The Fastest Way to Learn to Read Chinese

Photo by https://www.flickr.com/photos/familymwr/4928460718/

Update 11-29-2023: Use AI to create graded Readers in Seconds

I have met many people who became fluent in speaking Chinese in 6 months. Chinese does not have very complex grammar rules such as the slavic languages. It was also quite easy for myself. It took me longer to become fluent in French and I gave up on Russian at some point, because of the complex grammar. Benny Lewis, who is a well-known polyglot and blogger on rapid language acquisition achieved an okay fluency even in three months – see his blog. Benny Lewis also wrote an excellent bestselling book about his process and tactics of rapid language acquistion. Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World.

What is much more challenging is to learn to read.  This is not only a challenge for foreigners but also for the Chinese as well. Especially Chinese growing up outside chinese speaking countries find this particular difficult. It takes the first four years in school for chinese children to learn to read and write their first 1000 characters! This is not a fun process because it is mainly through continuous rather boring rote learning.

I found a way to learn to read the first 950 most important characters in 2 months and even had a lot of fun with it. All in all it took me just under 32 hours of my time. Now I am reading my first Chinese Book without consulting a dictionary . Actually I could have even done it in much less than 32 hours. As I am travelling a lot I used my iPhone mostly where I only type with one finger. On my laptop where I can use my ten fingers I am of course much faster. Usually I spent around 3-5 minutes to work on my course and I have done so several times a day. When I wait for the train, when I am in the train, when I wait for the plane, when I am in the plane, when I have a short coffee brake, when I am in the bathroom, when I wake up or before I go to sleep. You will be surprised how many 3-5 minutes slots you can find each day which I didn’t noticed before. I done all this while having a 120% job, a family and a few days a week when I look after the children and the household while my wife is on a business trip.

I only had a slight advantage as I knew still a few (less than 100) of the most important characters from my Chinese Studies at University 20 years ago.  In 2014 I also had picked up frequency lists on the internet and tried out the books “Remembering Simplified Hanzi: Book 1, How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese Characters” by James Heisig and Timothy Richardson and the beautiful book on Chinese Characters “Chineasy: The New Way to Read Chinese” by Shaolan, “Turbo Chinese (English Edition)” by Saurabh Sharma and the well known Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters: A Revolutionary New Way to Learn and Remember the 800 Most Basic Chinese Characters. I had no success with these books because by the time I started to learn the 1000 most important characters I had forgotten almost all of them.

To sum it up even if you have never learned any Chinese characters before you would still need roughly the same net time as it took myself. But what could differ is the period of time. Instead of 2 months maybe it will take you two to four weeks longer. It all depends on the amount of characters you can learn per day and the frequency.

So what was the method I used to finally succeed with? I signed up for the course “Chinese words spoken by frequency 0-1000” by Ben Whately on Memrise. Memrise uses the state of the art of the latest in neurosciences and learning research. It uses the right spaced repetitions, learning chunks, social learning methodologies, reward system and mnemonics to keep learners engaged. And on top of all it is free.

The course is broken down in 136 levels. Each level contains maximum 15 words. In the odd numbered levels you will learn the characters and their meaning in English and in the even numbered levels you will learn the pronounciation in pinyin and the meaning in English.

When you start learning you will learn around 5 characters per round until you completed the level. Then the pronounciation will be trained in rounds of 5. You can stop anytime and save where you have left of. Each time you get it right you will receive a number of points. This instills some competition as memrise will show you how you compare to other learners in the same course and where you rank. As I am a competitive person this was very motivating.

Additionally in both levels an audio pronounciation of the character or pinyin (pronounciation) that you are currently learning will be given. You will also have various ways to reply. Sometimes you need to select from a list similar to multiple choice or you need to type it directly into a text box. The system will show you the character and ask for the English word or show you the English word and ask for the character or the pinyin.

But this is not all. For each new word that you learn you can see how other people used mnemonics to learn and retain these words. This can be stories, pictures with text or links to useful resources or sentences where the character is used in, etc. If none of these are suited for your need you can create your own mnemonics so called mems.

Memrise was founded by the Memory Grandmaster Ed Cooke who taught Joshua Foer to become the US memory champion and Greg Detra a PhD at Princeton University neurosciences.

Also Joshua Foer used Memrise to study a new language in just 22 hours. http://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/nov/09/learn-language-in-three-months

My mission for 2015 is to help you overcome the first threshold to start to read Chinese. Once you start reading you will constantly add often without really noticing it more and more characters and vocabulary to your memory. To do that I will add small excercises for each levels of the memrise course over the next months.

