David on Formosa

One of the main goals that I have in Taiwan is to learn to read Chinese. I can already speak Mandarin to a reasonable level. However, it is frustrating not to be able to read much more than a map or a restaurant menu.

I have never thought that learning to speak Mandarin was that difficult. I think that most of the people who claim it is difficult have never made much of an effort to actually learn it. However, learning to read Chinese is definitely quite a challenge.

I have a good head start in that I already know quite a few characters. It is always difficult to quantify exactly how many characters you know. I doubt anybody could ever make an accurate estimate of the number of words they know in English. Anyway I know at least 1,000 characters. That is not enough to read a short newspaper or magazine article.

There is also the question of what constitutes knowledge of a character. There are three aspects to knowing a character. The first is knowing the meaning, the second is the pronunciation (some characters have more than one) and the third is knowing some of the words that the character commonly occurs in.

There are some characters that I know the pronunciation of but don’t know the meaning. There are other characters that I might be able to identify if I saw them in a word or sentence, but I don’t know the exact meaning of the character. Even so any knowledge is useful and to be able to read for meaning you don’t necessarily need to know the meaning of every single character or word.

A few days ago I went to the Guoyu Ribao bookshop in Taipei to buy some books to practice reading. I bought two books. One was called Qibai Zi Gushi (七百字故事 or 700 Character Stories) and the other Wenhua Keben Di San Ce (文化課本第三冊 or Culture Textbook Book 3).

Both books are at a level that I can read without having to refer to a dictionary. In each story there will usually be a few words or characters that I don’t know, but I can still understand the story and perhaps guess the meaning from the context. It is great to actually have something that I can read in Chinese and understand the meaning.

The books are written with the Chinese characters in vertical columns from right to left. There is Zhuyin Fuhao written alongside each character. I cannot read Zhuyin Fuhao very well so it doesn’t really distract me from reading the characters. If I don’t know the pronunciation of a character then I can check the Zhuyin Fuhao. The Zhuyin Fuhao also makes it easy to look up words in the dictionary.

I will study a couple of stories from these books each day. I hope that I will get used to reading Chinese and learn some new words and characters. I will also be able to refamiliarise myself with some that I have forgotten. Once I am finished then I will look for some new books that are a little more difficult.