Building the Chinese reading habit by month's end.

[Kelby]

Hi Chinese forumers

I've gotten super bored with my Chinese learning, which has really stagnated recently. I just got done with my HSK level 4, which went really well and was actually really easy, and I've gotten lazy. Nowadays I pretty much just learn make sentence cards for the HSK 5, try to remember interesting stuff my fiancé says, and pick up lingo at my work place.

So, (and maybe this is tied to my spurt of motivation from joining a gym and trying get healthy) I've decided to put some sweat into trying to create a reading habit. Maybe this is interesting or maybe it's been done to death in the past, but either way it seemed pretty Chinese-forums worthy. So here I am

I'm not doing anything complicated, just getting some reading done everyday. Stuff beyond just my usual text messages and WeChatting, that is

Here's what I'll do:

1. Read at least 40 minutest a day.

2. I'll search out the next day's reading the night before so I can literally just roll out of bed and get my practice done, I do a lot of reading in the morning before work, so I could easily sub out reading a blog article or two to fit this in.

3. I plan on following some familiar topics and finding most of my reading that way. For example, the stuff in Ukraine is pretty interesting and I've always loved tea, so these will be pretty easy things to plug into Baidu and find webpages and articles back on.

4. I'll be on the prowl for new and interesting readings unrelated to the stories and topics I'm following. Not sure how I'll do this other than pealing through newspaper headlines and and Weibo and waiting for something to grab me, but the goal is to try and keep new topics from new sources coming in my eye holes.

5. I'm only going to capture words I deem useful. My goal isn't to build my vocabulary nor to learn vocab about these topics of interest, it's simply to reinforce what I know at my current level and expand it. That means I'm not interested in super technical stuff or idioms, but I am interested in things like everyday adjectives. I'll still expand my vocabulary, I just won't try to learn ALL the words. One step at a time

Anywho, if this has been done I'd love to see how the last guy did it and if you're interested I'll post back some updates as things go on.

[imron]

See my post about it here.

 

My advice would be to make sure you have a backlog of reading material ready that you have thought about and prepared beforehand.  That way, when you finish reading one thing, you can go straight on to the next without having to spend time thinking about what to read next (which will distract you from reading).  This could mean newspaper articles or wechat, but instead I'd really recommend some sort of book or novel.  Novels are great because you get a real indication of progress as time goes by, and even if it feels slow when reading, after a few weeks you can look back and see you've read half the book and you can also see how much more you have remaining.  All of this means that for the most part you always know what you're going to be reading next, and you have ample time to prepare something new for when you run out of pages.  It also gives you a great sense of accomplishment when you finish one.

 

The book sub-forum has a number of suggestions, including numerous short stories, as well as several simpler novels - some with plot summaries and word lists.  Yu Hua's "To Live" 《活着》is quite popular, and《圈子圈套》is also good (it's more modern, but also slightly more difficult than 《圈子圈套》).

 

If you're not quite at the novel stage, graded readers would be the way to go (Mandarin Companion has quite a few available now).

 

I would also recommend not judging yourself by words, but rather time spent, first because it's much easier to measure, and second because your reading speeds will fluctuate depending on what you are reading, and will also (hopefully) improve over time which means you may end up spending an unpredictable amount of time each day doing this activity, which makes it harder to set aside time and also for it to become a habit.  Instead of aiming for N words, set a target of at least 30 mins a day (this is where the previously mentioned backlog of reading material comes in useful), not including any vocabulary learning that happens as a result.  Use a tool such as don't break the chain, or my own 100% to help measure progress.

 

Finally, I know you said vocab learning wasn't your goal, but don't ignore this completely.  Set yourself a minimum and maximum number of words to learn a day (5 and 10 are good numbers to start out with).  The minimum makes sure you are actually expanding your vocab, and the maximum will ensure you aren't spending too much time learning vocab.  If you find what you're reading has too many new words, find something easier.

[Kelby]

Thanks for the advice, Imron! I tried out my practice today, and sure enough that 250 character minimum is CRAZY low. I chose a wimpy little news article to begin with (something about old pipes in Qingdao :/ ) and that itself was 300+ characters, so I'm taking your advice and shooting for 30 minutes, broken up throughout the day. Keeping a stopwatch on my phone did the trick, so I could just start and stop to track actual reading time around interruptions.

I grabbed a couple of books from my elementary school which include a translated copy of the Little Prince and a book of 成语 background stories. I know I said I'm not learning idioms, but I remember liking the stories themselves when I tried to pick up 成语 last time. I figure I can pull a chapter from either book, or a news story, to keep the content fresh yet familiar. Still figuring out how to get fresh material, but the packed bookshelf at the back of my second grader's classroom is looking like a pretty good bet. Plus, my students get a kick out of my interest in their books.

