Author: Jared Turner

We just launched a podcast! Here is how all of this started.

While in Shanghai, I ride my electric scooter to my office nearly every day. I could take the metro, but between walking and riding, it was a 22 min commute compared to a 10 min scooter ride. However, it was this reduced commute time that got me interested in podcasts. For some reason, being surrounded by people on the subway made me less inclined to put headphones in my ears because I might talk to or interact with someone else. Yet, riding on my bike, it was just me, my two wheels, and the chaotic Shanghai traffic.

One day, I wanted to listen to more than just music. I wanted something that was enriching, informative, and uplifting. My first foray into podcasts occurred when I was a guest on the China Startup Pulse to talk about my other business in China. I didn’t give podcasts much thought then, but this time I began listening in earnest and I got hooked. I started listening to podcasts when I was travelling, washing dishes, cleaning house, or out for a walk. Fast forward one year and hundreds of podcasts later, the idea dawned on me that perhaps John and I should start our own podcast about Chinese.

I searched for Chinese podcasts, and there were many. However, there didn’t seem to be any that were talking about learning Chinese, they were all focused on teaching Chinese. As we talked about it, we felt there was a need for a podcast to talk about how to learn Chinese without trying to teach it to you.

John and I have spent years studying and applying methods of learning Chinese as a second language, John’s specialty being teaching through instruction (that is what he does at AllSet Learning), my specialty being implicit learning through extensive reading. For Mandarin Companion, we have attended Chinese language conferences around the world and worked with hundreds of Chinese teachers and listened to their unique challenges and situations. We know countless individuals who have learned Chinese and all have a different path. When we are frequently asked what is the best way to learn Chinese, we know there is no one-size-fits-all solution. On top of it all, we have learned Chinese and we know for ourselves the challenges a learner faces.

When we framed it like this, it seemed obvious that we needed to start this podcast. This kernel of an idea started nearly six months ago is now the “You Can Learn Chinese” podcast!

What This Podcast Is

This is the very first Chinese podcast of it’s kind! Here is what we will be doing.

• Discussing the best ways to learn Chinese
• Sharing leading research and best practices for learning Chinese
• Identifying trends in Chinese learning (good and bad)
• Discussing funny and interesting instances of Chinese in movies and culture
• Interviewing a wide spectrum of Chinese learners.

For each show, John and I will be discussing different topics followed by a guest interview. We already have many interviews recorded with guests sharing their fascinating and wide ranging experiences with learning Chinese including an actor, a public relations director, a graduate of a dual immersion program, a diplomat, and many more! We’re also on a quest to interview Mark Zuckerberg and John Cena.

What This Podcast Is Not

Since this podcast is much different than your average Chinese podcast, here is what it is NOT.

• A podcast to teach you Chinese
• A podcast in Chinese
• A study program
• Virtual phrase book
• A platform for us to try and show off how awesome our Chinese is

Simply put, we are not your teachers! And while John’s Chinese is good enough to do a podcast in Chinese, mine isn’t (believe me).

Listen to You Can Learn Chinese

Have a listen! You can click here for our short introductory podcast.

That’s not all, we released a second episode too!

But wait, there’s more! We even recorded a THIRD episode for you!

We plan to release a new episode every two weeks. I highly recommend subscribing so that you can automatically receive each new episode. To do so, pick one of these options:

1.  Visit us in the iTunes store, then click ‘Subscribe.’
2. iTunes not your thing? You can find us on Google Play, Stitcher, and Spotify and click “Subscribe”.
3. For iphone users you can use Apples iTunes app to listen, for Android users, the Google Podcasts app is an excellent option.
4.  Prefer a different app? Copy and paste this RSS feed into the app, or search for You Can Learn Chinese in the app’s podcast directory: https://rss.simplecast.com/podcasts/10037/rss

You can always visit our podcast website to make comments on episodes and share links with your friends. We plan to release new episodes every two weeks so stay tuned!

If you have any ideas for our podcast, a topic that you think needs to be discussed, or a story to share, please contact us and drop us a note! You can do it!

To start off the new year right, we want to communicate with you on what we have been working on. Just to bring you up to speed, Mandarin Companion is largely a two-man operation consisting of John and myself. This is why at times it takes us longer to release things than perhaps it would normally.

That being said, we’ve been developing a lot of things behind the scenes. Today we are pulling back the curtain to give you a preview of what Mandarin Companion has in store for you in 2019.

