Comments on: Learning to read aloud in Chinese

By: Benchmarking progress to stay motivated | Hacking Chinese

Benchmarking progress to stay motivated | Hacking Chinese — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 10:55:44 +0000

[…] By revisiting the same or similar texts over time, you will see improvements in comprehension, speed, and confidence. I’ve written specifically about reading speed in Chinese reading speed revisited and about learning to read aloud in Learning to read aloud in Chinese. […]

By: Student Q&A, March 2024: Reading aloud, finding word boundaries, and working actively with reading materials | Hacking Chinese | Hacking Chinese

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 23:02:47 +0000

[…] Learning to read aloud in Chinese […]

By: Richard

Richard — Sun, 27 Apr 2014 22:59:03 +0000

As Chinese, i will say reading Chinese aloud is hard. In my junior high Literature class, we often did 阅读接龙.When ever a student made a mistake he/she must sit down and next one continued reading. Some people even couldn’t read a paragraph. But I was good at it. My record was 2 pages.
Reading Chinese is different from reading English. When reading Chinese, you have to map the whole sentence into your brain and then read it out. In English it is pretty much word by word, phrase by phrase.

By: Olle Linge

Olle Linge — Fri, 21 Mar 2014 08:24:36 +0000

In reply to Harper. Such as these two, perhaps? :) Phonetic components, part 2: Hacking Chinese characters Phonetic components, part 1: The key to 80% of all Chinese characters

By: Harper

Harper — Fri, 21 Mar 2014 02:47:59 +0000

I find it difficult to read texts aloud to a class without stopping on a word… I think an a article based on finding a phonetic hint within components such as radicals might be helpful in cases such as mine.

By: John Carpenter

John Carpenter — Sun, 09 Mar 2014 21:00:02 +0000

Another aside: I’ve learnt and am learning quite a bit from observing professional Chinese newcasters on various CCTV sites, and BonTV. Observing means using my eyes and ears to the utmost. The spaces between the words are as important as the words themselves. The newscasters’ eye movements say volumes on their processing of the material from which they’re reading. Also, I’ve found listening to ChinesePod QingWen Media audio extremely helpful in relating to the flow of words; as well, the radio broadcasters on Chinese radio stations are a study in reading aloud. Just listening while feeling how my body responds to the sounds is highly informative. Is this how babies feel while learning their Mother Tongue?

By: John Carpenter

John Carpenter — Sun, 09 Mar 2014 20:44:05 +0000

Competency at reading aloud is a skill mastered only with perhaps several hundred hours of practice (whether in or out of class). Court Reporting students are one class of professionals who spend hundreds and hundreds of hours reading aloud from their own tape-code (which is English rendered as CODE). Toastmasters is a group that encourages “out loud” reading and speaking. The point is that there aren’t any easy, stress-free ways of reaching the point where your speaking will sound natural and professional. You practice until you get it! If hundreds of hours are required, so be it. Far too many people simply lack the necessary discipline, motivation, resolve. Remember the Greek Demosthenes, who used to talk with pebbles in his mouth and recited verses while running. To strengthen his voice, he spoke on the seashore over the roar of the waves. (My note: There’s no such thing as too much practice. Old Japanese saying: 10,000 times I practice, I’m still a beginner.)

By: Olle Linge

Olle Linge — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 10:28:42 +0000

In reply to Jon Strauss.

Thanks for posting your data! The thing is that speed is the major factor that makes reading aloud in Chinese difficult. To give you an idea of what’s consider fairly slow and clear speech when reading a short article for instance, this article is read at about 225 characters per minute and to my ears, the reading is very slow. News broadcasts are much faster still. So, the thing is that I’m struggling with reaching 70% of this speed. If you read at 87 characters per minute, you’re not even up to 40% of the speed.

So, my guess is the reason that you think that it’s not hard is because you read too slowly. The extreme case would be reading one character every two seconds or so, which would obviously be very, very easy. Perhaps I should have said “reading Chinese at a reasonable pace is very hard”! Try and see what happens if you try to increase speed a bit, I think you will find that it becomes much harder very quickly.

I hope you don’t perceive my comment as overly critical of your Chinese ability, I simply want to highlight the fact that the speed factor is a crucial factor for the difficulty of the task. I’m not able to read aloud at anywhere near the target, which would be something like the article I linked to above (i.e. 225 CPM). Obviously, this is still much slower than most native speakers are capable of, but it’s a reasonable goal, I think!

By: Olle Linge

Olle Linge — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 09:20:54 +0000

In reply to Emily Liedel.

The phenomenon you describe is in fact very common when Chinese is taught as a second language. I know the problem exists in other languages as well, but it’s even worse in Chinese, because you can actually (in theory) be able to read a text without having the slightest clue what it’s about (if you’re really good at recognising characters but lack words/grammar, for instance).

To answer your question, if I would have spent as much time reading it normally as I would reading it aloud, I would obviously have understood it better. As I mentioned, my normal reading speed for this kind of text is roughly twice as fast, so slowing down means more time to think. It’s also quite clear that removing one aspect of reading should leave more processing capacity to other areas.

By: Jon Strauss

Jon Strauss — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 09:15:38 +0000

In reply to Jon Strauss. After posting, I looked up carefully at your own numbers. It's interesting that the 125 mark seems perhaps significant, if not a coincidence, seeing that you leveled off there, too, before your jump. I should note that I did this sample with a book (non-fiction) whose vocabulary range I am already practiced with.