Last recap of 2025 is about the progress I made in Chinese.
2025 has been the year where I really started reading in Chinese, it’s a real breakthrough! I had read a couple of mystery novels before, but that’s because the author, Zijin Chen, was very easy to read.
Interestingly, I only read in Traditional Chinese, the reason being that I am used to buying books on Readmoo, which is a Taiwanese platform, and there are so many novels I want to read there that I haven’t felt the need to look for other ways to read in Chinese. Most of the authors I have read are from Taiwan, but there are some from Honk Kong as well. It’s easy to create an account and they have different payment systems including paypal, so buying books is very easy.
And I’m pretty sure I already mentioned it on my blog, but if you learn zhuyin, one of the font options on Readmoo is called 注音芫荽體 and it shows the zhuyin alongside the characters. This is very useful for language learner and well worth the effort to learning zhuyin in my opinion.
So these are almost all the books I read in 2025 on Readmoo. We need to add the one I just finished that is not including on this list and four physical books, so it’s a total of 15 books read in Chinese this year! 🎉
It’s interesting to have reading times. I have no idea how long I need to finish a book in Japanese, it would be very interesting to compare. I’m sure I’m reading faster in Japanese than Chinese though. The more recent books on this list have all been very short, that’s why the reading time is only 10 hours or so, not because I made huge progress compared to the beginning lol. The one I read in 5 hours was a manga, and 網內人 was a monster of a book (and I did not particularly like it either), so it took me 29 hours to finish.
As for my favourite book of the year… it’s close between 馬克白的命數 by HK author 譚劍 (Albert Tam), a novel that explores how a fortune can shape someone’s fate, FIX by Tw author 臥斧 (Wolf Hsu), linked short stories about authors of mystery fiction who don’t quite understand their own work, 上流兒童 (one of the physical books I read, so not on this list) by Tw author 吳曉樂 (Wu Xiaole), about the society of privileged mothers who are devoted to their children’s education, and finally, the one I just finished that’s not on this list either: 七十號，你的鳥歪了 by Tw author 顏瑜 (Yan Yu), about the life of a first-year student at Taiwan Police College amidst political intrigues and conspiracies.
And if I have to choose just one among these four, it’s probably 馬克白的命數 ❤️
As for 2026, I will continue reading Traditional Chinese on Readmoo, but I also plan to read authors from Mainland China as well. I have downloaded 微信读书 and created an account. I’ll probably subscribe because it’s so cheap, and I’ll post about it once I learnt how to navigate the app!
And I also upgraded to the Boox Go 7 💛, so I’ll probably post about it too at some point.
That’s it for the 2025 recaps! I’ll post about my December readings too, and then we can head into 2026!
About
I’m learning Japanese, Korean and Chinese to read mystery novels and play video games in these languages.
Learning languages has always been one of my favourite hobbies, but I’m not a social person, I don’t like to meet new people and make friends, this is just not me. I keep hearing that languages are meant for communication, that we have to actively use them, talk with natives, etc. and for a long time, I thought it was weird to learn languages just to read books, with zero interest in communication.
Now I don’t really care what people think, and this blog helped me a lot to stop doubting myself and just do what I enjoy doing.
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