alt Hacker News> I decided to go against the grain of the near-universal advice to "learn to read by reading".
...Why? That advice is universal for a reason. The side adventure with Claude Code strikes me as a distraction from the fact that there is a hard thing you want to do but are avoiding because it's hard.
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Indeed, his premise is quite flawed. Yes, you will have difficulty understanding everything you read at an early stage, but you aren't supposed to be able to understand everything. You read to heavily reinforce the most common words and patterns that show up constantly, and from that base you pick up bits and pieces as you go along.
Under normal circumstances, even if you grind out "knowing" all the words in advance you will still struggle to read any basic sentence and you've essentially wasted time because it's an unskippable step; to be good at reading you need to read a lot. He seems to already know Chinese though, so this might work for him since he is not really having to learn the language or specific vocabulary, just how it's actually written.
Did you read part 3? Doesn’t sound like “avoiding hard things” is really a problem for the author :)
This is a hilariously common thing with studiers of Asian languages. There are countless posts with people spending years, even more than a decade, just trying to memorize every single kanji and how to write it before even beginning vocabulary or basic grammar, then lamenting how difficult the language is and how they can't pass kindergarten level tests. So then they spend loads of money on apps, make custom tools, and find countless other ways to burn time.
Meanwhile others read books and get pretty good at their language of choice in a couple years.