Efficient Ways to Improve Chinese Reading Skills

Without any doubt, reading matters in every language, including Mandarin. There’re tons of research papers and essays published to illustrate or confirm the value of reading.

But I must deliberately emphasize mandarin reading. This is because I was a Chinese tutor, have heard I only want to learn speaking Chinese or speaking Chinese is enough for me, and I do not want to learn mandarin characters so many times.

This is not great for leaner with a long-term goal, because it’ll lead to a sort of illiteracy, one who can just speak but cannot read mandarin.  I must state that mandarin characters are extremely related to Chinese reading ability. 

In fact, Chinese reading is indeed used everywhere in China, from an instant message to a work email, from a menu to written news from a conventional sign to written notification, etc.

Since there’re mandarin characters everywhere in China, differing from other states with Phonetic writing, reading is a survival ability far more than language ability to some degree. Besides, if you cannot read well, it actually blocks you from a bundle of things, like a better job, a very deep understanding of China, and fluent communication with your friends just to name just a few things.

What is more, in every test, reading Chinese also counts for a huge part. For example, HSK – Chinese Proficiency Test had read parts from Level One to Level six. Besides those evident advantages – opening your horizons, enlarging your Chinese vocabulary – better mandarin reading skill is really favorable for your work or studies. It’ll definitely provide you more opportunities.

Efficient Ways to Improve Chinese Reading Skills 

I understand all the mandarin characters. But, I do not understand what it means. Countless students of the mandarin language, from beginners to advanced learners, have faced this issue when reading mandarin texts.

For beginner learners, it’d be a short discussion. For intermediate learners, it’d be a mandarin newspaper article. They look to recognize all the mandarin characters, just cannot make sense of it.

What should they do to improve their Chinese language reading skills efficiently?

There’re very few things they can do. The final thing on the to-do list is to learn more and more Chinese characters.

Learning more mandarin characters would not help you to improve your mandarin reading skills 

Misinformation gets passed around quite a lot, that when learners learned more than 2 thousand Chinese characters, they could read mandarin newspapers. This is a completely false promise, a completely missed the real problem. Misled by this false claim and millions of learners spend days and even months trying to learn more Chinese characters.

Using Flash Card to learn mandarin characters is quite a well-known method, but it has serious issues. Trying harder to learn mandarin words through radicals is also widespread, but it wastes more time than it saves.

One more perceived shortcut is to study components first in order to learn new mandarin characters quickly and efficiently, but connections among a mandarin character, its components, pronunciation, and its meaning are not forever there. This shortcut will turn out to be a serious dead end.

Indeed, regardless, what ways learners use to learn new Chinese words, it would not lead to strong mandarin reading skills. In fact, it’s not how many mandarin characters learners have learned. 

It’s rather how many structures and words they’ve learned and how many mandarin reading exercises they’ve done.

Characters are the building blocks of Mandarin Texts

When we read mandarin texts, in order to understand the meaning, we must mentally group words together and pick out any special mandarin characters, if any, which are there for structural purposes.

For beginner learners, as the sentences are mainly short and very simple, the tick is primarily to find out which words should be grouped together. In this article, the instance is “小星星期天看小说”. 

For higher-level Chinese learners, the sentences are getting longer and much more complex, and very often, a few sentences structure is in place. For instance, this sentence, “他一学习就头疼”, recognizing the structure “一 ... 就 ...” is extremely vital for us to understand the sentence. This structure connects 3 words, 他, 学习, 头疼, and makes them a coherent sentence.

Lastly, a to-do list to improve Mandarin reading skills 

No. 1 – Read More 

The single method to improve mandarin reading skills is to read more and more and read more level-appropriate material. In this important aspect, the world is friendlier to high-level learners. The materials they can read are everywhere around you, magazines, newspapers, essays, and novels. You name it.

But everywhere is very low-level learners look; they just see tons of mandarin characters they’ve not learned. For them, the greatest reading material is their textbooks, particularly the ones having full control of the Chinese vocabulary used.

To use CCHATTY tools and blog posts as an instance, the idea of this particularly for beginner learners to study very limited mandarin characters but do lots of writing and reading exercises. The learning way of the techniques consists of 4 steps, Awareness, Expansion, Consolidation, and practice.

Of these 4 steps, only the primary step awareness involves learning new mandarin characters. All of the rest are on how to use these newly acquired Chinese characters, therefore, guarantee learners that they get sufficient practice.

On top of that reading more and read aloud when possible. Reading practice should have tons of advantages to reading the mandarin language. That is when we’ve to use our own voice to manifest what we’ve been doing in our head.