I'm also taking your advice on having a book to finish out the time with. I'm using 鬼吹灯, which although being idiom rich and being filled with historical vocabulary is actually pretty interesting and has held my interest quite well.

That all should fill up the time nicely, no doubt. I'm kind of interested in tracking how many characters I read within the 30 minutes so I can get an idea of my reading speed, but if I do that daily I'll undoubtedly get annoyed by the exercise and neglect it. I guess I'll do a reading speed check every week just to see if there's a change there though. Daily seems a bit much.

This is also starting to get a bit complex because my goals are getting muddled. At first I was shooting for ex many characters by the 31st. Now I suppose my choice is between how much total time I read and how my reading speed changes. The main idea is to read more, however, so I guess I'll go with a goal of at least 14 hours of reading by month's end. That sounds a little wimpy though...

I'm building my vocabulary off of the HSK 5 list, so I don't want to get loaded up with too many words. I'm concerned about making my vocabulary study a harder to fit in and keep up with, but adding 5-10 words a day from reading can't hurt anything.

[imron]

Having a ready to go stash of reading material is key to developing a reading habit.  I found the biggest killer for the habit is letting yourself get out of the habit, and if there's nothing to read on hand, it's easy to convince yourself to skip a day because it's too much bother to go searching for new material.  End result - you end up skipping 2 weeks or something.

 

For reading material, I would avoid anything you find boring or uninteresting.  That will kill your motivation and therefore desire to continue.  If something's too hard, too boring or contains too many new words, drop it and go for something simpler.  You can always come back to it later.

 

Reading speed is nice to improve, but the biggest speed hit will come from unknown words and unknown grammar.  They should be primary focus and you can then train reading speed later.  It's always good to do a bit of daily special purpose speed improvement, as over time it will start to flow in to your normal reading habits.  You won't see any significant and lasting improvement unless you are doing it regularly.  Once a week is probably not enough, but again, I'm guessing your limiting factor will be unknown words.

 

One piece of advice I would offer is don't get so caught up in micro-managing metrics.  It can be fun to do this, but it can also be highly distracting and you might find large chunks of study time devoted to calculating various things that would have been put to better use studying.  Instead of tracking time daily, figure it all out afterwards after major milestones have been reached, e.g.  when you finish a book.  At the front/back of every book published in mainland China there will be a character count for that book.  Instead of counting words read daily, wait until you finish the book and then figure out how many days it took and how much time on average you spent a day, then you can figure out average words a day/minute from the aggregated total which is far more accurate measure of sustained reading speed than doing it daily.

 

If I was setting goals, my goal would be to read X minutes per day (not including any time for looking up/studying newly encountered words), and to read daily for Y number of days.  Where X and Y are hopefully both over 30.  Everything else will come as a function of that.

 

For building vocabulary, HSK is simply one representation of commonly used words in the Chinese language.  If you are reading native content, there will be large amount of crossover between that content and various HSK lists and chances are that excluding specialist vocab (tomb raiding, ghosts etc) many of the unknown words you encounter in native content will also be in the HSK lists.  For prioritising which 5-10 words to learn in a day, simply crosscheck new vocab against the HSK lists, and you'll be killing two birds with one stone.  Take care though that you don't go over your 'max' quota.  It won't hurt for one day, but over time it all starts to add up.  Better to be disciplined from the start.  Don't worry about missing out on words.  If you're doing regular reading, the useful ones will repeat soon enough anyway that it won't make a difference.

[imron]

Also, see here for the thread on 鬼吹灯.  I'm sure Laurenth would love some company.
 

[tysond]

A technique I learned from All Japanese All The Time is to take advantage of your laziness by ensuring there is a Chinese book near you at all times.

I leave multiple books/comics in places - bedside table, bathroom, bags I carry during the day, travel bags, my desk at work, etc.

 

Also, I have comic book apps on my devices and have downloaded an ungodly number of comics on them for offline reading, plus I have text files on them all with books and subtitles from films on them.  Not to mention social networks, news articles etc which I've got on shortcuts frequently.  

 

This helps a lot with killing downtime by reading a few pages here and there, it really adds up.  The challenge at intermediate level seems to be how to prioritize vocabulary in these sources and I thought Olle's recommendation of the rule of three is quite good (if you see it three times, look it up and consider adding it to your SRS or whatever, otherwise just keep reading).

[Kelby]

It's been a couple of days, and I've successfully done my reading every day so far. Figured I'd throw an update up here about how exactly my 20 hour reading project has been going. I've also created some little projects for myself, which has made this reading habit thing more enjoyable.

