This could either be an uplifting and helpful article or a gradual spiral into torture. I hope it might be of use to those who are learning foreign languages and are restricted by a textbook focus at the intermediate plateau, and I think it will be especially useful for learners of Chinese, where sustained reading can seem impossible even at the advanced level. Long story short, I currently consider myself a good Chinese reader. There are still relative gaps in my vocabulary, especially when it comes to chengyu (four-character idioms) and dated or specialist language, but I am quick, can skim-read to some extent, and my comprehension is better than I ever expected it to be. So far I’ve read 20ish books as part of the intermediate-advanced learning process, and have also spent a considerable amount of time reading online news. When other learners find out about these study habits, I’m often greeted with a look of shock and an ‘I could never do that!’. I have never dared to say ‘You totally can though!’ because I am aware it would make me sound like a sports coach or a corrupt racehorse trainer. But you are reading this article, presumably on purpose, and I would like to a) explain exactly how and why I got to the book-reading stage, b) provide some healthy suggestions for incorporating prolonged reading in a language-learning routine.
I’m going to go through my background first, because context is really important: Mandarin is the first (spoken) second language I have learnt to a functional level. I started learning when I was 16 from a Memrise course, but at that point I was very disorganised and excited with an on-and-off approach to studying, and it took me the rest of the year to pin down the beginner essentials - the four tones and the 214 radicals, which are the building blocks of almost the entire writing system. The year after that, I proceeded more seriously and started to memorise all the vocabulary from the first few HSK levels, drilling pronunciation and using a flashcard plugin on my dictionary app to test my writing skills. I attempted to read almost every day, but this was mostly confined to a) Weibo posts of under 30 characters, b) lyrics to Jolin Tsai songs which I played so much on the ukulele that I effectively (badly) memorised anyway. In 2019 I started taking actual Chinese lessons, and found that my character knowledge meant I could coast through a lot of exam exercises but that I didn’t have much of a ‘sense’ (语感) for grammar, and that my speaking and listening skills were lacking and impeded by nerves (I made a conscious attempt to speak as much as possible and improved a lot within a few months).
It was then (Christmas 2019) that I picked up my first-ever Chinese book. It was a mass-market paperback from the late 80s with a lurid green cover. I couldn’t outline the plot if I tried and struggled with comprehension on every page, but there are several things I still remember: the first time I saw the loanword xiangbin (champagne) written down, a detailed historical explanation of the Chinese name for San Francisco, Jiu jinshan, characters who owned a shop selling Mandopop records, and a scene where a man fell into a river and was bitten by fish, possibly piranhas. My reading was slow and laborious, fuelled by the book’s campiness, the repetitive kick of learning new words (I had my phone with its dictionary app beside me at all times) and also, ashamed as I be to say it, the theatrical outward value of being a foreigner engrossed in a Chinese novel.
Over the next few months, I also read a short story collection in which most of the stories were about insect infestations (new words: ant, nun, flamethrower), the fictional diaries of a young woman during the Cultural Revolution (new word: Marxist-Leninism), and a depressing novel about a man sent to the countryside during the Great Leap Forward (in Mandarin the passive particle and the word for ‘quilt’ are the same, and I remember being confused about a sentence in which someone gets tucked into bed). After a few novels (and the moderate-to-high level of struggle that came with them), I was told by two Chinese teachers that I had visibly improved, my intermediate grammar exercises became easy, I completed the reading sections on sample HSK4 exams with minutes left on the clock, and I slowly became a more confident speaker and listener. It felt like I was reading all the time, but when I factor in ‘zero days’ I probably averaged about 45 minutes to an hour daily.
I don’t think I would have been able to read for that long that early without the apparently inherent enthusiasm for the Chinese language which has always accompanied me as a learner: I derive aesthetic pleasure from new characters and feel something resembling joy when I see a rarely-used measure word, an oddly evocative verb phrase or an idiom with an interesting backstory. This gave me a solid motive in these early stages and meant that I was usually enjoying myself to at least a slight degree, even when speed and comprehension barred me from being properly entertained by the actual content of whatever book I was reading.
My ‘struggling through dodgy paperbacks’ phase ended when the virus struck in 2020 and I decided to move home. The only Chinese book I actually owned was the little red one. I took a break from reading practice for a few months, deciding to turn my attentions to Classical and Literary Chinese instead. I’d already learnt the basics of Classical grammar and went a step further by memorising a few Tang poems. This was probably the first time I did substantial Chinese reading to fulfil a secondary purpose of my own, searching the internet for baihua (Modern Standard Mandarin) translations, author biographies and explanations of difficult phrases. I had also become interested in foreign film, and watched several Kurosawa and Antonioni movies on Chinese websites and with Chinese subtitles - great speed-reading practice, and an excellent taste of self-reliance in a foreign language.
