Does reading a manga can help me improve my reading skills?

[brigitte]

Hello, 

 

I'm around hsk 6, but I'm not satisfied with my reading skills. I don't think I read fast enough, and when reading novels there are lot of unknown word, thus making reading a novel a boring task for me. 

On the other hand, reading a manga in Chinese is pure pleasure to me. I can understand like 98% of it without having to pre-study vocabulary.

 

Do you guys think reading manga can improve my reading skills? Does it will help me read novel afterwards?

[Lu]

Reading manga will be more helpful than not reading anything at all, but it won't get you all the way there. If you want to read novels, try and find a novel that is 1) on the right level for you, so you don't need to look up many words; and 2) something you're actually interested in reading. Perhaps there are novelisations of the type of manga you like to read, or novels in the same genre? If they're not too difficult, that can help.

[Jim]

Reading food packaging can help a bit in my opinion so a manga definitely would, though to get the most out of it you'd want to be thinking about the language patterns you're seeing and maybe checking on any vocab you don't know, so a bit of work on top of the pleasure. There can be the downside of picking up a lot of outlandish specialist vocab from e.g. martial arts stuff before you've got more common words down but that's not such a big deal in my view so long as you're aware of the issue.

[imron]

The more you read the better you’ll get at reading. 98% is considered the sweet spot for learning new words from context, so this content seems well suited. 
 

As lu mentioned, you should also look at branching out in to simpler novels.  There’s a world of difference between 余華 and 金庸. 

[Insectosaurus]

1 hour ago, imron said:

There’s a world of difference between 余華 and 金庸. 

 

From your own experience, how long did it take you to adapt to Jin Yong's way of writing? I have read ten novels by now (seven of them being Harry Potter) with quite high comprehension. I'm just re-reading the sixth Harry Potter book and my comprehension is close to 100 percent. I'm also struggling through Taibei Ren by Pai Hsien-yung.

 

I always make sure to know all morphemes before I read a book so that won't be a problem with Jin Yong either, but just by scanning the book a few minutes the grammar seems quite difficult, but also references (that goes for Taibei Ren as well).

 

I'm thinking I should perhaps use an English translation as a reference for whenever I get completely lost, but it would still be interesting to see how you experienced the learning curve.

[amytheorangutan]

I love manga/comics/graphic novels! When I first started reading native materials I started with manga/comics and I think they definitely help. I still jump back and forth between novels and manga to give myself breaks in between as I also find reading novels can be exhausting when comprehension level is below 98% also takes me forever to finish. I try to find novels that I'm super interested in and not much over 200 pages so that I don't get bored and overwhelmed and give up. 

 

I've been avoiding novels that are too genre specific so far but I've been thinking of reading crime/detective novels at some point because I like the genre so even though I know it will be a slog in the beginning hopefully the vocabularies will get repeated when I read more books in that genre.

 

 

[feihong]

On 5/17/2021 at 2:33 PM, brigitte said:

Do you guys think reading manga can improve my reading skills? Does it will help me read novel afterwards?

There’s been a lot of good general advice already given in this thread, but it bares asking: what kind of novels are you aiming to read? Depending on your answer, there are definitely manga that can help you reach a good level for comprehending novels. But if you only read manga that isn’t very difficult (for example, Yotsuba), then you likely won’t progress much.

[imron]

On 5/18/2021 at 10:56 AM, Insectosaurus said:

From your own experience, how long did it take you to adapt to Jin Yong's way of writing?

About 10 novels, but I could already read Chinese quite well before the first novel (I just hadn't done much long-form reading).  I wrote about the experience here.

 

Note however that those 10 books were all original Chinese books, not translations, and I think has an impact on your ability to understand original Chinese content.

 

Another important factor is how you are reading the novels.

 

When I read novels in Chinese, it's almost exclusively paper novels, and if I encounter an unknown word then I have to manually look it up in the dictionary (which for me is Pleco, so not an entirely manual process).

 

If however you are using an electronic reader with easy dictionary lookup, then you'll be missing out on many benefits that paper books offer.  In the short term, electronic readers with popup dictionaries make difficult material more accessible, but it comes at the cost of long-term learning because you're not building up a strong foundation of material you know well enough and confidently enough to read without quick dictionary checks.

 

On 5/18/2021 at 10:56 AM, Insectosaurus said:

I'm also struggling through Taibei Ren by Pai Hsien-yung.

My recommendation would be to try and find content you can read without struggling.  See for example the difference between this post and this post.  You are better off breezing through 10 easier novels rather than struggling through 1-2 more difficult books.

 

On 5/18/2021 at 10:56 AM, Insectosaurus said:

I'm thinking I should perhaps use an English translation as a reference for whenever I get completely lost

I starting reading one English translation of the first Jin Yong novel I read.  It was an officially sanctioned translation but it was missing a lot of stuff, and other parts had been moved around.  I didn't bother to finish it.

[Insectosaurus]

On 5/24/2021 at 4:23 PM, imron said:

When I read novels in Chinese, it's almost exclusively paper novels, and if I encounter an unknown word then I have to manually look it up in the dictionary (which for me is Pleco, so not an entirely manual process).

 

This is how I read all my novels as well, and I completely agree. My first few chapters of ever reading Chinese was done in iBooks, but I ended up buying the paper novel and have never looked back. I just ordered several more books from Taaze, some of them translations of things I know, to increase speed rather than anything else. I already have a few harder books in my shelf but I've decided to let them rest for a while.

 

I have also noticed the gap between translations and originals, but at least to me personally both have had some value. Translations have been very good for me to increase my reading speed and character comprehension, while books by Yu Hua have taught me a lot of colloquial language and Under the Hawthorn Tree a lot of terms relevant to the time period and political environment in which is takes place.

 

Thanks for an excellent answer. Can I just hijack the thread for one at least somewhat on topic question? What would your main suggestion be if I want to be able to read older handwritten cursive script? Does learning to write help a lot, or should I mostly just practice reading them by using a cursive script in my computer? I'm barely OK-ish at reading semi-cursive, but mostly clueless when I encounter real cursive. Perhaps Fred Wang's book, which I see recommended a lot, is still the best way forward?

[imron]

5 hours ago, Insectosaurus said:

Perhaps Fred Wang's book, which I see recommended a lot, is still the best way forward?

This is a good introduction.  If however you are ok with things entirely in Chinese, I'd recommend 《席殊3SFM实用硬笔字60小时训练》instead.  Do all of the exercises and by the time you finish the book you'll be able to read most handwriting.

[Jan Finster]

16 hours ago, Insectosaurus said:

Can I just hijack the thread for one at least somewhat on topic question? What would your main suggestion be if I want to be able to read older handwritten cursive script? Does learning to write help a lot, or should I mostly just practice reading them by using a cursive script in my computer? I'm barely OK-ish at reading semi-cursive, but mostly clueless when I encounter real cursive. Perhaps Fred Wang's book, which I see recommended a lot, is still the best way forward?

 

My current approach is to install cursive fonts [handwritten style fonts] and then read simple text in Chrome: https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/25120-does-anyone-know-where-to-download-chinese-fonts-for-free/?do=findComment&comment=476412