I'll start with the materials I've been reading and then move on to my feelings and observations so far.

Here's what I've been reading.

Books
To live (活着)
     I watched the movie version of this a while ago. Bought it at a going out of business sale at a tape store and watched it one bored night so I'm familiar with the story (I think). It's a charming little work and even though I'm not even through the first section I'm enjoying it. It's simple, and relatively simply worded so lookups are relatively few. That makes it pretty easy to getthrough  too.

鬼吹灯
     I'm not really going out of my way to learn much from this book as it's packed with esoteric vocabulary (although my fiance has gotten a kick out of my influx of ghost and opium related vocabulary), but this story is right up my alley. I love the pulpy, dark, anti-hero sort of action happening in the beginning. I'm nearly done with the third section and I'm loving every second. This is the only resource so far that I've been able to read and forget time with, so it's been one of my favorites to work with. I do fear I'm using the clipboard reader in Pleco a bit too much here. It's sort of necessary for understanding what's going on at my level though. I've also noticed that with this novel I'm finding an interesting oscillation in difficulty. Descriptions seem to be my weak point, but I'm having a good time with any action related elements of this book. For example, descriptions of a graveyard are a little laborious to work through but a sizable section about an opium smoking rat stealing money for the main character required almost no dictionary work.  Maybe this is just the nature of the writing style where descriptions are more wordy than the action. Either that or my knowledge of descriptive language is lacking.

成语故事
     Even though I'm not focusing on learning any 成语 (not even adding them to my list) this book's been awesome because reading each little story is great practice for feeling out the main idea of a passage. It's been great practice because I can just read each story, which takes about 4 minutes, spend some time thinking about what it means, and then look up the idiom which is the title to each little story and see how off the mark I am.
    This one's also been great for practicing focus and making sure I'm pronouncing things right in my head because it has above line pinyin (it's a kid's book). This has worked in my favor rather that to my detriment, truth be told, because every time I bump into a character I've seen a lot in my other reading (but that I haven't added to my list) I can take a quick peek to see if I'm remembering or guessing at it's pronunciation correctly. This has been great for correcting course, if you will.

Newspaper articles/ webpages
    So far I've read articles about how to drink Pu'er tea, the conflict in Ukraine, the Kunming train station attack, how to select tea, and many more.
    I'm taking in most of my vocabulary from these articles, and so I put them first in my daily reading queue. Needless to say, these articles have much more common and useful vocabulary in them than the other readings, so it just makes sense to make them the way I start my day. I suppose it's better for me to be taking in the vocab from these real word things  than from the pulpy, horror book above, lol.

Vocabulary
    Like I said in the beginning, vocabualry hasn't been my focus but I'm still interested in it. That being said, I've been having trouble falling into a good vocab routine. I've been maintining my lists outside of my reading time, but I haven't been building them. My old habit was to take a selection of HSK 5 words and make them into sentence cards every day and build my vocabulary that way, but with all of the reading that practice has fallen off. I've tried making cards from what I read, capturing words from sentences right on the spot and makign a card from them, but it just feels like that gets in the way and breaks my flow too much. I've tried tagging words to look up and coming back to them, but honestly by the time I'm done I'm either out if motivation to make cards or it's the end if the day and I need to get some sleep for work the next day. I know I need to make a better system, so maybe that should be my goal for this week.

Projects
     To make this more interesting I'm creating some projects within my goal of 20 hours of reading. One of those is to finish my first Chinese novel by the end of my project. With two great recommendations from the forum I'm in good hands with that. I figure if I continue with the two that I'm doing and then up the reading time of one or the other I'll be able to acheive this by the 31st. Reading a novel is mich easier than I thought it would be, and doesn't require as much preparation as I thought so I figure there's no time like the present to finish this milestone (and then plan to do one with less dictionary work ;P).
    I've also divided out my 成语故事 book into readings per day, so I can finish almost all of it by month's end. It's fun to read and I'll want the background for learning idioms later, so I figure this will have benefits outside those of just reading anything and everything. I'm not caught up too much on what I'll get out of it. I just want to familiarize myself with some of the stories.
     I think this will do for now since I don't want to fill up all of my time and leave none left for other articles in the rotation.

Future reading ideas
三字经, 必背古诗词80首, 死亡笔记（漫画)，news about the missing plane out of Malaysia , and articles on wine lingo.

