What was your biggest struggle in learning to read Chinese?

[Kelby]

What with the new year, I've been waxing all nostalgic as I start on my my Chinese resolutions. This year I will be working on my reading more than ever before, and so I've had to do some real hard thinking about where my problems are and how to solve them. Moreover, though, I've been taking a look at where I've come from in my study to boost my confidence for the next big endeavor.

This got me thinking that it might be kind of fun to pick each others' brains on the subject. I know there are some vets here that have gotten past hurdles that I and other green ears have yet to trip into, and there are no doubt others like me feeling like they're headed into uncharted territory without a map.

So what do you say we do a little sharing? What was yor biggest struggle when learning to read Chinese? How'd you get past it?

For me, I'd say my biggest problem to date has been finding suitable materials for my level. For thenlongest time it seemed I'd either breeze right past what I was reading and not take it seriously or find myself with a numb mind, glassy-eyed staring at a wall of gibberish. Either way, especially when I still lived outside China, it was hard to feel like I got much out of my reading time because it either demoralized me or gave me a false sense of security in my abilities.

Now that I'm in the mainland, my solution has been to sort of just read anything I can get my hands on or at least attempt to. Newspapers magazines, pamphlets, Weibo, and shop signs coupled with actually taking vocabulary building seriously for once and it's been working pretty well. Of course, now the issue is actualy finding things I'm interested in reading :/

What about you folks?

Tag, you're it.

[abcdefg]

What was yor biggest struggle when learning to read Chinese?

Reading word by word like a child and not putting things together into logical phrases and sentences like an adult.

[ouyangjun]

 Of course, now the issue is actualy finding things I'm interested in reading

I find Weibo and Weixin are great tools to streamline reading that is specific to my liking.  Plus it's on my phone so I can squeeze in it during random downtimes throughout my busy day.  I follow a handful of different media and news accounts that post good articles, not to mention the good articles that my friends post with everyone.

[Kelby]

I find Weibo and Weixin are great tools to streamline reading that is specific to my liking. Plus it's on my phone so I can squeeze in it during random downtimes throughout my busy day. I follow a handful of different media and news accounts that post good articles, not to mention the good articles that my friends post with everyone.

It's nice being able to filter social media addiction through Chinese and making it study time instead of time wasted ;)

I'm just scratching the surface of how to tailor my Weibo feed to my interests better. Right now it's just cat gifs and the occasional cutesy comic. Light reading, one would call it.

[Krisspy]

Definitely finding suitable reading material Most of the stuff I find is a huge wall of gibberish which is extremely off putting!

[abhoriel]

the most difficult thing is finding something interesting to read.. you cant just read occasionally to improve at a reasonable speed, it must be done very often and its easy to get bored!

its especially easy to get bored on something that is too easy, too difficult to something that is simply not interesting.

 

i've recently tried playing a chinese translation of an old video game I used to play as a child.. its working quite well!

[Lu]

To be honest, vocabulary. Second year of university we got 1-2 pages of new words every week, I quickly fell behind and it was a pain. Failed the exam, crammed for a few weeks and then barely passed. I suppose with reading, I've been lucky. I attempted a few books but they were too hard at the time, so I read almost only textbook articles. I read my first book in my fifth year of studying and it took me quite a while, but it wasn't too difficult. Never had problems finding material ever since (I did give up on a number of books, but picked up others instead).

[Kelby]

I read my first book in my fifth year of studying and it took me quite a while, but it wasn't too difficult. Never had problems finding material ever since (I did give up on a number of books, but picked up others instead).

In that case where do you get your readin materials from? Or was it simply breaking the seal of reading your first book that made the rest of the reading easier?

[Lu]

First mainly novels, later on also newspapers. I don't think finishing a novel made the rest easier, I think my level at the time was good enough that I could read novels as long as they weren't too difficult, so I just kept doing that. I love reading in any language, so it was important to me to read in Chinese too.

 

Newspapers never interested me that much, but once I started reading them I found that it's really something that gets noticeably easier if you do it every day. You get used to the grammar, you know some relevant words, and if you follow the news you already know the background of the article you're reading and can almost anticipate what it'll say (especially if you already skimmed that day's English headlines).