and the article is very short, I’m classifying this as ‘advanced’ since several of the words are quite chemistry-specific.
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History: The History of the Pencil
Woo, I’m on a roll this week. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the history here, not being a pencil history expert myself, but this read has a lot of good words for larnin’. I’d put this in the lower-advanced spectrum, as the sentence structure isn’t over-the-top literary, but there are a ton of [...]
Gonna lay it on a bit thick today with something nice and serious. This is an abstract of an academic paper from the Gender Studies Network authored by Zhou Ying.
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The History of Postage Stamps
Huh, learn something new every day. My entire understanding of the postal service comes from Terry Pratchett’s “Going Postal”, so it’s interesting to take a quick look into the [vaguely] factual history of the postage stamp.