Reading Exercise 1 Level 1 for the Course: “Chinese words spoken by frequency 0-1000” by Ben Whately on Memrise
These are the first 15 Characters/Words you will learn in Level 1. 的 我 你 是 了 不 在 他 我们 好 有 这 就 会
Before you do the below reading exercise you should first learn these words in the memrise course.

I will use these words from level 1 to form small sentences or fragments of it below:
这 是  zhe4 shi4   this is
这 是 我 的 zhe4 shi4 wo3 de5   this is mine
不 是 bu4 shi4  is not
是 不 是 你 的 shi4 bu4 shi4 ni3 de5   is this yours
不, 不 是 , 这 是 他 的 bu4, bu4 shi4, zhe4 shi4 ta1 de5  no, it is not, this is his
是 的 shi4 de5   yes it is
你 好 ni3 hao3  hello
你 有 ni3 hao3  you have
我 有 wo3 you3  I have
我们 有 wo3 men5 you3   we have
我 会 了 wo3 hui4 le5   I know how to do it (now)
我们 不 会 wo3 men5 bu4 hui4  we don’t know how to
我 在 wo3 zai4  I am in/at
我 不 在 wo3 bu4 zai4 I am not in/at
我们 在 他 的 wo3 men2 zai4 ta1 de5  we are at/in his….
就 是 jiu4 shi4  exactly (this word you will actually learn in later level in memrise
好 不 好 hao3 bu4 hao3  alright? or okay?
不 好 bu4 hao3 not good
我 是 不 是 你 的 wo3 shi4 bu4 shi4 ni3 de5  I am not your

Now over to you – try to come up with new combinations. And if you enjoyed the exercise may I ask you for a small favour to share your new combination in the comment section below the post. Thank you.

Another way to boost your chinese readings skills is to start to learn the first 100 most important radicals. These are the small components of a character and help you understand the meaning of the characters much better. I have developped a mnemonic system to make it quite easy and rapid for you. Please see The Fastest And Easiest Way To Learn Chinese Characters.

The best book to read after the course on memrise?
The easiest book to read after the memrise course is The Secret Garden: Mandarin Companion Graded Readers: Level 1, Simplified Chinese Edition. It is so far the best way to start to use your new character and word skills. I was able to recognize 98% of the characters. As I am reading the book on Kindle I can click on the underlined characters that I see for the first time and will be directed to a word list where the pinyin and English translation of the character or composite characters will be given. I am 21% into the book after just one day and I consulted this word list twice so far  and basically it was only to check if I had grasped the meaning already of the new characters while I was reading the sentence. I haven’t yet red the other Level 1 graded readers book of the series but I would assume this to be a similar experience. You can a look inside the book here or download a sample in the kindle store. It is my first book that I can just read without consulting a dictionary and it feels very similar like reading any book in a language that I am totally familiar with: No big effort, no headache, no drag of energy, just fun.

What is the first book I am reading? A very good start to practice your new reading skills after your memrise course is by Marina Chan: First Chinese Reader for Beginners Bilingual for Speakers of English (Graded Chinese Reader Book 1). I am reading it on the Kindle. You can download a sample version first before you buy. The sample version convinced me to buy it and practice my reading skills. You can also take a look inside the book.

There are very few characters in the text that haven’t made it in the 1000 most frequently used words in Chinese. The 1000 words are based on the analysis of Chinese Film Subtitles. Researcher have confirmed that these subtitles match the actual most common words used by the population in China. I think this is no surprise as the film reflects the current vocabulary and in return as film and TV is the most consumed media in China influences back on the use of vacabulary in daily life. If you want to know about the research follow this link.

I can read between 90%-95% of the text in the book immediately. Some of the words I can guess through the context. But of course there are a few that are new. As an example the words for the different colors or words regarding touristic items. I guess in daily life they do not talk a lot about colours or hotels.

At the beginning of each chapter Marina Chan provides a list of characters, the pronounciation in pinyin and the English word for it. Additionally below every sentence in Chinese Characters there is also the pinyin. The translation of each of the sentences is provided at the end of the chapter.

Let’s take the first chapter of the book. From the 90 characters used only 9 were new. So most of the new words you would already be able to read all or at least a part of it. So some of them you could guess out of the context of the sentence. Being at this level it is so much easier to read than if you need to stop every second word to consult the dictioniary.

