Mandarin Melon - Chinese social media as Comprehensible input

Hello! I wanted to share a website I recently put together for to help Chinese learners read real Chinese social media posts tailored to their level of Chinese ability. It's called Mandarin Melon, you can see it here: Mandarin Melon

I've found comprehensible input and extensive reading to be really helpful for learning Chinese, but it's a struggle to find enough content that is at just the right level and is still interesting to read. Resources like DuChinese, The Chairman's Bao, and graded readers are all great, but eventually you run out of interesting content at your level. I wanted more.

I also wanted to be able to read more native content. However, when I tried to use Chinese social media sites directly, it was really difficult. As an intermediate learner, I wasn't understanding enough for it to count as "comprehensible" input, and it would get frustrating quickly.

This is why I made Mandarin Melon. I have a collection of several million posts from Chinese social media, and I've filtered them based on the vocabulary you would know based on your HSK level.

For example, if your Chinese is at HSK level 3, here is a collection of 56,000+ posts that only use characters from HSK 3 and below:

• HSK 3 Posts

Or, if you want, you can allow it to show posts with a limited number of characters you haven't learned yet. For example, here are 200,000+ posts that use HSK 3 level characters, but allow up to 1 character to be new to you.

• HSK 3 plus 1 new character

I've found it's a really fun way to practice Chinese. It's also a really fun way to increase my passive vocabulary, since there will be words I haven't learned yet, but comprised only of characters I already know.

I find it's a really fun to practice when I'm reading social media posts. They're bite-sized pieces of content, and you get a peek into peoples lives.

I also created an experience targeted at people who don't know any Chinese characters, but are interested in reading Chinese social media. It's a bit sillier, but also pretty fun, as it introduced characters based on getting you to read posts as fast as possible. You can read more about it here: Learn from scratch.

The site is totally free, and I hope people get a kick out of it.

Cheers!