New 150 Character Level Books (Breakthrough Level)

Over the years, we’ve received many emails from readers asking for new levels. During the same period, we’ve had the opportunity to attend a number of Chinese language teaching conferences and speak with Chinese teachers about the challenges they face in the classroom. Finding suitable reading materials is a fundamental problem faced by Chinese teachers everywhere. Finding books that are level appropriate for Chinese learners and are fun to read is like finding the holy grail, and for teachers who have used the Mandarin Companion series with students, they absolutely love them and students who do read them experience a lot of progress.

The downside to all of this is that it typically takes students longer than they would like to get to the stage where they can read our level 1 books; in high school it is typically 3-4^th year Chinese students, in Chinese dual-immersion programs it is usually 4^th to 5^th grade students, and in College programs it is usually students somewhere in the middle of the second year. Unfortunately there are too many students who drop out of Chinese programs because they don’t feel like they are making progress or that Chinese is even within their grasp and consequently never reach the level necessary to read a Chinese graded reader. For anyone who has experienced the immense sense of accomplishment from reading an entire book in Chinese, that experience alone has motivated countless readers to continue studying Chinese.

This has given us the impetus to create a new and lower level of Chinese graded readers in a way that has never been done before. We have decided to call this the “Breakthrough Level”. Similar to our other levels, it will be based on a defined character set and any new words occurring outside of that set will be introduced as keywords accompanied by pinyin and a definition. This new Breakthrough Level will be written at a 150-character standard which essentially comes from half of the level 1, 300-character standard.

The trick about Breakthrough Level is that it will not use any new characters outside of the level 1, 300-character standard. That means that any key words used that fall outside of the 150-character standard can only be borrowed from the level 1 standard. Therefore the vocabulary used in the Breakthrough Level standard will be very constrained. We have roughly 10 nouns to work with and a very limited set of verbs. Honestly, at the beginning, the task seemed insurmountable, but we organized the possible words we can use and kicked our creativity into high gear to come up with some new stories that can be written at this level, are of substantial length, and are entertaining to read. These Breakthrough Level stories will be written at the 150-character standard and will be three to four thousand characters long. Nothing like this exists yet! They’ll be actual books, not just short stories.

These new lower level stories will reach learners at an even earlier stage and not only help to accelerate their learning, but also inspire them to continue learning Chinese. We are working on five stories to be released in 2019 including “Young Sherlock Holmes” and “My Teacher is from Mars”. We plan to launch this new level in spring of 2019. It’s going to be great!

New Podcast

Both John and I have been working in Chinese education for a long time and people are always asking us for advice about learning Chinese. We find ourselves talking to so many people that we wanted to find a better way to reach out and help even more people through their trek towards Chinese proficiency.

Therefore, in early 2019, we have decided to launch the “You Can Learn Chinese” podcast about learning Chinese (***UPDATE*** Podcast has since launched, click here). In contrast to the many podcasts intending to teach you Chinese, this podcast will be about learning Chinese. We’ll be discussing the best ways to learn Chinese, the research behind it, and include inspirational stories and guest interviews along the way.

John and I are really excited about this project! We already have recorded a few episodes that are in post-production and plan to launch the podcast soon. We expect it will be an inspiring and edifying podcast, something that we hope you will find helpful and valuable to you, a Chinese learner. We’ll be sending out notifications on how to subscribe and get involved in the coming weeks!

Audio Books

We began production on audio books in 2018 and released five and in 2019 we will release the remainder of the Mandarin Companion series as audio books! We plan on having these available for all newly published books. Now you can listen as you read along. This can be a great boost to building your fluency. It helps readers to read more fluently, recognize tones, and practice listening.

Because the books are available through Audible and iTunes, the listener has the ability to slow down or speed up the recording as needed to suit your comprehension speed.

Level 2 stories and beyond

At the end of 2018, the Mandarin Companion series has 11 titles including 8 level 1 books and 3 level 2 books. Once we complete the Breakthrough Level series, we will be working on new level 2 titles. We have already begun working on some story ideas for level 2 and we are excited to get working on these!

As we finish some new level 2 titles, we will get onto developing a level 3 standard. I don’t want to get your hopes up too soon because creating a new level takes much more time than you might think, but we will be expanding to level 3 in the future, however it will likely be 2020 before we have new level 3 titles released. Nevertheless, they will come!