New words in chapter 1 that are not in the 1000 frequent word list in memrise are:
公园  gong1 yuan2   park – the second character yuan2 is not in the 1000.
商店 shang1 dian4  shop – the first character shang1 did not make in the top 1000, dian4 did
星級 xing1 ji2 – means star – used to say how many stars a hotel has. The second character ji2 is not in the 1000.
酒店 jiu3 dian4  hotel – both characters are in the top 1000, only the combination for the word hotel is not. So you can read the characters but might miss the meaning when combined.
文本 wen2 ben3 text – the first character wen2 is not in the 1000.
桌子 zhuo1 zi5 table – the first character zhuo1 is not part of the top 1000.
窗口 chuang1 kou3 window – the first character chuang1 did not make it into the 1000.
笔记本 bi3 ji4 ben3 notebook – all characters are in the top 1000, only the combination for the word notebook is not – one could guess the word out of the meaning of the individual characters
绿 lv4 green
自行車 zi4 xing2 che1 bike – all characters are known, only the combination to form the word bike is not – also here one could almost guess it from the individual characters used
蓝 lan2 blue
鼻子 bi2 zi2 nose – the first character bi2 is not in the 1000 words list.

I have found a newspaper for the intermediate level in Chinese. It is a dedicated section in the online edition of Global Times called Target Chinese. http://language.globaltimes.cn/category/for-intermediate/target-chinese/. So far I can understand between 70-80% of it. I still need a dictionary to look up missing words.

To read your first book of the mandarin companion series – vocabulary:
http://hskhsk.pythonanywhere.com/mandcomp

On Skritter you can find the vocabulary of the series:

http://blog2.skritter.com/2014/02/mandarin-companion-guided-readers-for.html?m=1

Fun and fastest way for kids children to learn Chinese characters reading and writing while at the same time improve their learning agility and IQ 有趣的和最快的方式为孩子们的孩子学习中文字符写书法，而在同一时间提高学习的灵活性和

Gwen Stefani and baby Zuma Picture by Dennis Stefani See Stefani’s Website

http://www.gwenstefani.com/news/default.aspx?nid=17103

As I have kids myself, I have just recently looked for fun, easy and playful methods for my young children to learn a few chinese characters in their past time.

The ambition was not too overload them with more schooling, nor was the objective  to get them to speak chinese up to a certain level in a set time frame.  Clearly my “hidden” goal was to stimulate their learning agility by exiting them about calligraphy, about writing and reading chinese characters for fun.

My own motivation in this area is based on my own experience. When I was studying Chinese at university in my early 20s I noticed an impact on my learning agility in other fields such as a better and faster understanding of other foreign languages and even mathematics. Since then I have followed the academic research in this field to see if my personal observations were valid. Also Chinese reported the same observations when they studied a phonetic language such as Portugese or English. The same effect on the other hand did not occur when I had learned English, French and Russian previously.

I came across three research projects that showed a link between learning chineses characters and an increase in the Intelligence quotient IQ, an improvement of  mathematical skills and a support to children in second grade with reading problems  (see the list of scientific research at the bottom of this blog post ). Yet I have not come across any research that would confirm the personal observations of my chinese friends. The unanswered scientific question remains if the learning agility of a chinese child will increase as well when learning a phonetic language?

The approach I use is based on the following methods:
a) Baker/baker paradox and loci-method Reference:  How to train your mind to remember anything
b) Minimal invasive education approach by Sugata Mitra
c) Swarm creativity and intelligency by Peter Gloor
d) Inner Game coaching by Timothy Gallwey and media education approach by Prof. Dr. Klaus Jantke

For this fun project I use several methods.
One method is based on story telling, This also works very well with pre-school children.  I have written a short story where I introduce related chinese characters which I selected from the most frequently used chinese characters list. Did you know that the same 152 chinese characters can make up to about 50% of any chinese text ?
The example: The Story of the lonesome human being and The story of the sun

Besides having fun it is important for children to build confidence. In the first warm up I show them three characters, that are quite easy to remember.

It is the number 1: 一 yī. Then I ask how would a chinese child write the number 2 and I show it:  二 èr and then I let them guess how to write the number 3: sān. Additionally to help them remember the pronounciation you could tell a very short story.  One day a little girl walked to school and on her way suddely she saw a monster. The little girl shouted “eehh“(yī) and the monster said “errrr” (èr). But when the “sun” (san) came out the monster ran away.

Example: Speed Learning Chinese in 5 Minutes – 3% of all Chinese Characters used in any text – learn 5 Strokes, which make up 6 characters and represent 78 English words. This builds quickly the confidence and shows that it is not so difficult and complex as it people in the West are saying.

