Reading Strategies “The only guide you'll ever need to Reading Chinese,” accessed at Zizzle Learn Chinese https://www.zizzle.io/blog/the-only-guide-you-ll-ever-need-to-reading-chinese

The benefits of learning to read Chinese Reading Chinese is the best tool to increases your vocabulary: Without reading, it’s next to impossible to actively gain new vocabulary on your own. The process of acquiring vocabulary requires you to memorize a new expression and the corresponding meaning. While reading, you will encounter a new word, you will look it up in a dictionary and you can make a flashcard to revise it later. Sure, you can watch movies or listen to Chinese conversations instead (and you should), but reading gives you much more control over your progress.

Reading Chinese also tremendously improves your grammar: Using the textbook based approach most teaching systems follow, grammar is basically a set of individual rules that are memorized in the abstract. But, you will realize that you won’t actually be able to put grammar to use when speaking Chinese! Native speakers don’t think about grammar rules when speaking, they just have a feeling for what sounds right. And extensive reading can get you there as you are exposed to contextualized language. After a while, you will start to cultivate this feeling for correct grammar.

Reading Chinese improves your writing skills: To a great extent, Chinese writing is done on computers and smartphones. For this, you don’t actually have to know how to handwrite Chinese. Rather, it is enough if you know the shape of each character and its corresponding pinyin (which is exactly what we teach through our app Zizzle). Put more simply, writing Chinese is largely dependent on your skills to read Chinese! Besides, it is no secret that avid readers are better writers!

Extensive vs intensive Chinese Reading Reading does not equal reading Extensive vs intensive Chinese Reading Reading does not equal reading. Intensive reading generally entails reading relatively short but difficult texts. It involves a lot of searches with dictionaries or using a vocabulary list and generally requires a lot of effort to understand the text. You don’t want to approach reading like this!

Extensive reading, i.e. reading widely and at great length at a level where you don’t need much assistance to comprehend the text. It goes without saying that reading a Chinese text will likely be a lot more enjoyable if you can easily grasp its meaning. The result is that you are much more likely to actually follow through on your reading! More importantly however, reading extensively consolidates a lot of the knowledge you already have about Chinese.

Because you know most of the characters, you are much more likely to grasp different meanings and nuances of words in different contexts and recognize the underlying grammatical pattern. But how do you know which level is the right one for you to engage in extensive reading? As a rule of thumb, if you can understand a text well enough without having to consult a dictionary, if the reading feels smooth and you don’t have to stop much at all, this is the text you want to be going with.

Make educated guesses: With some understanding of Chinese grammar, it is reasonably easy to tell which words in a given sentence are nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. For the nouns, at least, it is often possible to work out what kind of object an unknown word is, based off its radicals and knowledge of the content. For instance, words with the water radical 氵are likely to be related to water, e.g. river, sea, liquids or other things watery. It is also possible to hint at the pronunciation of a given character using the phonetic component. This list here provides more information on phonetic sets.

Read multiple times: To make the most out of your reading resources, read them more than once! This might sound quite obvious. However, it is important that the second time you read, you do it differently than the first time! The first time, you want to get a general sense of the meaning of the text. If you stumble over vocabulary you don’t know, don’t stop, but finish the paragraph. When you read for the second time, you want to do some in-depth analysis. Which words are unfamiliar, which words are used in an unfamiliar context, which grammar patterns have been used and so on.