2019 Year of the Pig

As we are looking forward to this year unfold, we wish all of you a happy new year and we are looking forward to the Year of the Pig on February 5^th with the start of Chinese New Year!

新年快乐！

We’ve received many many emails asking when Emma, The Prince and the Pauper, and The Ransom of Red Chief were going to be available on Kindle. I am extremely pleased to announce that day has come!

You can get each book in simplified or traditional characters now, and just in time for the holiday season!

What was the problem?

The Kindle platform for small publishers and self-publishers allows you to publish books only in certain languages, Chinese not being one of them. That being said, Chinese books would usually get through and we were able to offer our books on Kindle.

However, about two years ago, something changed within Kindle and our attempts to publish new ebooks on their platform were unsuccessful. From what I was able to discover, the content management team at Kindle had upped their game and had begun more thorough checks thereby blocking any new Chinese language book that came onto the platform.

I can’t begin to tell you how many hours I have spent exchanging emails back and forth with the Kindle team continually getting the reply that “this book is in a language currently not supported by Kindle”. Email exchanges like this were commonplace for a period of about a year while I continued to try and get our books approved on the Kindle platform. I contacted different departments at Amazon, got in touch with a former classmate who use to work on the Kindle team for help, and even asked in our newsletter for help from anyone who might know someone on the Kindle team, but all was in vain.

I ended up discovering that the US Kindle team only officially supports languages where they have staff with proficiency in that language in case the content needs to be reviewed by human eyes. Surprisingly, KDP supports some unexpected languages:

• Three dialects of Norwegian (Bokmål, Nynorsk, and Norwegian).
• Manx with only 1,800 speakers all located on the Isle of Mann.
• Luxembourgish spoken by 390,000 people located in Luxembourg.
• North Frisian, a minority language of Germany, spoken by about 10,000 people.
• Provençal, a variety of Occitan spoken by less than 250,000 people in southern France.
• Romansh, a Romance language spoken predominantly in the southeastern Switzerland with an estimated 36,000 native speakers.
• Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language native to Scotland with an estimated 57,000 fluent speakers.
• Even Japanese with 125 million native speakers.

I think it is incredibly admirable the lengths that the Kindle team has gone through to support some of these languages, especially ones that are in risk of being lost. However, I am still unclear why the US Kindle team has chosen not support a language spoken by 16% of the world population with an estimated 1.2 billion native speakers. I also don’t think KDP was amused when I asked to speak with their Manx language speaker on their content review team ?.

What I have learned is that most of the Chinese books available on Kindle are published by larger publishers who have a different type of account and are not subject to the same language restrictions smaller publishers are.

What has changed

Recently, Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) merged their operations with CreateSpace, the print-on-demand arm of Amazon. Due to recent changes, we are back in business and we have been able to get our ebooks onto Kindle!

While Chinese is still not an officially supported language by Kindle, we anticipate all of our future books will also be available on Kindle as soon as they are released to the public. This will make things easier for all of our readers, especially those who are in areas where it is not as easy to obtain a print copy!

Get your copy today!

The second installment of Stories form our Readers highlighting the experiences of learners like you on their quest to learn Chinese. If you would like to share your story, please reach out to us!

I would have never imagined that one day I would learn Chinese. My family is bilingual, my husband is from Spain and I speak Spanish and French, but Chinese was never on our radar. It started a few years back; the school my daughters attended ​had been teaching Chinese to the children for a year or two, and decided to start up a Chinese class for families. We sang songs in Chinese, learned animals, colors, and it was such a special experience for us to learn together as a family.

Unfortunately, a while later the classes stopped. Being the sort of person I am, I talked to the head teacher to see if we could find a way to carry on the classes, but to no avail. Soon thereafter, the ​head teacher was contacted about a ​basic level Chinese language and culture class​ for non-Mandarin speaking Primary school teachers. The school didn’t have available staff so ​he offered me the the opportunity to ​go to the course, and then teach ​Chinese in the school! I began teaching 5 to 7 year-old students, but it was amazing to think I was teaching something I was learning as well! It gave me the chance to really reinforce my basic vocabulary of colors, animals, and songs. There were two Chinese teacher​s at the school and it was due to their amazing support that I was able to do it. I had lessons with them where they would teach me Chinese and I would help them with their teaching. It was a real sharing of knowledge.

