Learning how to read Chinese for heritage language learners

Now that you’ve assessed your Chinese, you need to regularly read Chinese. Reading is imperative to develop fluency in any language, especially Chinese. However, unlike English, you cannot sound out a new Chinese character if you’ve never seen it before. You must memorize the sound for each one. This sounds daunting—I know, so I’ll share tricks to help you navigate this.

Learning to read Chinese in my adulthood has been both a challenge and adventure. During my trip to China to visit relatives, I picked up my niece’s book. It was written for children because it had pinyin (a system to learn how to pronounce Chinese characters) above characters. I vividly remember this was how I learned to read 这 which means, ‘this’, and I’ve said it countless times. But to finally see its visual form gave it more meaning—I could recognize it.

As a child, my teachers taught me characters I have yet to say. To have an experience opposite to this was fun. Ever since, I’ve been hooked. I look up characters I see pop up frequently during my visit and quickly gain familiarity with them. But I still had a long way to go to develop fluency.

The unique challenges of a heritage language learner

Perhaps you recognize 水 shuǐ or 用 yòng, but you may not be as familiar with 清水 qīngshuǐ or 使用 shǐyòng. Most heritage language learners (HLL) learn informally, i.e. not at school. So, the language skills developed are only useful in informal situations. However, formal language is incredibly important to establish new relationships, find jobs, get an education, show respect, write an email, understand the news, sign legal documents, and so much more.

Luckily, there is an easy way to identify if something is formal or not. Generally, formal terms combine two or more characters. You may have said 用 (to use) to instruct someone to use the phone 用手机. But formal writing pairs 用 with another character to form 使用, which also means ‘to use’. Here’s an example 使用手机 shǐyòng shǒujī, which means ‘to use the cell phone’, but formally. The first two means ‘use’, the last two means ‘cell phone’. Chinese likes symmetry, so phrases are in sets of two or four. Many common idioms consist of four characters.

If I didn’t tell you that 使用手机 consists of 使用 (to use) 手机 (cell phone), then you’d have no idea how to read this. In fact, many Chinese characters don’t mean anything unless combined with another. In 使用, 使 cannot be used alone, but 用 can. Together, they mean to use. This leads to another challenge of reading Chinese; Chinese is not a scriptio continua language, i.e. characters are not separated by space or other marks.

ImaginereadingthissentenceinEnglish. Confusing huh? This is how I feel when I read Chinese.

Check this out: 社交媒体是否让孩子们变得不幸福. Can you tell me which characters are together to form meaning and which are solo?

Here, this how the characters would look like if they used spaces to separate compound characters.

Without a strong vocabulary, it becomes very challenging to try to read anything in Chinese. Being aware of these challenges will equip you to tackle new text and understand how to break it down to develop comprehension.

The basics of reading

Pinyin is critical to learn how to read Chinese characters. If you never learned it before, here is a crash course. It will help you learn how to read new characters and brush up your pronunciation.

As a HLL, you may know already recognize pinyin, but did you know there are tone change rules? My Saturday Chinese school did not teach me this so I only recently learned about them. In fact, you might know them inherently without realizing it.

For example:

• 一个 yīgè: is actually pronounced as yígè.
• 不要 bùyào: is actually pronounced as búyào

If you try saying these words, you will catch yourself pronouncing it as you’ve heard it, which is not the official pinyin.

I really love how AllSetLearning summarizes three tone change rules.

Next, you should have a general understanding of how Chinese characters are structured. The secret behind how Chinese characters work, a TedX video, provides a great overview of radicals and components (without trying to sell you an app subscription or Chinese course!)

Video: TedX, The secret behind how Chinese characters work.

In short, they are the building blocks of characters and help you interpret meaning or sounds. To be honest, until I started writing this post, I had no idea radicals and components were different until I read this article from Ninchinese. A Chinese character can only have one radical, and its main function was to help you find the character in a dictionary. On the other hand, a character can have multiple components, which could fall in one of three categories:

1. Sound (gives clues on how to pronounce)
2. Meaning (what it might mean)
3. Empty (no purpose)

The majority of characters use a combination of sound and meaning components, which is also known as 形声字 xíngshēng zì (semantic-phonetic compounds). Building the skills to recognize components will rapidly increase your reading capabilities!

Finally, use Pleco as your Chinese-English dictionary. No other app compares. It’s free to use and you only pay for add-ons. I highly recommend investing in the Outlier add-on. It was recommended by Hacking Chinese and although I was skeptical at first, it completely shifted how I acquire new vocabulary. Not only does it break down what the character components are, they also describe other words that may include said component, further expanding your understanding of how characters are related.

My favourite character breakdown has to be 狱 (yu, prison). Here’s how Outlier dictionary describes it:

And when I tap on the 犭component that means dog, I see all the other characters with this component. The dog component gives meaning to characters about: hunting, madness, animals, crime, and so on.

My interpretation of this character is since 犭and 犬 refer to dog and 讠represents a criminal, then the criminal is being guarded by two dogs. It’s fun to come up with stories to understand these terms.

Get ready to start reading

In my next post, I’ll share reading resources to get you started with reading. Even if you have limited vocabulary, you can start reading to build your vocabulary and literacy.

Let me know in the comments what you thought of this blog post. I’m eager to adapt content that meets the needs of HLL.