How to start reading (self-study)

[renzhe]

I'd just to point out that I use character and word count as a very rough measure for orientation, nothing more. I keep talking about X thousand characters this and that, and I'm afraid some people (here and elsewhere) might have misunderstood me.

Of course counting characters is not the goal of studying nor a good measure of ability, I just see it as a very rough measure of progress and a rough gauge of what sort of material you might be comfortable with. While there are materials suitable for almost any level (Doraemon is really not that hard), there is quite a range in terms of how complex some of the native materials can get, and picking something suitable for your level will save you lots of frustration.

[imron]

I agree completely about using counts as a good rough measure. See that thread some time back about reading fluency where I bandied about some numbers of my own. You simply need to have a largish vocab in order to be confident that you can make sense of any random piece of native content you might come across, so no misunderstanding from me. I was just making the point that at the end of the day the important thing is not the number of words you know, but whether you can use the words you know to do the things you want.

[poleag]

It's not fun to use your dictionary 30 times per page. I battled my way through four of the twenty-something chapters of 猫成记 by 老舍 before needing to give it a break. The book is interesting. I made it to the point where this pilot who crashlanded on this planet gets captured by cat-people and he's contemplating using his gun against them. I truly want to know what happens next, but it's simply too annoying to use a dictionary that much. I went back to watching a Chinese-dubbed version of Spongebob Square Pants and other children's cartoons while looking up words I didn't know as I watched the show.

With a few hundred characters, it'll be tough to find anything interesting to read. The stuff that's interesting is going to be too packed with unknown vocab. I would try to get a bigger vocab before tackling pleasure reading. Use flashcards/SRS on the most common characters/words (preferably in sentences so you pick up on the grammar as well) and look up words from TV programs that get repeated.

[patko]

Nice set of replies here. I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing. I cannot get a teacher because I don't have the time to be taught because of college and the fact that this chinese thing isn't yet uber serious. My interest has brought be this far and I will go where it takes me. I'm just mining for gold atm and being very non precise is my learning ie just words and some grammar. I believe I can carve out the gold into a statue further down the road when I'm more comfortable. As for pronounciation, I listen to pimsleur audio and thats about all I can do for now. I see my study as an investment for the future when I get an opportunity to go to China or have more free time and I can become more serious. Until then I think having concistency will pay of in the long run.

[Chief123]

Would a mixture of Pinyin/BoPoMoFo with characters speed up the process you think?

What I mean is if you have a very limited character set you're familiar with, you're not going to be able to do much reading at all for awhile. But if there was a mixture it seems that may be helpful - if nothing else it would help in looking up words. Mixture meaning either BoPoMoFo beside each character or something like two columns - one with Pinyin and one with characters. Any characters you don't know you can look at the Pinyin or BoPoMoFo and look up the words.

Thoughts?

[paotale]

Find something to read, it really doesn't matter (I used to use a woman's health magazine I got for free on the street) and then read the characters in it that you know. It helps if you are interested in the topic as you already have basic knowledge about it. Read the characters you can, and after a while you will start to notice that certain characters (that you can't read) appear pretty frequently. Find a way to look up those characters (pronounciaton and meaning/translation) then find a way to remember it. You can pick up a lot this way. Then go back to reading or re-read what you had, now you recognize those characters you didn't before, and you can find new characters that seem to be frequently used to repeat the process and expand your vocab quickly.

Also, try using this list of frequently used characters http://www.zein.se/p...k/3000char.html