The following summer, I had the chance to go to Shanghai for a training course. I had been studying Chinese for a year and a half and I had the basics down. It was hard to leave my daughters behind, but it was an amazing opportunity to learn in the country and experience the culture, food, and language for myself! Just being able to use Chinese on a day to day basis was an amazing experience. I was buying fruit at shops, ordering food at restaurants, and even when I would go out for a run in the mornings, I could say to someone “It’s really hot!” and they would understand me!  When you’re learning a language and you’re not in the country, it’s great but you’re learning from a textbook, but going to the country makes it very real. It’s an experience I’ll never forget, to be understood by a real non-teacher native Chinese person.

From the time I began teaching, I had started learning Chinese characters. We found that the Chinese teacher​s ​were initially unsure about teaching the young children Chinese characters but we used it as part of the whole learning experience. We got them drawing characters on water paper which we frequently used in our lessons. By writing very basic characters with the children, it helped me to build my confidence to learn. The most challenge transition was moving from the HSK 2 level to HSK 3. The pinyin was gone and I had to knuckle down and learn how to read the characters.

I was getting to a point where I was almost ready to give up because learning the characters was just so hard. I had spent countless hours learning the HSK 1 and 2 characters but I didn’t know what to do with all of this knowledge of the simple individual characters. I wanted to find something I could read that wasn’t in a textbook. The textbook stuff, although it’s important, it’s not really interesting. It’s not fun to read a conversation about somebody having difficult homework and the mum tells off the child. It may be conversations but it’s not a book.

As I was looking online for something about HSK practice conversation, I stumbled upon Mandarin Companion. I started reading about graded readers and I thought “this is exactly what I need!” It was an amazing moment, it really was!

I ordered a book and when I sat down to read for the first time, I was astonished with absolute disbelief that I could actually read characters without pinyin! Suddenly all of those individual characters made sense, it all just came together. It was simple enough for me to read and understand a full sentence, I just wanted to keep reading and reading just because I couldn’t believe I was reading in Chinese! I felt that I shouldn’t be able to do this. I had never thought I would ever be able to read a book in Chinese. I kept reading to prove to myself “yeah, I can do this, this is real!”

The day I finished my first book, oh my goodness, I was running around the house! I ran to my daughters because they kept asking me if I had finished it, and when I did I was running around yelling “I finished it! I finished a book in Chinese!” It was a fairly crazy moment in our house!

Sometimes when I read at home, my youngest daughter hangs over my shoulder and picks out characters that she knows. I think it’s made my daughters a lot more confident to learn Chinese when they see their 45 year-old  mum reading in Chinese. It proves to them, yes, you can learn characters, you’ve just got to keep working and keep learning. I’m not studying so I can get a job or go off to study at University, but just for my own love of languages and a challenge for myself. To combat my midlife crisis, I just keep learning Chinese!

My favorite story was “The Sixty Year Dream” and I created my own bookmarks to help me remember the character names. I photocopied the pictures of the characters at the front of the books, cut them into strips, and laminated it to create my own book marks. It helped me so that I didn’t need to keep flipping to the front of the book. Names can be so confusing in Chinese. Sometimes you don’t know what a word is and it doesn’t make sense, then after a while you realize you’ve been trying to make sense of a name. I also found it very useful in the books that character names were made up of commonly used Chinese characters which helped to reinforce those characters.

Sometimes I would learn something in a lesson but I wasn’t able to fully grasp it. Later when I was reading one of the Mandarin Companion stories, I was would see it used in sentences in various ways and think “Ah! That’s how it’s used!” This happened frequently with grammatical structures. Most of the examples in textbooks were not as helpful because they are staged conversations. But if you actually see the pattern used in the flow of a story, you think “that makes sense now!” This happened when I learned the word 想. I didn’t fully grasp how it was used, but after seeing it in multiple contexts in the story, it finally made sense and I learned how to use it! This also happened with tenses, using negatives, comparisons with “比” and so on. It’s been incredibly useful to reinforce things I’ve learned and make it real.

Before I read these books I honestly thought that my Chinese would be limited to simple conversation and a basic vocabulary, but now I really believe that I can continue to progress. My vocabulary and grammar has dramatically improved which has had a huge impact on my listening and spoken Mandarin. I feel so much more confident to keep learning and keep using my Mandarin. It has helped with every aspect of learning!