The resumption of my book-reading happened as soon as I worked out that I could download Chinese books and open them on my laptop. I think I was smart in my reading choices, picking books I knew were vaguely in my ballpark of difficulty: Sanmao’s Stories of the Saraha and the first three translated Harry Potter books. At this stage I experimented periodically with my reading speed, scanning ahead and forcing myself through texts at some stages and at others attempting to read aloud, focusing on every character. Harry Potter worked wonders for my comprehension - I found it helpful to be triggered in Chinese to recall a story I already knew - but I still remember struggling with the plot of the next book I read, a translation of Yukio Mishima’s Temple of the Golden Pavilion. The vocabulary was obscure and lovely, though, and I found it enough of a joy to encounter that I ended up fuelled through the entire story and even reading two more by the same author.
After Mishima, I became preoccupied with non-fiction: I had heard about the new advanced HSK exam, which featured specialist language and advanced, elegant writing, and thought that I had better branch out from my course of novels. I read a translation of Sapiens, half of a biography of Mei Lanfang, half of a fact book about ancient Chinese history, and Wang Huning’s America Against America. Then I used the QQ aggregator to start reading news, challenging myself to get through odd numbers of articles from each section. Then I read a really awful translation of Lolita. Then I started reading academic documentation in Chinese for my job. The rest is history. I have a long way to go, but I still find that I have a huge advantage in Chinese classes, that my passive vocabulary has grown a lot and that I generally have no trouble forming grammatical sentences - that the rules have been solidly lodged into my brain and that they come out when I try to speak. I attribute all of my progress over the past year to my reading routine.
Here are a few reading-to-learn tips and FAQs and general things to think about:
My extrinsic motivation and vocabulary system
People often say ‘Don’t look up every new word you see’, but that’s exactly what I’m doing at the moment. It helps that a) I use an online dictionary and it is very quick to look up words, b) I enjoy learning new words. It’s unknown vocabulary, in this case, that pushes me to read: I save new words into my dictionary’s flashcard extension and use the total amount as a ruling metric, comparing them against my HSK vocabulary lists to gauge the difficulty of a text, and working out where I’ve seen difficult words before and how many times that has happened. I’ll sit down and aim to read until I encounter 25 new words - 25 is a manageable number. Several bonuses to this system:
I have incentivised the unknown. I don’t feel shameful or insignificant for not knowing something - because I essentially score a point for looking up a word, I feel as if I have unlocked something cool and exciting. Reading becomes a positive experience at this point, and when I’m faced with something advanced or challenging, I am eager rather than discouraged.
My reading time adjusts with the difficulty of each text - if it’s specialised and complex, I read in short bursts; if it’s closer to my level, I will read for longer. This prevents burnout.
When can you start a sustained reading routine? What should you read at first?
This is basically impossible to work out, because every learner (I think) has their own unique relationship with the written language versus the spoken language. I began my adventure when I was at a low-HSK4 level, but I was an HSK4 learner who was obsessed with the character system and this made things considerably easier. This might be the absolute minimum level you need to consider reading native-level books. I never used a Chinese reader series, but I can see how this would have been very helpful for bridging gaps in vocabulary and comprehension. Most of the readers I have seen don’t seem to be substantial (ie. long) enough to achieve the subconscious-grammar effect that you might get from reading a more advanced book with a lower level of understanding.
Good materials with which to ease yourself into reading include:
Online fanfiction (look for short scenarios featuring characters you know and love. It’s also worth looking for special-interest material, such as the genre of lesbian stories, 百合)
Books you vaguely remember already reading in another language
Biographies of people you already know a lot about
Books which feature a rural setting and/or small cast of characters
I’d advise against using news articles as the major component of a reading routine: they look tempting because they are short, but unless you filter by subject they can be offputtingly inconsistent. I think it’s important to read a substantial body of text which is centred on one story or one nonfiction subject, so you a) have enough time to get used to one writing style or genre, b) get the chance to encounter the same vocabulary over and over again.
How can you improve your reading speed?
Reading in a foreign language (any foreign language) involves a sort of quasi-Catch 22. The reason you read so fast in your native language is that you know your native language: your grasp of grammar and idiom is so good that you have the ability to predict what is coming up next and fill in information for yourself, likely faster than your eyes can follow the actual text. If you have only taken a few Chinese classes and are attempting to read a Chinese book, then you do not have this advantage. To gain the advantage, you have to read. Inevitably quite a lot of this reading will be slow and laborious. Shortcuts to quick reading with improved comprehension involve:
Jumping ahead to the verb
Practising scanning an entire sentence before decoding it
How often should you read in a new language?
Your brain is a horse. You must feed it little and often or it will explode and you’ll never be able to ride it again. A few half-hour sessions of reading per week - where you’ll be exposed to the same reinforced body of grammar and vocabulary - is better in the long term than an ambitious journey of a few hours. Obviously this depends on the text and on your language level and level of interest.
How much reading does it actually take to improve your language level?
I see a noticeable, measurable change probably once every five books I read. But that’s a noticeable change.