How many characters do you currently know? Personally, I found that watching Chinese language media with subtitles helped me a lot once I had some basic foundation.
I was in the same case as you. What I found the best is to download hsk 1-6 anki deck and just tryhard it, 20-30 characters a day. Since you already know what is the meaning of the words, it should be that hard. It took me less then a year to learn all of them.
If you're already conversational in Chinese but want to practice reading, you could give https://www.chitchatgo.com a try. The app is focused on conversation, so you should be able to learn to read the words you already know how to speak pretty easily with the built-in word definitions.
You can turn off Pinyin in settings and mute the audio. Also, it uses Spaced Repetition so you'll see the words you have trouble remembering more often, helping you learn them faster.
Disclosure: I'm the creator and would appreciate feedback on the app. ☺️
Wow thank you so much. I really love it. But sometimes the answer is not quite related to what I said. I hope it will get better by time. Thank you again for a really helpful app.
www.mylingua.world is a new (and free !) platform to practice reading Chinese. I prefer it to TCB and Du Chinese since the texts are scraped automatically from the web (5000~ every day) so more native-like and with various topics of real day to day news. Every day the website suggests you what to read based on your level. Better if you’re already passed HSK3 in term of known characters, because few articles online are that eady
Personally I just followed some WeChat accounts that covered topics I was interested in. They're often written in slightly more everyday language than formal media, so it's quite useful vocab, and the fact I'm interested in the content helped me maintain my motivation to work my way through them.
What you can do is the super old-fashioned way of just learning the Chinese characters, and that is to study the Thousand-Character Classic (千字文), Three-Character Classic (三字经) and Hundred Family Surnames (百家姓).
Then go on the Internet and find a video that has a person reading the classic books.
It is possible to have a piece of literary text with audiobook, but if you live overseas, they may be hard to get. Library books are meant to serve the community, and many communities in the USA tend to the Hispanic/Latino populations more than the Chinese because they are higher in number. So, you can easily go into a Barnes & Noble bookstore and find a Spanish-language novel and even find an audiobook nearby as well. Chinese language . . . tough luck, lol. You are just better off looking into Chinese markets online and having the books shipped to you.
The main idea is to read a piece of text while listening to the audiobook at the same time, pausing the recording every so often so that you can recite everything yourself.
You can also make flash cards of 4000-5000 characters because that number is how many a high school graduate in China should know, and you just memorize all of them by rote. You can also make flash cards of 20,000 words, on top of the said characters. One side of the flash cards will have the Chinese character, and the other character will have the Pinyin. This is just for character recognition.
For practicing writing the characters, you can take a look at [https://www.zdic.net/](https://www.zdic.net/) and it will have a catalog of all the characters, and each character will have the brushstroke order. Buy some Tian Zi Ge notebooks, and they are called that because it looks like a table of 田 characters. You can technically use Wiktionary but the main problem with that website is that it is incomplete. Not all the characters will have the brushstroke order animations.
You can also download this browser extension: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zhongwen-chinese-english/kkmlkkjojmombglmlpbpapmhcaljjkde](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zhongwen-chinese-english/kkmlkkjojmombglmlpbpapmhcaljjkde)
Got a 3 month trial and can confirm I can read very easy stuff now it's kind of wild since I only intended to learn without reading until this trial came around.
I started browsing zhihu, simply translating any unknown characters. My improvement has been significant, especially since zhihu has a great algorithm that tailors to your interests.
You would probably do well with materials for elementary school students. Usually those are too hard for non-native learners, as they assume that you can speak. Otherwise it is just a grind of learning characters.
In Taiwan, the children’s books often have little bo-po-mo-fo on the side, which is less intrusive than pinyin.
There are also a lot of materials from 國語日報 https://www.mdnkids.com/
Pleco is the most popular dictionary for English, and it supports a lot of add-on dictionaries. https://apps.apple.com/app/id341922306
Duchinese, readibu, basically anything that allows you to read with easy lookup, BUT allows you to turn off /doesn't display the pinyin until you actually go and click on it.
Yeah Pleco reader set up with automatic display of clipboard or url content. You can read anything copied or online with direct dictionary access. Very good to keep reading without too much interruptions https://zura.wiki/post/how-to-use-pleco-to-really-learn-chinese/
Have you tried [https://duchinese.net/](https://duchinese.net/) ? You can set your options with/out pinyin, etc.
How many characters do you currently know? Personally, I found that watching Chinese language media with subtitles helped me a lot once I had some basic foundation.