To be able to read a book with no pinyin and understand it has just been one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever come across. There are loads of people out there saying, “OMG, I’m trying to learn Chinese and it’s really hard!” but reading suddenly made everything make sense and joined everything together. That is where the Mandarin Companion books have just been amazing and I am so appreciative of how they have positively influenced my Chinese. I feel like I’ve been paid to say this but I’m not! It’s massively impacted my motivation to keep learning and inspired me to move on to the next level.

Harriet Simpson is a 45 year-old wife and mother of two young girls, 11 and 9, residing in Blackpool, England. She works as a Speech and Language Therapist in a primary school and enjoys playing the clarinet and the piano. She and her family are a self described “outdoors” family, preferring to play old fashioned games such as Scrabble and frequently eschew screen time.

Has this ever happened to you? You are reading something in Chinese and then come across a character you don’t know. You pull out your phone and open your Chinese dictionary app to look up the character. You find the definition, understand what it means and then move on. No more than 10 seconds later, you run across the very same character and you’ve totally forgot how to say it or what it means.

Why do we forget?

There are many reasons we forget things. One of the most common reasons is because we are focusing on understanding or doing something, not remembering it. I think we have all walked into a room to do something and forgot the reason we came in. It starts when we decided to go to the room with a specific action in mind, intending to accomplish a task. We are focused on completing that action, not remembering what it is, thus it is easy to forget why we walked into the room in the first place.

This same problem is found when we are learning new words in a foreign language. Sometimes we are focused on understanding the word and miss out on actually remembering it. The scenario shared at the beginning of this article is a prime example. You are reading with the goal to understand what you are reading. An unknown character is an obstacle to your goal so you look it up to understand what it means. After you understand it’s meaning, you move on without having tried to remember it, and when you run across it 10 seconds later, you’ve totally forgotten what it means. You are more focused on comprehending the sentence (a goal or result) than in remembering the character (a task).You’ve proverbially walked into the room and forgotten why you came in.

Reading Pain vs. Extensive Reading

This helps us to understand why reading below 90% comprehension, or reading pain, is less effective for learning. If we are using all of our mental effort just to comprehend what we are reading, it is difficult to devote sufficient focus and mental power on remembering the words and characters that are new to us.

Conversely, this also illustrates why reading at high levels of comprehension, 98% for an extensive reading level, is very effective for learning new characters. If we can already understand and comprehend what we are reading, it is much easier to devote the mental focus and power towards remembering a new word or character, especially when supported by context.

The Forgetting Curve

Even when we devote specific focus and memory muscle towards remembering a word, it is still easy to forget. This is in part because we are constantly fighting against the “forgetting curve”, a concept that simply states we forget things over time if there is no attempt to retain it in our memory. Studies show that we forget over 50% of what we had learned within less than 24 hours! A week later we may remember only 20% and a month later that can drop down to about 10%.

Whenever we are trying to learn something, we are constantly fighting against the forgetting curve. Things we have just learned are fragile and easy to forget.

How to Commit Learning to Memory

Research in the area of language learning has shown that it takes 10-30 or even 50 or more meetings of an average word before it is truly learned, and that is for an average word. When facing words that are abstract in meaning or use, much more repetition may be required before they are retained in our memory.

But we do not learn things well all at once. It is not enough to repeat a new word 50 times in one cram session. There must be repetition, but it must be spaced out over time also known as “spaced repetition”. It is better to see the same word 10 times a day over 5 days than it is to see the same word 50 times in one day. Using the concept of spaced repetition is highly effective in helping us to commit new words to memory. This is why text books offer sections to review what has been learned.

Today there are many apps and flashcard programs available that use spaced repetition algorithms to recycle characters at optimum times designed to maximize memorization and retention of new and recently learned words. All of these are great uses of technology to fight against the forgetting curve.

Not all Forgetting is Bad

There are advantages to forgetting some things such as outdated information, where you parked your car yesterday, an old password you no longer use, the chores your mother asked you to do (this is a bad long term strategy; don’t do this), or even the details of a former long-term relationship. This type of forgetting can even help your memory as you prune away irrelevant events and are better able to remember more important details, a phenomenon known as “adaptive forgetting”.

In fact, in learning a second language, forgetting can help you learn! It has shown that suppressing your memory of your native language can be helpful when learning a second language. Many learners do this in class rooms where they focus on speaking only Chinese. Often there is an urge to speak in English, but the learner consciously focuses on speaking Chinese instead.

