How I learned to read in my target languages (Part 2)
I will mention multiple others sources I used to improve my reading. Basically I would read for as long as I need to get 15 or 20 words daily.
I can't recommend WordSwing as much as I recommend DuChinese, but it's still worth using if you want to read more.
I don't remember using DuHanZi, but apparently I finished all free stories on it, there probably weren't a lot of them.
Once I had enough vocab and I was bored of DuChinese, I used a website, that I found on Reddit — www.mylingua.world.
It forms your recommendations on what news you can understand, based on your vocab knowledge. Once you see a word you've learned, you just mark it as learned. Gradually after marking more and more words, you see how much progress you've made and it's really motivating.
Would I recommend reading news to improve your vocab? Unless it's an article on your interests, I would say no. There's no need to force yourself to consume what you're not interested in to improve your language skills.
Another useful feature from this website is being able to add your own texts in chinese. Which significantly improved my reading skills in just a few months of reading fanfiction.
The main con of this resource is inaccuracy. While in most cases you won't notice it, some words on there have innaccurate translation. But don't worry, just use Pleco or an online dicitionary.
I have a dictionary I want to recommend to those of you who know Russian, it's name is PocketChinese. The app may be a bit laggy, but in a lot of cases where Pleco failed to explain a word or a phrase to me, PocketChinese succeeded. So as long as you switch between these two and mylingua.world, you'll probably be fine.
A few months ago they've set a limit on how many articles you can fully read weekly and on how many you can upload. But i assure you that even with the limit you still have a lot of possibilities to learn.
Just remember to bookmark articles you've found interesting, since finding them later is hard.
When I played games in chinese and had difficulties with writing down words to search for them I would use Deepl. It has a scan feature that allowes you to make photos of chinese texts. It automatically translates that, but you can also copy it and work with it.
My top resource is mylingua.world. Genuinely simplifies my life so much when I want to figure out new vocab in a new text.