Chinese student studying at desk, storyboard, simplified sketch, gestural lines – midjourney

Ok, so I’m not really an ABC (American Born Chinese). I was born in Beijing, but I came to the US when I was 5 so I think that’s pretty close. I speak Mandarin / Chinglish mostly with my parents over the phone and sometimes at restaurants. I love watching Chinese movies, TV shows, and YouTube videos though sometimes I don’t understand the parts of the dialogue. I prefer having subtitles on even if I can comprehend most of it. It’s a bit of a crutch. And if the show is set in historical China, subtitles are a must.

I want to learn how to read Chinese better so I can order at restaurants without pointing at the menu or speaking broken Chinese with the waiter. “我们要一个。。。 这个。。。和一个Chicken with Explosive Chili Pepper” just isn’t cutting it for me anymore. I want to be able to read news articles, understand comments on Chinese reddit, and most importantly, read my extended family’s WeChat group conversations without needing to translate every other message.

I’m writing this post because I’ve tried a lot of different methods to learn to read Chinese throughout the years and finally found a pretty effective way recently. Here are some of the things I’ve tried that weren’t as useful:

• Learning lyrics to Mandopop songs
• Reading kids books and doing grade school workbooks
• Watching Chinese TV shows and trying to read the Chinese subtitles
• Using a pen pal app to chat with native Chinese speakers
• Language apps like Duo Lingo or HelloChinese

None of them really helped improve my reading skills for a few reasons.

1. I lost interest very quickly. Starting to learn Chinese from the ground up may sound like a decent idea, but having to read through workbooks made for 6 year olds becomes a real drag after a while. Learning phrases like “XiaoBai went to school today” or “XiaoBai likes to jump rope” is just incredibly boring.
2. Not made for Chinese Americans. Apps like Duo Lingo are probably great for people who don’t know the language at all, but if you know how to speak Chinese, it starts to feel like you’re wasting your time. For example, Duo Lingo may try to teach you the word 餐馆 (restaurant). Great, that’s a useful word to learn. But then it also forces you to listen to the phrase, use it in a sentence, etc. I couldn’t find a way to only use the features I needed.
3. I felt like I wasn’t learning some of the most basic words. When learning through pop songs, you may learn 5 different words for ’love’, but you’ll never learn the word for ’table'.

Method

This may come as a disappointment, but I came to the conclusion that in order to improve reading ability, you need to have some baseline of vocabulary that comes from rote memorization. Without this baseline knowledge, you’ll have to continually check the dictionary and break the flow of whatever you’re reading / watching. In other words, watching a Chinese show with subtitles may help you get better at reading, but you need to be at a certain proficiency before that method is effective. A lot Chinese people believe that you need to know ~1,000 characters to be considered literate. For me, things started getting easier after I memorized around 500-600 words. This is certainly not the only way to learn how to read Chinese, but it has been the most effective for me.

Enter Anki

My friend introduced me to this program called Anki that is basically an open source flash card reader. You can download the free program onto your computer and load custom flashcard decks. I also chose to pay $25(!) for the mobile app so that I could study without needing to be at my computer. It is by far the most expensive app I’ve ever purchased, but it allowed me to study on my phone in short bursts. Totally worth it. Progress syncs to the cloud after every session so it’s pretty seamless between devices.

Desktop client vs mobile app.

The best part about Anki is the ability to upload decks of flashcards. There’s a whole community of people uploading all kinds of decks - language, biology, geography, law - basically anything that needs memorization. The decks that I used are called “Mastering Chinese Collection Level 1-10”, which can be found here. I would start from the beginning since it’s pretty easy to blaze through if the words are too simple for you. I found that even within Level 1, there were some words that I was unfamiliar with. The cards range from individual words to entire sentences.

After every flash card, you select how familiar you are with the word. If it’s a new word, it’ll repeat the flashcard to you during the same session. If you’re comfortable with the word, it’ll show it to you during the next session. If it’s a word that you feel like is easy, it’ll show you the card in a week. This automatically spaced repetition makes sure you continue to review previous cards at the right cadence. The cadences are all customizable and they change depending on your history with the card.

Is this the most engaging way of learning to read Chinese? Probably not - it’s still rote memorization at the end of the day. However, I’ve found that this is the most effective way to increase vocabulary so that you can eventually switch to more interesting mediums.

Adjustments to Anki

Another useful feature of Anki is the ability to customize what you want to study. I often added new words or phrases I wanted to learn to the deck. I also found that the pronunciation-type flashcards weren’t useful to me, so I deleted the entire category from the deck. Unfortunately, it can be confusing to find where to remove them since there are ‘options’ buttons that lead to different things. Here are the steps below to remove an entire type of card:

Open the deck that you’re working on.

