Boost your Chinese skills with extensive reading
After learning about how to improve your Chinese pronunciation with shadowing, it is now time to learn how to improve your Chinese reading skills with extensive reading. What is it? How does it work? And how can you profit from it? Let's dive right in!
What is extensive reading?
Despite its fancy name, extensive reading is a very simple concept: Read as much as you can! Your reading skills will skyrocket! The idea is that consuming a lot of written Chinese content will help you get used to the flow of the language, build your vocabulary and become a faster reader. This sounds kind of obvious but let's look at what it actually means.
How extensive reading works
First off, studying textbooks is not extensive reading. Every chapter introduces new words and characters and it will take some time for you to internalize them. That means you read slowly and have to look up many words while you are reading. You are thus definitely not reading as much as you can. This form of reading is called intensive reading and it has it's place in your Chinese learning endeavor as well, but mostly for building a bigger vocabulary and learning new grammatical structures. Extensive reading on the other hand focuses on reducing the time it takes for you to make sense of a page filled with Chinese characters. This reading comprehension happens on a few different levels.
Characters
First, you need to identify individual characters and words. The percentage of words you need to know in a text for extensive reading is actually pretty high. 90% won't be enough because you would still have to look up every tenth word, which interrupts the reading flow too much. 98-99% is a good ballpark to aim for. Extensive reading then provides an endless stream of opportunities to practice character recognition.
Sentences
Second, you need to understand words in sentences. Knowing a word by itself is great but you also need to know what it means in a specific context. Extensive reading provides a great opportunity to see words in many different constellations, thus improving your “feel” for the language. Reading lots and lots of Chinese will also help with your speaking skills by conditioning your brain on proper Chinese sentence structures.
Paragraphs
Third, you need to understand sentences in relation to each other, because only in context can a sentence be fully understood. For example, someone saying “wǒ yào shāle nǐ (我要杀了你/我要殺了你, I'm gonna kill you)” has dramatically different implications depending on whether the person is talking to another person, chasing a mosquito, or playing a video game. Again, extensive reading provides the perfect training ground for getting better and better at making these connections.
Continuously practicing extensive reading will help you overcome these three obstacles one by one. In the beginning you will slowly decipher one character at time. But after a while you are not even looking at single characters anymore. Instead, you directly process whole sub-sentences because you have seen them so many times before. Eventually, you'll become a real master and read yīmùshíháng (一目十行): Ten lines at a glance.
Where to find suitable material
Finding suitable material for extensive reading can be a bit of a challenge. You can in theory start with content from textbooks. However, reading the same text over and over again means that you will simply memorize it and not really read it anymore.
One of the challenges of finding suitable material is that it is really hard to exactly tell what your Chinese level is. Everyone's learning journey is different and two Chinese learners will likely know very different words after studying for a year, depending on the course they took or the apps they used.
Popular sources for graded reading materials include Mandarin Companion, Pleco's graded readers, DuChinese, or The Chairman's Bao. They use different systems to tell you the difficulty of a text. Pleco offers graded readers for vocabularies of 500, 1000, 1500, … words. I personally read the simplest ones when I already had a decent vocabulary but I still had to look up a lot of words, because I apparently didn't know the right 500 words. DuChinese uses categories like “Elementary”, “Intermediate”, and “Advanced” and The Chairman's Bao uses a level system. Both therefore assume that you at least roughly followed a certain curriculum. There is also a community-curated list of reading materials at Heavenly Path.
Closing thoughts
Do you want to improve your Chinese reading skills? Read more! And not only more, but at the right level. Finding the perfect material right at your level is unfortunately very hard. But with every step you take, you unlock new content and at some point larger and larger amounts of native material become accessible as well. So keep grinding and you will eventually get there. And maybe one day someone will invent an app that always recommends content that is exactly right for your level.
Until next time, happy learning! 📚
Featured image by Eric Prouzet on Unsplash.