     I want to get some more cultural background and I've found two great books that have explanations for both the three character classics and ancient poems. Could be fun to take a look.
     Death note is my favorite Anime show, and I've already read the first book in Chinese translation, so this could be a fun way to fill up my reading practice too.
     I got a part time job as a 侍酒师 at an import wine company (I'm nowhere nearly good enough with wine to fit the title in the truest sense of the word) so I need to do some research on wine lingo in Chinese for the next time they call me out to introduce and serve wines. I learned a lot from my first go at it and I think I held my own well in an English free wine discussion, but it pays well stupidly well and sharpening my tools before I go back seems a must if I want to be on call. Might as well throw this on the pile too

[roddy]

If you're reading 鬼吹灯 it'd be great if you can drop in in laurenth's topic and add your thoughts. The more the merrier. 

 

Thanks for posting about your project, interesting stuff. 

[laurenth]

 

For prioritising which 5-10 words to learn in a day, simply crosscheck new vocab against the HSK lists, and you'll be killing two birds with one stone. 

 

Here's a trick you may find useful if your setup looks a bit like mine, i.e. if you look up words on a smart phone and want to know if a particular word is included in the HSK lists.

 

- In Pleco: I have a list of all HSK words. When I look up a word and Pleco sees that that word is already included in a list, the "+" button (used to add a word to a list) has a dotted line around it.

 

- In Goldendict or other e-dictionaries that use the Startdict format: I have created a Stardict dictionary that consists in a simple list of all words included in the HSK lists. When I look up a word, I can see immediately if it was found in that particular "dictionary".

 

That's a simple, if slightly arbitrary way to prioritize vocab learning.

[Kelby]

Hey everybody! It's time for a little update.

 

I'm behind... well, not by much but I'm behind. Turns out that starting a mentally taxing project is a bad idea during a month in which you're moving house.

 

Anywho, this isn't all that bad because I decided to reorganize things a little and adjust my daily targets. Changing from 40 minutes to 1 hour a day has turned out to be much easier than I thought it would be. I only need to get up half an hour earlier than usual and do some solid reading in the mornings. I'm finding it nice to curl up on the couch with a hot cup of tea and my Chinese reading materials, which signals to me that I'm getting old . You also can't beat the solitude and quiet early mornings give you, which is so hard to grab living in China.

 

Nothing has really changed with the materials I'm using, althought I've looked up some more articles related to tea. The whole fresh materials from the web thing has kind of fallen off, but I'm finding my primary schools readers and idiom stories are giving me decently fresh vocabulary. I find it more worthwhile to follow a story every day than to look up random stuff on the web anyway because stories are more interesting.

 

I'm 12 hours down, leaving me only 8 days worth of reading 1 hour a day. This also gives me a little wiggle room to finish early or take a day off for writing my weekly blog content.

 

I already have some takeaways from doing this practice, so I'll drop my observations here.

 

Some pros to practicing in this way.

1. Getting a feel for your reading level: Since I'm focusing mostly on utilizing the words and characters I already know, I have been getting a very good idea of where my reading level lies. I have relatively few issues with with my primary school stuff, but when it comes to novels, I'm doing lots of lookups. It's time to start thinking of how to push my level.
2. Getting a feel for parsing sentences: After a decent amount of reading, I'm finding I no longer have issues differentiating grammar particles, names, regular words, etc. within a sentence or paragraph. Looks like practice really does turn the great wall of Chinese into digestable reading.
3. A steady, controllable drip of vocabulary: Since I'm not focusing on building vocabulary right now, my SRS deck has grown at a VERY leisurely pace. Definitely not getting overwhelmed with the new stuff. It's been a good opportunity to get caught up.
4. Focus on reinforcing old words: Related to the last point, I'm finding this is a great way to catch up and sharpen  understanding of previously studied words. I've found lots of words whose usage I didn't understand before becoming more clear.

Some cons

1. Slow vocabulary acquisition... really slow...:While there are pros to this, I'm only progressing at a snail's pace. At this rate of vocabulary acquisition, it'll take ages to up my reading comprehension (that is with readings reliant on vocab for understanding). For that reason, I think this type of practice isn't sustainable until you're at such a high level that your vocabulary will be increasing at a snail's pace anyway.
2. Reading more means 'studying' less: There's been a huge trade-off between my reading and SRS time to make room for the larger volume of materials. Studying more cards will have to detract from my reading time and vice-versa. This is certainly something to take into consideration as I try to balance my reading and vocabulary practice next month.

I'm sure I'll have many more observations as I finish this up. But that's it from me for now!

 

Back to the books...

[imron]

When you say vocab acquisition is happening at a snail's pace, what sort of pace is that? I've found 5-10 words a day is a good sustainable pace over long periods of time.

