Most of my Chinese time has been taken up recently playing a game called Murders on the Yangtze Rivers (山河旅探). It is basically an ace attorney detective style game but with the setting being in historic China. I’ve really enjoyed it and it has voice acting which is always a plus.

I’d say to play fully in Chinese it’s something HSK5+ would enjoy, but someone could also play in English with the audio in Mandarin and get some benefit from it.

English trailer

These were the best graded readers I ever came across. I liked that they were a continuous series that gradually expanded the vocabulary as you went along.

Have finally put attempt no. 3 out there.

I can make another post this coming weekend, see if it fares a little better!

They’re not uncommon in the UK either!

An extremely uplifting song about regicide.

This is pure nostalgia.

I do think the geopolitical angle they are going with is a bit overplayed. It looks like Mandarin is only a bit below the trend for foreign languages in general. Personally, I think part of that is just people realising over time that studying Mandarin won’t necessarily lead to business or career success.

It does explain why all the niche communities I visit have gone from quiet to abandoned.

Due to being a Chinese learner, I have been playing a lot of Chinese developed games over the last few years. Gujian 3, in particular, makes me less sceptical about Black Myth than others are as Gujian 3 was so close to being a genuinely solid game. I just really hope they don’t skimp on the translation.

Maybe an odd choice - but the original xbox. It had Halo, Morrowind and KOTOR. Some of my favourite games of all time. Yes they were available on PC, but I was a kid so didn’t have a PC capable of playing these games.

Nothing better than using the language - is tandem mostly text or audio?

As for me I have been watching:

Blades of the Guardians (镖人）- this is a new animated series, which I have been very impressed by. Probably the best animated series I have seen so far coming out of China, accessible to intermediate plus learners and available for free on YT:

https://youtu.be/1daaRdE3BBM

Wave Makers (人选之人—造浪者) - a Taiwanese series on Netflix that has been getting a lot of attention, about campaign staff. It hasn’t really captured me yet, but I’ll probably finish it as its only 8 episodes.

https://youtu.be/Q8ryUSYemhk

One of my favourite new power metal bands of the last few years. Gives me the same feeling as listening to Power Quest / Rhapsody (etc.) growing up, whilst somehow also sounding fresh.

Someone the other day referred to posting in niche communities as shouting into the void currently, which I thought was apt.

I’m seriously impressed with how functional this app is from the start. Like lots of others have said, it felt like coming home given how long I’d used Sync for. Didn’t hesitate to pay for the ad free version once that option was added.

Yeah, this is my experience with Lemmy so far: it has replaced the “all” experience for me, but all my hobby / interests subs are completely dead.

I would really recommend the Imagin8 Journey to the West graded readers. They are one continuous series which is really handy, they increase the amount of vocabulary featured every few books and they have free audio on YouTube of the series.

https://imagin8press.com/books/the-rise-of-the-monkey-king/

Not sure why this has been downvoted; it isn’t self-promotion. I was just sharing material I thought would be interesting to other learners.

The problem I encountered when I started switching the in-game language to Chinese was that descriptions of game mechanics and systems can be quite hard to read, whereas it’s relatively straightforward to keep up with the narrative.

I did the same as you initially and just set audio to Chinese for games like Cyberpunk, and I think it did help my listening. Now I’ve played through a few games with text and audio set to Chinese and it has gotten a bit smoother.