i’m not really fluent so i just lurk and translate anything i don’t know. most of the time i’ll just browse zhihu or baidu and find new terms. sometimes i’ll find stuff that i wouldn’t on english sites. it’s also become my go to “immersion” study method.
i actually set up a goal for myself yesterday, to start learning chinese characters by browsing bilibili (now that youtube is not allowing adblock). I am planning to learn 2-3 characters a day and browse through bilibili trying to identify the characters and with time i may be able to translate video titles and comments.
that’s really cool I need to start doing this
I encourage you to do it too, start with the simplest characters.
I will comrade
I would much rather recommend you to find words to learn instead of characters, since this will actually let you understand the characters a lot better. Learning the words and the characters they are made out of will help you map the underlying meaning of the characters a lot better, since characters in themselves are hard to define using english words. Take for example “面” which if you look it up in a dictionary will be translated as: surface, flour, noodles, aspect, side. The meaning of this character will depend on what characters it is used in conjunction with, and so how will you be able to understand which of these meanings it has if you don’t know the words and grammar?
Also, I would strongly recommend that you start with focusing on listening instead of reading, since this will help you develop a better accent and it will make learning the characters a lot more effortless.
Additionally, understanding comments on social media is actually kind of an advanced skill, since you need a very good understanding of the culture and references.
This sounds like a rather inefficient way of learning the language.
To each their own, but for me taking small daily steps works.
Small daily steps is a good idea but I don’t think learning character by character is a good way to go about it. If it’s fun for you then that’s fine but just know you won’t make much progress understanding the meaning.