No. 2 – Listen More                   

Listening plays a key part for Chinese learners to get a fine sense of mandarin language rhythm, which helps tremendously when they read. And listening to level-appropriate and authentic materials is critical.

Again, the world is a lot friendlier to high-level learners who’ve more options as to what to listen to. It’s especially advantageous when there’re mandarin subtitles available.  They can read, listen and comprehend at a similar moment.

For beginner learners, picking up a few crucial words here and there is all they can do in the actual world. For them, it’s vital to listen to something written at their level, so they can get additionally familiar with the mandarin language. And this familiarity assists them when they read level-appropriate mandarin texts.

No. 3 – Write more 

To a very high extent, writing helps develop mandarin reading skills to another level, provided the focus is oriented around words, sentences, structures as well as paragraphs. This kinetic movement, writing in few complex words, brings something alive in us, particularly when we write something very important, something that we actually mean, or something fun and exciting.

My advice here is to try not to copy one single mandarin word a thousand times unless you wish to doze off gradually at your desk. It is very important for every beginner Chinese learner to male grip on Chinese reading skills.

No. 4 – Learn more Mandarin Characters and their associated structures or words 

After you’ve done plenty of workouts mentioned above, now it is time to learn some new mandarin characters and very importantly, new structures and combinations of which these characters are part.

The next step is, to read more and more!

Additional Tips 

List new Chinese words and rewrite the passage with them 

With massive teaching experience, I can tell you that the main thing to becomings in a language is recurrence. No problem how good or bad you’re at learning languages, you have to repeat new words and phrases. The main difference is that if you are good, you can repeat fewer times, if you are bad, you’ve to repeat more times.

How can you keep in mind the new words as well as phrases you have just read?

Highlight or underline them, write them in your notebook, get the Pinyin, get the actual meaning, and find instances using the word. You’d review them by just reading via them many times, but this can be extremely boring as well as inefficient. 

The better way is to rewrite the whole story with the new words, see if you can utilize them rightly, and at least make some sentences with them. Those words and phrases will go through your mind again and again continuously when you do that. By the way, do not tell me that you can’t write or speak with mandarin people because you’re not in China – we’ve fast internet in Chinese, too!

Understanding the meaning of every Chinese character 

Try to understand the meaning of every Chinese character rather than the whole word.

There is a huge difference between Western and Chinese languages. As you know, mandarin words are made up of several Chinese characters, each and every mandarin character has its meaning and the characters work jointly to provide the full word its meaning. When you learn new Chinese words, please think about them like this. With this method, it’ll be extremely simple for you to understand the slight difference between 2 synonyms.

Get some better instances 

Use the internet to get instances, and ask native Chinese language speakers to right you.

Even if you are tried every kind of method, I am sure you still have some words or phrases you cannot understand – Google them or ask experts. Find the meaning this way and compare with them. This also works when you are trying to write a blog and you are not sure which word to use.

Search the 2 words, using them in separate sentences, and then pick the one which has millions of pages on Google rather than hundreds (as I said, we acquire fast internet in China, too!).

The most efficient method of checking your perfection is to find a mandarin tutor to assist you to check or a reliable website where you can find reliable tools and materials to improve your mandarin skills.

Read Slowly and Read Quickly 

To read slowly means you’d understand all in the book you’ve chosen for your intensive reading. But if you want to improve your Chinese reading skills rapidly, do not read only one book, read a lot, as much as possible for you. If you do not have a lot of time, do not worry, just read fast. You do not have to understand each and every word or sentence; you can just need to get the fundamental meaning.

Doing that helps you understand the Chinese words you already understand – and assists you cement (make something stick with it) the knowledge in your mind.

Mandarin Reading Practice Materials and tips 

CCHATTY provides practice for reading as well as comprehension which are based on HSK scales. You can simply find the materials which are ideal for your Chinese learning journey. All of the reading content is written or edited by native Chinese tutors. Every article has a lot of vocabulary which might be beyond your present mandarin level.

Improving your Chinese reading skills can therefore be more efficient. These reading materials on our website can’t train your mandarin reading skills, but can also help you learn more daily vocabulary as well as expressions. 

The types of these reading materials are in a huge collection, including culture, tips and tricks, stories, and much more! Whether you want to read a simplified version of traditional, both are provided. 

Takeaway…

Improve your reading ability is not that hard, as you might think. But, how difficult it depends on several factors, some of which are beyond your control. Most of the mandarin characters are a combination of meaning and sound. Learn how Chinese characters work and you’ll save yourself a lot of time as well as trouble.

Use clever memory techniques to learn Chinese characters. This is not something new, it is been practiced basically always, but our understanding of why and how mnemonics work has improved reading skills immensely.