Glancing at text

[missbrokensmile]

This is kind of a poll-type question.

I'm kind of curious. For those who are almost fluent/are fluent in Chinese... how long did it take for you to be able to glance at a piece of text and be able to catch a few phrases?

For example, if you sister were to be be reading an inappropriate book and you happened to catch a glimpse of the title/text before she quickly hid it away (and from those few phrases/words that you caught, you could discern what sort of thing she was reading), can you do that in Chinese? And if so, how long did it take for you to be able to do that?

[anonymoose]

It's not one of those things that either you can do or you can't do. The better you get at Chinese, the more you'll be able to catch by quickly glancing.

I have noticed, however, that when walking down the street, I tend to internalise shop names less in Chinese than English. I guess that's because I'm less likely to pick up a name in Chinese than in English just by glancing.

[missbrokensmile]

Yeah, I didn't phrase my question really well... ^^;;; I guess my question was how long did it take for you to be that good at Chinese, that you're able to do that? XD

[zhouhaochen]

I would get my sister to give me the book. Regardless of what I managed to read.

[doraemon]

That depends on what level you're starting from. But I believe it would take about a year or two at least. Maybe one or two years more if your progress is comparatively slow.

[imron]

I think it's not so dependent on how long you've been learning, but of when you start to improve your reading speed. You can be learning for a long time but if you never make any effort to get your reading speed up to a high level you'll never really get good at glancing.

[gougou]

Agree with imron. It depends on your familiarity with characters, which really you can only build if you spend a lot of time reading. After I started reading Chinese books, I noticed that I picked up much more walking down the street than before (which is a pity, it was nice to be immune to advertisement for a while...)

PS: Even though I have three sisters, yours is probably the last example I would think of to illustrate glancing at text.