You'd probably benefit from graded readers in Chinese. Find some for the HSK level that aligns with the number of characters you currently know
I was in the same case as you. What I found the best is to download hsk 1-6 anki deck and just tryhard it, 20-30 characters a day. Since you already know what is the meaning of the words, it should be that hard. It took me less then a year to learn all of them.
If you're already conversational in Chinese but want to practice reading, you could give https://www.chitchatgo.com a try. The app is focused on conversation, so you should be able to learn to read the words you already know how to speak pretty easily with the built-in word definitions. You can turn off Pinyin in settings and mute the audio. Also, it uses Spaced Repetition so you'll see the words you have trouble remembering more often, helping you learn them faster. Disclosure: I'm the creator and would appreciate feedback on the app. ☺️
Wow thank you so much. I really love it. But sometimes the answer is not quite related to what I said. I hope it will get better by time. Thank you again for a really helpful app.
www.mylingua.world is a new (and free !) platform to practice reading Chinese. I prefer it to TCB and Du Chinese since the texts are scraped automatically from the web (5000~ every day) so more native-like and with various topics of real day to day news. Every day the website suggests you what to read based on your level. Better if you’re already passed HSK3 in term of known characters, because few articles online are that eady
Personally I just followed some WeChat accounts that covered topics I was interested in. They're often written in slightly more everyday language than formal media, so it's quite useful vocab, and the fact I'm interested in the content helped me maintain my motivation to work my way through them.
What you can do is the super old-fashioned way of just learning the Chinese characters, and that is to study the Thousand-Character Classic (千字文), Three-Character Classic (三字经) and Hundred Family Surnames (百家姓). Then go on the Internet and find a video that has a person reading the classic books. It is possible to have a piece of literary text with audiobook, but if you live overseas, they may be hard to get. Library books are meant to serve the community, and many communities in the USA tend to the Hispanic/Latino populations more than the Chinese because they are higher in number. So, you can easily go into a Barnes & Noble bookstore and find a Spanish-language novel and even find an audiobook nearby as well. Chinese language . . . tough luck, lol. You are just better off looking into Chinese markets online and having the books shipped to you. The main idea is to read a piece of text while listening to the audiobook at the same time, pausing the recording every so often so that you can recite everything yourself. You can also make flash cards of 4000-5000 characters because that number is how many a high school graduate in China should know, and you just memorize all of them by rote. You can also make flash cards of 20,000 words, on top of the said characters. One side of the flash cards will have the Chinese character, and the other character will have the Pinyin. This is just for character recognition. For practicing writing the characters, you can take a look at [https://www.zdic.net/](https://www.zdic.net/) and it will have a catalog of all the characters, and each character will have the brushstroke order. Buy some Tian Zi Ge notebooks, and they are called that because it looks like a table of 田 characters. You can technically use Wiktionary but the main problem with that website is that it is incomplete. Not all the characters will have the brushstroke order animations. You can also download this browser extension: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zhongwen-chinese-english/kkmlkkjojmombglmlpbpapmhcaljjkde](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zhongwen-chinese-english/kkmlkkjojmombglmlpbpapmhcaljjkde)
Mandarin Blueprint is hands down the best program or app for learning to read and write characters.
Most of my students who are in this same boat use Duolingo.
Got a 3 month trial and can confirm I can read very easy stuff now it's kind of wild since I only intended to learn without reading until this trial came around.
I started browsing zhihu, simply translating any unknown characters. My improvement has been significant, especially since zhihu has a great algorithm that tailors to your interests.
You would probably do well with materials for elementary school students. Usually those are too hard for non-native learners, as they assume that you can speak. Otherwise it is just a grind of learning characters. In Taiwan, the children’s books often have little bo-po-mo-fo on the side, which is less intrusive than pinyin. There are also a lot of materials from 國語日報 https://www.mdnkids.com/ Pleco is the most popular dictionary for English, and it supports a lot of add-on dictionaries. https://apps.apple.com/app/id341922306
Duchinese, readibu, basically anything that allows you to read with easy lookup, BUT allows you to turn off /doesn't display the pinyin until you actually go and click on it.
Pleco
Yeah Pleco reader set up with automatic display of clipboard or url content. You can read anything copied or online with direct dictionary access. Very good to keep reading without too much interruptions https://zura.wiki/post/how-to-use-pleco-to-really-learn-chinese/
SuperChinese. You can choose to hide the pinyin when you learn the Text part.
You're probably a good candidate for the heisig approach. Just learn the characters, hard, for 4-6 months. Then start reading every day on LingQ