Chinese Learning Five Elements

The story telling element is based on the research findings on the Baker / Baker paradox and builds as well on the technics used by the world memory champions.
In the Baker / Baker paradox research psychologist showed a photograph of a person with the name Baker to the research participants. One group were told the name of the person and the other group instead were informed about that the profession of this person is a baker. A few days later when they showed the photograph of Mr. Baker again to the different members of the groups, the one who were told about the profession were much more likely to remember the name of Mr. Baker.  To quote the world memory champion Joshua Foer: “If you want to make something memorable, you first have to make it meaningful.” Reference. This demonstrates why stories about chinese characters work so well for children.

The second time I will read the story and I will not show the characters again. Instead I will have all the chinese characters of the story shuffeled as cards on the table.
Now I ask the children based on the relevant part in the story to pick the right character. Astoundingly in one event a five year old boy selected all chinese characters in the correct order.

What I also like to do is a short association guessing game. If I show them the chinese character for tree, what would three trees in a chinese character stand for ? Answer should be forest.

What is also working with younger children as well is to  give them the chinese characters in the correct order in the way they were introduced in the story and ask to them to retell the story.

For children who are comfortable in painting I introdue the loci-method (memory palace). I let them draw their favorite house, room with whatever they put inside or related to the story I have just read. In order to memorize the characters I let them place the characters on the picture. This is a fun exercise once they master more than 50 characters.

From time to time I also show them one character and ask them to describe the character and build their own little story to remember the character.

For older kids I have more challenging options. I let them in a group of maximum 5 children come up with their own mind map of the characters in the story or of the 152 character list.  For them to identify characters that are similar is like playing a puzzle.

The other challenge is to ask them to try and form short sentences out of the  chinese characters in the story. They can use google search to validate if this combination exits and use google to translate it.

Further I give them new not known chinese characters which are similar and have them come up with their own chinese characters stories.

After a few session I introduce the Chinese Radicals. I let them first analyse some more complex characters and ask them identify smaller parts that made up the character and also if they have seen this subpart somewhere else used as a character.

When they are more advanced and know the radicals I ask them to construct their own characters out of the radicals. We then look these constructed characters up in the dictionary and see if they exist.

The other question I give the older children is to think about, why chinese characters do not use triangles and circles and what are the basic strokes they can identify and why we use the alphabet instead and who invented the chinese writing. I let them explore with the help of the internet  in groups of maximum 5. This is based on the minimum invasive education approach by Sugata Mitra. See Self Organized Learning System.

Once they know at least 100 characters I let them read chinese children song and textbooks. The characters they do not know they can look up via google and the wiktionary.

The key of the activities is to have fun and never ask them to learn, just to enjoy the activity. This is where Gallwey and the research of Prof. Jantke come into play. Never should there be a goal or objective to how many characters they learn in the period of the activities nor a test how many they learned. This will build gradually their confidence and increase their motivation.

I also would  ask them once they are quite comfortable with Chinese characters to come up with their own little games and what else they could do to have fun. This is then using the so called swarm creativity (Peter Gloor) of the kids in the room for new types of activities.

If you had any other fun activity and method to share in the comment section, this would add to the swarm creativity of how best to learn chinese characters in a fast, fun and easy way. Thank you.

I just found another great example of a fast and easy way to learn Chinese.
“Learning Chinese in 7 Minutes” Ted Talk by ShaoLan. Linkedin Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/heidihsueh

Example that ShaoLan shared with the audience. Fascinating.
My kids (9 + 5 years)  just learned eight characters in 2 Minutes.
First Row: 1) Fire 2)Tree 3)Sun 4)Moon
Second Row: 5)Human Being 6)Mouth 7)Door 8)Mountain

Ted ShaoLan Chineasy Ted Talk on Youtube:

Ted ShaoLan Ted Talk:  Learn to read Chinese … with ease!

Excellent discussions below the talk on Chinese Characters and how to learn.

And ShaoLan Hsueh has more examples here: http://www.chineasy.org/

…..more insights and examples to follow soon.  Results of a very interesting project… blog post is in progess…

Telling  a story with Chinese Characters –
a) The Story of the lonesome human being

Further stories:
b) The story of the sun
d) The story of the tree
d) The stroy of the heart
e) The story of the roof
f) The story of the mouth
….

If you have created similar stories would you like to share the link to your story or even guest post. email to: petepalme@gmail.com . Thank you.

Example on Youtube:
The Story of Chinese Character : 卜

Scientific Research:

(2014) Ping Li et al. learning Chinese leads to rapid improvement of gray matter density and white matter integrity. Reference

(1975) Alan Watts in Tao, The Watercourse Way, page 11: Rozin, Poritsky and Sotsky University of Pennsylvania showed that school children in the second grade who had reading deficits could learn to read and write simple chinese sentences in just four weeks time. Reference: Rozin, Paul, Susan Poritsky and Raina Sotsky: “American Children with Reading Problems Can Easily Learn to Read English Represented by Chinese Characters”. In: Science, 26. March. 1971.

