learning to read Chinese as an ABC

October 17th, 2021

As an American born Chinese (ABC) person, I've always spoken Chinese around the house. In fact, Chinese was my first language. However, since I've never really needed to use Chinese, besides speaking with my parents, my skills in the language are subpar at best.

Over the course of the next year, I plan on drastically improving both my reading level and my vocabulary to where I will be able to read a newspaper written in Chinese. This means I will need to learn over 3000+ Chinese characters!

My motivation for this endeavor stems purely from envy and embarrassment. I’m envious of a few of my friends for their mastery of the language and I’m also embarrassed of my laughable use of broken Chinese when I call my Chinese relatives.

In terms of background in the language, besides speaking and hearing it at home, I have 1 year of Chinese school (3rd grade) under my belt and 2 years of taking Chinese in high school. With this limited schooling, I have a basic understanding of the written language, such as knowing the pinyin system and many basic radicals.

My strategy for learning is to read at least one short article a day from the app ‘Du Chinese’ and to review the vocabulary list I’ve built up there. It uses a system where you review a subset of the character list which are chosen given your understanding of the character. So a character I’ve forgotten from the previous day will show up in my list for today, but one I got correct will show up a few days later.

In addition to this app, I will review the list of the 100 most common Chinese radical twice a month. I will also watch more Chinese TV dramas with the subtitles set to Simplified Chinese.

I’ve been following this regiment for about 2 weeks now and estimate that my vocabulary has increased by about 20 words. I also estimate that I’ve learned how to read around 250 characters making my total close to 400 characters.

Thus far, progress has been pretty solid, however I expect things to grow more challenging as I run out of articles to read and when my word list becomes larger.

I’ll give another update on my progress in 6 months when I’m halfway to my deadline.