The first chapter of the Suwen is the best first text in the corpus: it is short, it is prose rather than dialogue-by-apostrophe, and it states the whole programme of the book in a few hundred characters.
- Read On Innate Vitality in Antiquity once through in English, without stopping for the characters.
- Read it again with the pinyin line showing, and say it aloud.
- Take the four terms that carry the argument — 氣, 精, 神, 天年 — and read their entries.
- Return to the chapter and read the original line with the pinyin hidden.
Everything else on the site is built on this pattern: original, pinyin, and English on the same line, with the terms linked.