How to learn Chinese by reading

Chinese grammar is famously light. Verbs don’t conjugate, nouns don’t decline, and there’s no grammatical gender and usually no plural marking: 我去, 你去, 他去, “I go, you go, he goes,” and the verb never changes. What makes Chinese a long project is the writing: thousands of characters, no spaces between words, and a pronunciation that the characters only hint at.

Reading is how those characters stop being a list and start being a language. Every page shows you the common ones again and again, inside words and sentences, and listening along ties each one to its sound and its tone.

Characters, words and tones

• Characters carry clues. Most characters combine a part that hints at meaning with a part that hints at sound. 妈 (mā, “mother”) is 女 (“woman”) plus 马 (mǎ, “horse”), borrowed for its sound. The hints are useful but unreliable, and the only real way to learn a character is to meet it many times.
• Words are usually two characters. 电脑 (diànnǎo, “electric brain”) is a computer; 火车 (huǒchē, “fire vehicle”) is a train. Chinese text has no spaces, so reading means grouping characters into words as you go, a skill that grows with practice.
• Tones. Mandarin has four tones and a neutral tone: mā, má, mǎ and mà are four different syllables. Characters don’t show tones, so you learn them by ear. Pinyin, the standard romanization, marks them for you while you learn.
• Simplified and traditional. Mainland China and Singapore use simplified characters; Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau use traditional ones. Many characters are identical, while others differ: 说 and 說 (“speak”), 书 and 書 (“book”), 们 and 們 (plural for people). Readers of one usually learn to read the other without much trouble.

If characters are new to you, our guide to learning a new script has practical advice on starting with audio.

The grammar you meet in stories

• Aspect instead of tense. 了 (le) marks a completed action or a change, 过 (guo) a past experience, and 着 (zhe) an ongoing state. 他走了 means “he left” or “he’s gone.”
• Measure words. Every counted noun takes one: 一本书 (a book), 一只猫 (a cat), 一条鱼 (a fish).
• Results built into verbs. 看完 (“finish reading”), 听懂 (“understand by listening”), 找到 (“find,” as in look and succeed).
• The 把 construction. It moves the object before the verb to show what happens to it: 他把门关上了, “he shut the door.”
• Four-character idioms. Written Chinese is rich in chengyu, compressed sayings with a story behind them. 画蛇添足, “draw a snake and add feet,” means spoiling something by overdoing it.

Chinese reading at each level

What the CEFR levels look like in Chinese text:

• A2, elementary. Short sentences built from high-frequency characters and words, 了 for completed actions, measure words, and simple time expressions.
• B1, intermediate. 把 and 被 sentences, result complements, the three different de (的, 得, 地), and linked clauses such as 因为…所以 (“because… so”) and 虽然…但是 (“although… but”).
• B2, upper intermediate. A more written vocabulary, long descriptions placed before the noun, and some chengyu.
• C1, advanced. Close to the original, lightly condensed, in the full written register. C2 is the complete novel.

Learners often ask how this maps onto HSK levels. The two scales weren’t designed together, so treat any conversion as approximate. CEFR levels explained describes what each CEFR level means.

Around the World in Eighty Days at A2 and at B2

Phileas Fogg’s bet, written for this page at two levels, with the A2 text in both character sets:

A2, simplified

福克先生和朋友们打了一个赌。他说：“我能在八十天里环游世界。”当天晚上，他就带着仆人路路通出发了。

A2, traditional

福克先生和朋友們打了一個賭。他說：「我能在八十天裡環遊世界。」當天晚上，他就帶著僕人路路通出發了。

Mr. Fogg made a bet with his friends. He said, “I can travel around the world in eighty days.” That very evening, he set off with his servant Passepartout.

B2, simplified

为了赢得两万英镑的赌注，福克先生乘火车、坐轮船，甚至骑着大象穿越印度的丛林，可是一名侦探一直紧紧跟在他身后，认定他就是那个银行大盗。

To win the twenty-thousand-pound wager, Mr. Fogg traveled by train and by steamship, even crossing the jungles of India on an elephant, but a detective stayed close on his heels the whole way, convinced that he was the bank robber.

In Chinese, Passepartout is often called 路路通, “every road open,” a translation as clever as the French original. The A2 text uses 了 for the completed actions (打了, 出发了) and keeps its sentences short; notice also the different quotation marks in the two character sets. The B2 sentence strings verbs together (乘火车、坐轮船), uses 着 for the ongoing action of riding, and adds written touches like 乘 (“to travel by”) and the measure word 名 in 一名侦探, where speech would say 坐 and 一个.

A reading habit for Chinese, step by step

1. Listen while you read. Play a section with the text highlighted as it’s read. This is the single most useful habit for Chinese, because it ties every character to its sound and tone.
2. Read it again on your own. Go over the same pages silently. Characters you recognized with the audio are the ones you’re about to know.
3. Tap words, not characters. When a word stops you, tap it for its meaning in context and play it to hear its tones. Don’t stop for every character you couldn’t write yourself.
4. Reread often. Rereading pays off in Chinese, because recognizing a character takes many encounters.

Pick the level with care. Hu and Nation (2000, “Unknown vocabulary density and reading comprehension”) estimated that adequate comprehension of fiction without help takes knowing about 98 percent of its words. In Chinese, an unknown word usually can’t be sounded out either, so text that’s a little too hard soon stops being readable. If you’re tapping in every line, drop a level. More in the 98% rule, reading while listening and extensive reading.

Classics to start with

• Around the World in Eighty Days is a perfect first novel: short chapters, a clear goal, and a stop in Hong Kong along the way.
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes gives you short, self-contained stories at B1 and B2.
• Little Women is full of the everyday vocabulary of family, home and growing up, at B1 or B2.
• Journey to the Center of the Earth has three characters and a single direction, easy to follow at A2.
• Treasure Island is fast, vivid and dialogue-rich, a good A2 or B1 adventure.

Reading Chinese in Lexo

Lexo offers Chinese in simplified and in traditional characters, as two separate options, so you can read in the set you’re learning. Every book exists at five levels, A2 to C2, and you choose the level book by book.

You can tap any word, even though Chinese has no spaces, and the card shows what the word means in that sentence, its part of speech, and the meaning of any phrase or idiom it belongs to, chengyu included. Each card also gives the word in pinyin with tone marks, so the tones of a word like 环游 are on the page as well as in your ear. The whole sentence is translated into English, and words you want to keep go into your Words list.

Then listen. Every word can be played on its own, so you hear its tones exactly when you need them, and the whole book is narrated, with different voices for different characters and the text highlighted as it’s read, which ties each character to its sound. Sentence-by-sentence mode shows one sentence at a time with its audio and translation, and you can enlarge the type when a page of characters feels dense.

Editions that don’t exist yet are written on request, starting with chapter 1, which takes a few minutes, and the first reader keeps a dated “First edition” mark. Downloaded books need no connection, and purchases restore through your Apple ID on a new device, so there’s no separate account.

Related reading: Cantonese, which has its own page, and Japanese and Korean, whose vocabularies borrowed heavily from Chinese.

Lexo is coming soon to the App Store for iPhone and iPad. Get notified at launch.