Don't be put off by the slower pace, just make sure you're doing that much every day. You'll pass the point you would have been at if you'd been going faster and then burnt out.

Also don't worry so much about missing SRS reps. Most of your deck you'll either know (and can therefore safely ignore) or it will be useful enough that you'll encounter it in reading and get reinforcement then. The stuff you don't encounter can be safely ignored because they're not words you currently need. Use it more just to keep recently learnt words fresh.

[Kelby]

Well Imron, I neglected to mention that my vocabulary study has fallen off almost completely with new words. I'm at about 5-10 new words per week. I suppose that's the last piece of the puzzle I need to work back in now. Since my increased reading volume has been edging out vocab study, my next step should be to dial down the reading time after my challenge to get my vocabulary growing again. Gotta find the balance, although I'm thinking of trying a vocabulary challenge next month ;)

It'd be nice if I could use the pleco flashcard system for this, because it would make adding cards from my phone readings much smoother, but unfortunately my debit card expired recently and so my in app purchases are all but impossible (thanks for the tips though Laurenth!).

Once I get my payment stuff all worked out I hope I can get the proper tools in place and save time on making my cards...

[roddy]

Well, Kelby, that's your month up - any final conclusions?

[Kelby]

Haha, thanks for the kick in the pants, Roddy.

 

Well, I got it done. It kind of sucked there at the end, what with the lag in motivation that usually happens when you're almost done with a project, but I got through and did my full 20 hours on schedule (on the last day of March, actually).

 

I'd be lying if I said I haven't taken a break these last few days, but I think it will be much easier to work in reading practice in the future. For the record, I've never worked on reading other than burning myself out trying to boost my vocab by capturing everything I didn't know in the paper while still a beginner. S,o going whole hog on trying to incorporate reading at my level has been sort of the old learning to swim by jumping of the boat experience. I've been focusing my study time these last few days on strategizing how to get more out of this new found reading practice going forward. If this little project has been worth nothing else, it has been worth highlighting exaclty what I need to work on.

 

My main problems lie with vocabulary and character familiarity. Vocabulary can happen piece by piece and naturally as I keep reading (and capturing more vocab now ;)). I'm really in no hurry to cram by passive vocabulary with more words anyway since my problem is more a lack of active vocab. That's a speaking problem and not a reading one though. Character understanding and recognition will take some research, creativity, and exploration, all of which I've already started and am really enjoying (more threads to come on that, provided I do anything worth sharing).

 

I guess with 'parting words,' on the whole thing, I would have quit sooner were I not so bullheaded. That's not quitting in a bad sense either. It became obvious relatively early that while my bloated reading practice was doing a lot for reinforcing what I already knew and helping me make sense out of the Great Wall of Chinese Text that used to daunt me, I wasn't growing in the way I wanted to. Considering the fact that I featured my personal challenge on my blog, I was sort of locked into my method and felt that sticking it through to the end and reporting on the downsides that showed themselves as I pushed through would be more useful to people than pivoting. The biggest one is that my reading time squeezed out all of my motivation before I could investigate much vocabulary.

 

Were I to retailor the whole thing a month ago, I absolutely would have focused more on keeping track of frequently occurring words and characters in my texts and focused on them instead of just picking stuff that  seemed arbitrarily useful. I also would have paid more attention to things that I partially know but aren't quite cemented in my memory too. I think I could have done a lot more self-correction that way, but then again, that would have slowed me down or stretched my study time even more.

 

Going forward I'm looking at dissecting characters, trying to understand how they tick, and using what I find to make my new, more balanced my reading and vocabulary study more efficient.

 

Should have more time to play on the forum now too

[roddy]

Very good, let me know if you need something else to keep you busy. Sure we can come up with something...

[imron]

Were I to retailor the whole thing a month ago, I absolutely would have focused more on keeping track of frequently occurring words and characters in my texts and focused on them instead of just picking stuff that  seemed arbitrarily useful. I also would have paid more attention to things that I partially know but aren't quite cemented in my memory too. I think I could have done a lot more self-correction that way, but then again, that would have slowed me down or stretched my study time even more.

Sounds like you know what you need to do this month then

[Kelby]

@Roddy: If that's an invitation to be an admin I accept. Lol, I kid I kid  .

 

Got any good resources on character entymology? Phonetic an Semantic Components? I'm also missing information on how characters are put together outside of phonetic-semantic and pictographic.

 

@Imron: Oddly, that's a far better idea than anything I had originally planned for this month and I'm the one who wrote it...  

[imron]

Being able to reflect on things you have done, analyse what worked and what didn't, and use that to incorporate improvements into future efforts is a valuable skill not just in learning Chinese, but in all aspects of your life.