Valentine's day, the perfect time to practice Chinese

Practice Chinese through Quotes and Poems

There are a lot of different ways to practice your reading, but one of my favorite ways is to practice through poems, and this month is the perfect time to start using this method, as it's the most romantic month of the year, you can even dedicate some poems to your significant other or if you are like me a lonely wolf you can simply use this method to improve your language skills. 

How to study through Poems? 

The way to do it is relatively easy, because the language used in poems and quotes tends to be quite simple the only struggle you might encounter is with characters you don't know, you'll have to look them up, and choose the translation that fits better with the context, but apart from that it will be quite a smooth process.

There are a lot of different places where you can find a poem that interests you, you can look for them  on Instagram, 小紅书, Baidu, or you can even find some poetry books, in my case I download some PDFs because it's quite hard to find Chinese novels in Mexico, so to find a poetry book in Chinese will be almost impossible. 

Another thing to take into consideration is to select a topic that's not too hard, for example: poems about life, about feelings, missing someone, love, etc. You can also try to start by reading quotes, because quotes don't use a lot of metaphors, but on the other hand poems are filled with metaphors, but don't be afraid of them they are not as hard as you might think,  the ones I have encounter until now have been quite easy to understand, the only ones I struggle with are: Ancient Poems, for a strange reason I simply cannot understand them. 

Resources for finding poems 

Depending on what you are looking for is where you are going to search for your poem, if you want something short and easy look for them on Instagram and 小紅书, if you are looking for love poems all you need to search for is: 爱情诗，情诗, 爱情语录, but if you are looking for other poems about life and different topic I can recommend you the following Instagram accounts: 

@nightalks_ @handwriting387 @charan.word @atmoment_tw @7_diary @yyshadowpoems @shitshit_poetry @lostwithpoem @infernowords @stay_mild @e.e___c @weakcan @milanoolsen

You can also search for poems in Baidu, but you'll find more content in Yuwenmi, Yuwenmi is a website/App, that is specifically design for teachers and students, you can find content for primary school up to high school students, for language learners this is really helpful because before each article it says for which grade is suitable for, so from each category you can more or less see which articles you'll be able to understand depending on your level. 

Another great thing about this website is that on the top there are different categories: dictionary, quotes, short stories, articles and there is even a category that's called 国学 that would be the equivalent of what you learn in your English class (ancient poems, authors, etc.) or for my Spanish speakers out there it would be the equivalent to the class of: Lengua Materna Español.

Now if you are specifically looking for romantic content, all you need to do is click on the category of 语录(quotes) and then you'll find another subcategory called: 最新爱情语录 just click it and a lot of different articles will pop up, and you can select the one you prefer. 

Finally, if you are looking for some different content for Valentine's Day, you can check out the following videos: 

北美过情人节文化大不同 Valentine's Day is so different by the country, I found this video quite interesting, she mentions a lot of differences between the way Valentine's Day is celebrated in China and in the west, and it's mainly based on her experiences. The only bad thing is that there are no subtitles. 

Valentine's Day(情人节)  情人节爱心绘本故事: 情人节的惊喜 | 中文故事, the vocabulary in both videos is really simple and easy to understand as the videos are meant for children. Also, they both have subtitles. 

瓦倫丁神父犧牲 西洋情人節的由來, finally I recommend the following video, which is about the history behind Valentine's Day, the vocabulary is relatively complex, but the grammar is quite easy so the only thing you'll need to do is search for the vocabulary you don't know.