How to Not Forget

If we want to not forget what we have learned, we must have many opportunities to encounter newly learned words over an extended period of time if we are to retain it in our memory. If there are not enough opportunities, then the chance that a word will be forgotten increases exponentially as time goes on. An axiom states “The most important thing to study is what you learned yesterday.”

Extensive reading is a highly effective way to not-forget words you have learned. It provides an ideal environment for remembering because the learner will be reading at a high level of comprehension thereby freeing up mental power that can be used to remember new words AND because it provides spaced repetition through continuous recycling of the same words in context. This is precisely the experience of the following reader.

“There is a lot of repetition in the descriptions—certain words and grammatical structures are used over and over—for the language learner, this is a good thing. In the end, I not only improved my ability to recognize high-frequency characters, but I’ve also picked up vocabulary and grammar along the way.”
– Peter S.

Even with all of this, sometimes you’ll still forget, and that’s ok! Forgetting is natural. If we forget something, it doesn’t make us dumb, it makes us human.

You turn the page. A picture is off to the side as you stare at rows of pinyin. But that’s not all… there is something below the pinyin. You squint your eyes and there it is: a row of Chinese characters. At first glance, you know a lot of these. In fact, at the beginning, you don’t see a single character you don’t know. But you’re not so certain because you’re distracted; it’s that pinyin! It’s got a tractor beam lock on your eyeballs and just like the Millennium Falcon, you can’t get away. Sweat starts to bead on your forehead as you exert every ounce of will to try and focus on the characters, but you are already within the gravitational pull of the pinyin as it crushes every ounce of desire to read characters.

Why Books Have Pinyin Over Characters

When Chinese children begin learning characters in school, they already speak Chinese. In the 1^st grade, Chinese characters are introduced to students as characters that represent words they already know and can speak. At the same time, “radicals” or 部首, are introduced and meanings of the individual components of a character are explained. New characters are introduced daily, along with short reading texts or 课文. At this early stage, characters are learned via rote memorization and pinyin is not even introduced to the children. Some children are still learning their ABC’s (for pinyin as well as for English).

Daily homework includes practice writing of characters taught that day, often with additional characters assigned by the teacher. Termed as 默写 or “writing from memory,” rows of practice characters will be written into small notebooks used specially for writing characters. The next day in class, students are usually quizzed on the characters practiced the night before in 听写, where the teacher reads the characters and the students write each one in a booklet.

The first semester of 1^st grade focuses on learning these building blocks of Chinese characters. They will finish the first semester with having been taught about 250 characters. Towards the end of the first semester, students begin to learn pinyin. By the second semester of the first year, the kids learn more pinyin, and when one of the reading texts for a chapter uses a character that has not been taught, pinyin is put over that character to help the reader. At the beginning, maybe 2-3 characters in the entire text will have pinyin over them.

By the end of the first year, the children have been taught over 600 characters and have a solid foundation in pinyin. They learned to read characters first and pinyin second.

When 2^nd grade begins, all of the reading texts have pinyin above the characters. This is a great help because at this point characters are introduced more rapidly and it is easy to forget a character that was taught some time ago. It is provided as a reference to the readers in case they don’t remember how to pronounce the characters.

Following this process, pinyin over the characters works very well because the students have learned how to read and build a solid foundation in characters before they even began to understand pinyin or English. Characters are much more natural to read than pinyin, and they don’t carry the same rich meaning that characters do, and therefore it’s easy to ignore pinyin when it’s over a sentence.

This learning process works very well for native Chinese speakers and it is highly effective. I have experienced this firsthand, as two of my children attended a local Chinese elementary school in Shanghai.

The English Experience

For those of us for whom our native tongue uses the alphabet, by the time we are in 1^st grade, we’ve mastered our ABC’s, been introduced to phonics, and have begun to read simple words and sentences. Words that use the alphabet are simple and natural to us. I sometimes joke that Chinese characters look like spooky animals to a new learner, but it’s not too far from the truth. If you don’t know the character, you just don’t know it. You cannot phonetically sound it out, but you can do that with English words if you know the phonics.

The Crippling Crutch

This is the learner’s conflict commonly found in Chinese textbooks and reading materials: pinyin written above the characters. The alphabet-loving-eyes are naturally pulled away from the characters towards the pinyin. After all, it’s an order of magnitude easier to read than characters, even if we know the characters! Even if the reader covers up the pinyin, he inevitably uncovers it to “check” or confirm what he read is correct.