(2005) “Learning to read 2,500 pictorial symbols, as Chinese students do in grade school, yields a 5-point advantage on IQ tests, compared with the scores of Westerners whose languages are based on alphabets.”
Andreas Demetriou of the University of Cyprus, Nicosia led the greek and chinese reserach team.  Reference
120 greek and 120 chinese children with equal gender distribution and family backgrounds took part in the research. “The two groups showed roughly equal intelligence at eight years old. By twelve years old, however, the Chinese children tested significantly higher for spatial problems.” Reference

(1987) Irene Miura, lead psychologist. Research on mathematical learning agility between US children, chinese children and koren children. Reference.

(2005) Further research shows that the capability to write chinese characters is key in learning to read chinese and is therefore different to learning to read alphabetical languages.
“Here we show that the ability to read Chinese is strongly related to a child’s writing skills and that the relationship between phonological awareness and Chinese reading is much weaker than that in reports regarding alphabetic languages.” Reference

(2013) Dyslexics children: parents report to Shaolan Hsueh how learning chinese characters helped their dyslexics children see facebook “chineasy”

If you aware of any other similar research results or individual observations please share in the comment section of this blog post. Thank you.

Recommended Reading:
The Fastest and Easiest Way to Learn Chinese Characters – How to Really Use Mnemonics For Learning Chinese

Recommended Materials:

James Heisig discovered the fastest way to learn chinese characters – Shaolan Hsueh’s approach is similar.
See: Remembering the Hanzi

A very similar approach as the one of Shaolan Hsueh was develop in 2007 by Jakob Hirzel. See  Lenaia. This sites has over 1200 pictorial mnemonics and also teaches chinese grammar in an engaging way.

Using visual stories (mnemonics) to remember chinese characters –
Turbo Chinese – saurabh sharma: (Example on Youtube)

Tuttle Learning Chinese
Uses stories children can relate to. This book covers the 800 most common Chinese characters that are necessary for the HSK Level A exam.

Chinese for Smart Kids: Chinese for Kids Age 3-8

Stepping Stones at Clavis Sinica

If you want to study the 300 most used commen chinese characters using simple text and poems go to Clavis Sinica:  Stepping Stones

Kaiming Guoyu (开明国语)

This is the best seller in China to teach Chinese Children to read.
More details here

Resources:

1) Chinese Writing Games
2) Chinese for Kids: Animation of Chinese Characters
3) Chinese for Kids: Online Reading
4) Activity Builder:Practical Chinese Reader Vocabulary
5) Learn to write Chinese characters (stroke order animated)
6) Easy way to learn Chinese with Children Songs
7) Arch Chinese: online Chinese learning system crafted by Chinese teachers in the United States for Mandarin Chinese language learners at K-12 schools and universities
8) Animated intro into Chinese Writing Dikk Kelly
9) Writing Chinese Charakters Stroke Order and pronounciation
10) Basic Eight Strokes
11) Chinese Character Canon – 4 Characters per picture
12) Chinese Characters Mindmap
13) Turbo Chinese
14) Valid Pinyin Initials and Finals Combination Table
15) Learning Chinese in Budapest, Hungary
16) Children Learning Chinese Q&A on Linkedin
17) Traditional Texts for Children and Young Adults 
18) Chinese Children’s Stories: Chinese Reading Practice
19) Learn chinese for kids through a Chinese Song “Mom is the best in the world”
20) Chinese Children’s Songs
21) Chinese English Talking Dictionary
22) Qianzi Wen – a thousand Character Essay
23) Best Chinese Websites
24) Chinese Made Easy For Kids
25) Chinese for Kids Learning Resources List
26) The most common Chinese Characters in order of frequency
27) Learning to See Chinese Characters (Meaning)
28) 152 Most Used Characters
29) Wiktionary
30) Frequency Statistics of Chinese Characters
31) TOCFL
32) BBC A better way to learn Chinese
33) Network and Meaningful Learning of Chinese Characters
34) Efficient learning strategy of Chinese characters based on network approach
35) The Network of Chinese Characters

Further Reading:

Speed Learning Chinese in 5 Minutes – The Fastest Way to Learn 3% of All Chinese Characters in Any Text Used

The Fastest Ways To Learn Any New Language

Amazing Capabilities of Our Brain to deal with Fuzziness
Chinese Western Management concept – how to brng the two concepts together