Tap the edit button on the bottom left.

Tap on the “cards” button.

Select the card type you want to delete (in my case, I deleted the 1.Listening ones), and then choose Remove Card Type.

Stats

I really love the stats aspect of Anki. You’re able to see how many flash cards you’ve reviewed, how many you’re studying per day, the ratio of new cards vs previously seen cards, and more. I saw that as I moved onto harder decks, my review rate began dipping since it took me longer to memorize the words. Here’s what mine looked like after a few months:

9,323 in 3 months! Pretty efficient learning.

Supplemental Tool

Another really helpful tool that I used was this google chrome extension called Zhongwen: Chinese-English Dictionary. It allows you to hover over Chinese words on a webpage and get the definition displayed to you immediately. Browsing around a website or trying to read an article is much easier with this extension. So much faster than copying and pasting into Google Translate. You can also save words to review them at a later time, or export them to Anki. Highly recommended.

Results

I used this method of study for about 1 hour a day for 5 months. As you saw previously, I average 104 card reviews per day (not 104 new flashcards since it includes previous sessions’ flashcards too) and got through the 4th level of the Mastering Chinese Collection.

The Good

I could clearly see a difference in my reading abilities. I could read entire sentences more often, used the dictionary less, and most importantly, could piece together a lot of my family’s conversations on WeChat without needing to use the translate function. This made improving even easier since there were fewer new words that I came across. I also didn’t feel like reading a paragraph was as much of a chore as before - I looked forward to it since I knew I could probably read 80% of it.

The Bad

I’ve found that maintaining that level of comprehension is quite hard when I’m not immersed in the language. I knew that I couldn’t continue to study flash cards for an hour a day forever, so I stopped after the Level 4 deck to find more engaging ways of learning. Unfortunately, I usually only spend 30 min - 1 hour a day doing this and would often go for days without reading any Chinese.

I’ve forgotten many of the words already. It’s frustrating to see a character that you recognize, but not know the meaning. It’s even more frustrating knowing that my reading ability will probably continue to deteriorate unless I make a concerted effort to improve every day. No learning through osmosis here.

Nonetheless, going through that 5 month period of studying flashcards was a step-function improvement in my reading abilities.

Continued Education

Below are some of the ways that I am planning on continuing my education. These suggestions are some of the more interesting sources of learning + entertainment that I’ve found - always open to more suggestions! Please reach out to me on Twitter.

Shows and Channels

Luckily for us, most Chinese shows and even small content creators put captions on their videos for accessibility reasons. There are so many dialects and different pronunciations of words that even Bilibili creators (like YouTubers here) will spend the time or pay someone to add captions to their uploads.

I like to pause the video when a new line of captions come up before they say the words. Then I try to read the words and resume the video to hear if I read it correctly. It’s a pretty slow way of getting through a video though, so often my laziness gets the best of me and I just try to read what I can.

I mostly watch content on bilibili rather than the studio-produced shows. These two are my favorite:

• Chinese Food Discover - I have no idea why their YouTube channel has such a generic name, but these two people travel around the country trying different cuisines. I think they were both broadcasting majors in college, so their pronunciation is perfect. They’re also really funny and the food they try looks incredible.
• Chinese Food Tour - Yet another generic channel name. Maybe for SEO reasons? The host is from Beijing and he… travels around the country trying different cuisines.

There are a couple of studio produced shows that have been entertaining, though I don’t watch these very often.

• iPartment - Straight forward sitcom about young people living in Shanghai. It’s pretty similar to FRIENDS, though not as funny unfortunately. Given that this show came out in 2009, the jokes feel a bit trite. Still one of the better shows I’ve found and there are 5 seasons of it.

• Youth With You Season 2 - Musical competition where the final 9 girls form a girl group. A bit cringe at times, but I found it to be pretty entertaining nonetheless.

• Nirvana in Fire - Many compare this to Game of Thrones, but I didn’t see too many similarities. Well acted with a good story, but it’s based in a historical setting so you’ll encounter a lot of language / words that people don’t use anymore.

Chinese eBooks

One other method that I’ve been trying is reading novels (slowly). 99csw.com has tons of free books available to read through your browser. If you use the Chrome extension I mentioned above, you should be able to find something interesting. I try to find books with more modern dialogue (as opposed to Wuxia, fiction about martial artists in ancient China).

Next Steps

Learning a language is a lifelong journey to develop a lifelong skill. My ultimate goal is to reach the point where I can read news articles and simple books, but I’m pretty far from that point right now. The biggest challenge for me is to find ways to consistently practice reading without it feeling like a chore. Immersing myself in the language is tough when 95% of my day revolves around English, so I need to dedicate some of my free time to actively study Chinese if I want to improve. I may even pop open Anki after a few more months to keep things fresh.