Learning to read Chinese isn’t as simple as learning a bunch of words on a page. If you want better reading skills and you want to improve in an efficient manner, you are going to need to understand and use reading strategies.
- People studying foreign languages usually try one of these strategies:
- Lookup and try to memorize every word.
- Don’t look up anything. Even when you need to.
- Superficial reading: Don’t lookup anything.
- Look up frequently occurring words, e.g. the “three times rule”.
The first two strategies are inefficient. Don’t waste time looking up every single word. I’m not saying you can’t read for pleasure: if you aren’t studying, e.g. trying to improve your comprehension, and expand your vocabulary, then you don’t need to take notes. If you’re reading for pleasure, you don’t have to look words up. But if you are studying, not looking things up isn’t an efficient strategy.
Superficial Reading
Superficial reading is where you go through your reading material quickly, looking for the main ideas and concepts. Don’t get bogged down on words, sentences or paragraphs you don’t understand, and instead just try to get the gist of what you’re reading. It may sound counterintuitive, but oftentimes, you will get greater understanding from a superficial reading than one where you are constantly looking up words in a dictionary. It’s also useful to do a superficial reading before going back and carefully studying a piece.
The Three Times Rule
This rule is simple and pretty useful: Only lookup high-frequency words–words that appear three times or more. I learned this rule from my 报刊 (bàokān: newspaper reading) teacher and put it to good effect when I first started reading newspapers. I also saw this rule mentioned by Jake over on Skritter’s blog, too. Apparently this rule is popular with Chinese teachers in China.
Only Lookup the important words
Looking up words in a dictionary can take up a lot of time. It also takes you out of your reading flow. When you need to lookup a word, make sure you’re using a good dictionary (hopefully an electronic one or an online Chinese-English dictionary). And try to make sure the words you’re looking up are worth studying. If you’re reading a classic work by 老舍 (Lao She), you should probably spend less time with your dictionary.
Actions to take
- Check your Chinese reading speed.
- Get a tool to help you read Chinese.
- Read something superficially before you try and master it.
What I did last week
- Study my flashcards 4x
Update: I wasn’t expecting I’d be able to do this one, but I got it done, studying Tuesday – Saturday. - Read at least 5 articles on Caixin.
Update: Even I can get bored of Caixin. I only read 3 articles from Caixin (but I did read a couple of other peices, including a pretty long 财经 peice. - Start using Weibo.
Update: I didn’t do this, but I’ll double down on it for this week. - Continue looking for audio sources that I can use to practice listening.
Update: This continues to be a thorn in my spine. The podcasts I have found are monologues with sappy background music. Not what I’m looking for at all. I might have to change my strategy and look for something else.
The Plan for next week
I’m expecting a busy week, so I’m going to make sure my goals are achievable:
- flashcards 3x this week.
- get all my reading material from 微博
Summary
Make sure your reading techniques fit your reading goals. If you’re trying to build more vocabulary, spend more time studying words that you encounter frequently. Always try to do a mix of superficial reading and close study.
How do you practice reading? Tell me the tools or methods you like to use in the comments
Leave a comment.
If I’m doing extensive reading and the material is at a level where I don’t need to look up too many words (around 3-4 per page), I will first look up the words that are crucial to understanding a sentence. These aren’t always used three times in the text; many times they are only used that one time, yet the passage is built around the word so that the meaning is unclear without knowing the word. As time and patience allow, I also look up words that are interesting to know or that have new characters I’ve never encountered before, even if they are non-essential words. I look up all these words in a print Chinese-English dictionary. I find that it forces me to focus on the characters enough that I remember the words better. If I were using electronic tools to look up words I would probably forget them more easily.
If I am starting a new text that’s somewhat difficult, there will likely be more than 4 unknown words per page. In that case I will use software tools to extract all the words, pick out the unknown ones, and use flashcards (but not SRS) to get familiar with them. It gives me a good start on the text without having to look up too many words in dictionaries.
I agree with you that the 3-times rule isn’t always the right tool for the job. But it is a good general rule.
Also, unless you are doing a careful reading, it’s not completely necessary to understand every single sentence in a text. As long as you generally understand what’s going on, your brain will probably fill in the rest.
That sounds like a pretty unique system you have that. I’m working on a website that actually has similar abilities (it extracts the words from a text and shows a list of the unknown ones). Let me know if you want to try it out.
Agreed that going by dictionary would probably enable better learning. But I’m not sure where my C-E dictionary went or even if I’d know how to use it!
Have you heard of this tool? (maybe you covered it in other blog posts) What do you like to read on Weibo? I open up the website and it all looks so daunting.
Chinese Perapera
http://www.perapera.org/perapera-9-0-finished/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir…ese-popup-tra/
Put your mouse over any Chinese words on a webpage and it gives you the pronunciation and definition. English, German, & French dictionaries; Pinyin and Zhuyin supported; Simplified or Traditional characters. Save and export words for studying later!
I’ve used Perapera in the past and like it. They recently came out with a chrome extension too.
Right now I’m using a tool I’ve built for reading Chinese. Basically, it lets you easily import any Chinese page by copying the URL (I’ll be adding a bookmarklet for it soon). Then it separates the words, creates vocabulary, adds dictionary lookups, etc. It also has list creation and a built in quiz that uses Spaced-Repetition.
I’m practicing reading by starting to read online novels. The beauty of this one is that they have online audio as well. It’ll be made into a drama this year. For the words I don’t know, I follow with my mouse and the meanings pop up with Perapera.
Da Mo Yao
http://www.spcnet.tv/forums/showthread.php?35931-%E3%80%8A%E5%A4%A7%E6%BC%A0%E8%B0%A3%E3%80%8B-Da-Mo-Yao-Novel-Discussion-%28SPOILER-WARNING!%29
http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=84651
http://www.cxt8.com/static/chapter_1733/
It is currently being translated here:
http://koalasplayground.com/tag/da-mo-yao/
Good morning! You may find this article interesting. It comes from the perspective of someone who learned English as a teenager, and now he’s extremely fluent.
http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2010/01/koreans-english-acquisition-and-best.html