So what’s the big deal? The problem is that this creates an over-reliance on pinyin and actually slows down the learner’s path to building speed of character recognition, reading speed, and fluency. This is how it works.

• A key component of reading fluency is reading speed
• Reading speed builds as the reader becomes more familiar with the characters
• The more encounters the reader has with a character, the more she will build the speed of recognition of that character.
• Pinyin over the characters distracts the reader from the characters.
• Pinyin over the characters creates over-reliance on the pinyin.
• Because the reader spends time reading both the pinyin and the characters, the overall reading pace slows down.
• Because the reading speed is slower…
  • The reader reads fewer characters
  • The reader still has time to translate inside her head
  • Progress towards fluency slows down

It is also for these same reasons that I am not a big fan of the “click your way to fluency” concept which many apps and software enable by clicking or hovering over a character for an instant pinyin and translation. They have their place and use for sure, but utilizing these aids to “read” a text does little for your progress towards fluency (mainly because you are understanding the text in English as opposed to understanding it in Chinese).

Some may be saying, “but without the pinyin, I can’t read this Chinese text at all!” If you need pinyin over the text to read it, then you’re not reading at the right level, and you’re not learning the words you’re reading. Put it away and find something easier (if you can) and I’ll kindly redirect you back to a previous blog article about reading at the right level.

For all of you publishers and teachers out there, please do not put pinyin over text that is intended for CSL (Chinese Second Language) students. If you have to use it, only put it over the characters that the reader is not intended to know. And for pete’s sake, don’t tell us just not to look at it. It’s about as effective as this button.

Pinyin is a crutch and sometimes we need a crutch to lean on. Without it our learning-lives would be much more difficult. My hope is that we not create an over-reliance on pinyin and help learners walk on their  quest to fluency.

Have you ever laughed in Chinese? “The Ransom of Red Chief” is the first comedic story in the Mandarin Companion family. Written in 1910, the story The Ransom of Red Chief brilliantly tapped into a rich vein of comedy associated with the many difficulties of caring for a mischievous child.

Perhaps many readers are unaware of the far-reaching influence this story has projected onto even modern day comedy. While there have been modern remakes of this story, the core of the story-line has been the inspiration of many others. Some notable influences can be seen in movies such as “Home Alone” and characters like “Dennis the Menace.” Stories with a mischievous child who outwits a couple of bumbling bad guys have their roots in this classic tale by O. Henry.

The “Red Chief” in the title, however, calls attention to the very different culture of the time, when “cowboys and Indians” was the most common game all children knew, and the United States had barely even begun to address its real issues of racial equality.

Clearly, the original “Red Chief” does not work in a Chinese context, even though the story’s larger theme of a child so unruly that he can barely be contained is all too familiar in the modern Chinese one-child household. And yet Chinese kids do have a uniquely Chinese hero all their own, unparalleled in his naughtiness: Sun Wukong, the Monkey King from Journey to the West. Thus, our story uses its own version of Sun Wukong, a modern-day, fictional caped simian superhero named 红猴 (Hóng Hóu), and gleefully jettisons the anachronistic “Red Chief.” You won’t miss him at all.

We are sure this story will bring a chuckle to your Chinese learning. This may be the first time you’ll laugh…in Chinese!

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At Mandarin Companion, we go to great lengths to ensure sure every book we publish is carefully written to be level appropriate and as easy to read as possible. The positive feedback we frequently receive from readers give us a good indicator that we are hitting that mark.

However there hasn’t been any independent research about our books until now. We were excited to read a research paper titled “Finding Something to Read: Intelligibility, Readability and Learner Chinese Texts”, written in 2017 by data scientist, particle physicist, and Chinese language enthusiast Dr. James C. Loach who used his expertise in analytics to create an algorithm to analyze the readability of Chinese texts written for second language learners. The smart man that he is, he too is an advocate of extensive reading for language learning and understands the immense impact fluent reading has on language acquisition. His findings were fascinating.

Readability

There has been very little dedicated research into the readability of Chinese. Dr. Loach defines readability of a text as the degree that a learner is able to “read fluently and enjoyably”. This highlights the importance of correctly matching the learners reading level with the text, a “non-trivial” task, as research shows that a relatively small difference in reading comprehension can result in a dramatic change in readability. This conclusion is also supported by the decades of research from the Extensive Reading Foundation which can be boiled down to this single chart.

