How to Improve Chinese Reading Ability?

How to improve Chinese reading ability and remember more Chinese characters? when you add repetition and consistency,you’ll be surprised how much your memory can improve. Below are six ways to improve your Chinese reading skills.

  1. Get the right books!

    All-purpose Chinese Character Cards  汉字一卡通

Improve Chinese Reading Ability

  • ISBN: 978-7-5619-1950-7
  • Press :Beijing language and culture university press
  • Cost: 42Rmb/box
  • Each box includes
  • 200 Chinese character cards; A MP3 CD; A metal ring; There are four boxes of cards with the characters increasing in difficulty; 800 commonly used characters of in the Hsk vocabulary; a metal ring enabling the convenient carry of any number of cards as one likes.

 

Chinese Breeze Graded Reader Series  汉语风系列

  • Press :Peking University Press

Chinese Breeze is designed for all learners of Chinese from beginner to advanced levels, offering students a great opportunity to read for pleasure and develop fluency, improve their confidence in Chinese. There are eight levels, Level 1: 300 base words; Level 2: 500 base words; Level 3: 750 base words; Level 4: 1100 base words; Level 5:1,500 base words;Level 6:2,100 base words;Level7: 3,000 base words; Level8: 4,500 base words;

The Most Common Chinese Radicals   常用汉字部首

  • bsISBN: 978-7-80052-576-6
  • Press :Sinolingua
  • Cost: 27Rmb
  • Textbook contents
  • This textbook starting from the most basic strokes, with the variant forms, storke names and the rules for forming them.
  • Learning Chinese characters through radicals;
  • Focusing on the combination of components;

 

Rapid Literacy in Chinese 集中识字

  • jzszISBN: 978-7-80052-695-4
  • Press :Sinolingua
  • Cost: 39Rmb
  • Textbook contents
  • Students is expected to learn 30 new characters in each lesson; Combing the characters into a short sentence, the sentences are closely related to daily life.
  • 30 commonly used words formed by the characters in each lesson.
  • Sentences are formed by the characters and the words above

2, Radicals

Radicals are components of Chinese characters that you will see repeated over and over again. Learning the meaning of radicals will help you to see the connections between similar categories of words. Many characters are comprised of radical-phonetic pairings, where the radical is the “root” that hints at the meaning of the word, while another part of the character hints at the sound of the word. Learning to spot radicals is also useful as they will be used when looking up unfamiliar words in Chinese dictionaries. The most common Chinese radicals!

3, Understand the Meaning of Character

There’s a big difference between Chinese and western languages. Chinese words are made up of many Chinese characters, Chinese character has its own meaning, and the characters work together to give the whole word its meaning. When you study new words, please think about it like this. This way, it will be very easy for you to understand the slight difference between two synonyms. Introduction of Chinese characters 

4，Expand Vocabulary

Vocabulary is very important, but few of them will go as far as I will in this direction. I don’t simply believe that vocabulary is king, I believe it’s god emperor as well. Learning many words enables you to communicate and it also makes you learn other areas of the language faster.

5, Intensive Reading 精读(jīngdú) and Extensive Reading 泛读(fàndú)

Intensive reading, you should understand everything in the book, read slowly! Extensive reading, If you want to improve your reading skills quickly, read a lot – as much as you can. If you don’t have a lot of time, just read fast. You don’t have to understand every word and sentence, you can just need to get the basic meaning. Doing that helps you understand the words you already know — and helps you cement (make something stick) the knowledge in your mind.

6, Chinese Newpapers

If you are in Beijing, the below newspapers are good materials for you to improve your reading ability. x

新京报(xīnjīngbào)                            北京青年报(běijīng qīng nián bào)

京华时报(jīng huá shíbào)                 北京晚报 (běijīng wǎnbào)

参考消息(cān kǎoxiāoxi)                   环球时报(huán qiú shíbào)

 

Reading Chinese not only requires you know the Chinese characters but also you need to combine them into a meaningful whole. For improving your Chinese reading ability? You should read intensively and extensively, start from easy texts is a good idea and there will always be some new words or patterns you can pick up and you also reinforce words and patterns you already know!