As we know, Chinese is a very unique language due to the complexity of the script where one must master several thousands of distinct symbols to read native texts fluently. Dr. Loach notes:

The consequences for reading [Chinese] are so acute that even upper-intermediate learners, with useful levels of conversational Chinese, can struggle to find meaningful things to read. Basic [native level] texts often use characters that are only known by advanced [second language] learners, and the market for dedicated learner-oriented texts is extremely underdeveloped.

The Methodology

Leveraging his expertise of particle physics, Dr. Loach created an algorithm to assess the readability of a text and assign it a “readability” score. Since readability largely depends on the level of the reader, they used the character lists from the six levels of the HSK standards (the HSK is the standardized Chinese language proficiency test developed by the Chinese ministry of education). The levels of the HSK tests are tiered according to vocabulary words used and progressively become more advanced. HSK level 3 is considered basic competency while level 5 and 6 would be an advanced learner.

In comparison to a specific HSK level, the Chinese text analyzed was given a readability score ranging from 0 to 100*. Dr. Loach and his associates then fed Chinese texts into the algorithm to see how readable they are.

The Findings

For the study, they analyzed six Mandarin Companion books, three level 1 (300 characters), three level 2 (450 characters), and six books from the Sinolingua graded reader series, tiered with its first level starting at 500 words and moving up to a 3000 word level. The results certainly caught our attention.

With the Mandarin Companion books, there is good consistency between the books at each level and the higher-level books are indeed found to be slightly more difficult.

The results for the Sinolingua books are more surprising, showing that the lexical difficulty of the books does not increase in the way that would be expected based on their titles. In addition (though not shown), the difficulties of the stories inside particular books are found to vary significantly. Manual inspection of the books accords with the results of the algorithm. In particular, the 1000 Word and 2000 Word books do appear to be simpler and easier to read that the 500 Word book.

Our internal analysis at Mandarin Companion has shown that if you are at an HSK 3 level, you should be able to recognize 95.3% of the characters in our level 1 books. Our experience had also shown that those who have passed the HSK 3 level and are working towards HSK 4 were excellent candidates for our level 2 books. This research paper indicates that our series is leveled appropriately.

What perhaps most surprising was what seemed to be a large disparity within the Sinolingua series. The 500 word level reader has a similar readability score, and in some respects lower, than the 2500 word reader. Based on the analysis of Dr. Loach, it appears you would need to be at an advanced level of HSK 5 (2,500 vocab words) before you would be able to begin reading any of the books in this series regardless of the word level printed on the cover. Our anecdotal interaction with other learners who have used this series have shared experiences that support the conclusion of Dr. Loach’s analysis.

Conclusion

It is not easy to write Chinese books that are easy to read! Compiling a list of frequently used characters is just the first step in a very involved process. This latest research paper shows that even if a book uses a small amount of characters, it does not necessarily mean it will be easy to read.

It also confirms that Mandarin Companion level 1 is highly readable for people at an HSK 3 level, which is very encouraging for students preparing for the test.

This is the first independent study we have seen supporting the Mandarin Companion series and it is quite possible there will be more to come in the future. In the meantime, we’ll continue to publish books you can read.

*The research paper applied a readability score from 0 to 1. For this article, we multiplied the readability score by 100 to give it a range of 0 to 100.

We frequently receive emails from our readers. A recent and inspiring story comes from Shang Zhu. Here is his story in her own words.

I’m a first generation Chinese immigrant to Canada. I came here pretty young and did all my education in the west. I attended Chinese classes on Saturdays in my teens but it did little to improve my Chinese reading skill. Due to my poor level, I was put in with the elementary level kids and felt somewhat ashamed. I ended up resenting my parents for forcing me to go and as result I didn’t put in a lot of effort to learning characters. I finished primary schooling practically illiterate in Chinese.

Between my teenage years and now, almost 20 years have passed. Finding the existence of graded readers was truly a blessing. Without exaggerating, the entire Mandarin Companion collection has helped me going from being almost illiterate to being able to read blogs on the net and chat in Chinese! Being able to read Chinese has always felt like an unattainable dream for me. Thanks to you guys, it’s no longer the case!

Looking back, I can see the main reasons my progress to Chinese literacy was slow.

• Less-effective learning strategies: I spent a lot of time reading short difficult texts with words that are not often encountered. Funny enough, I knew how to write most animals but yet could not read the most basic everyday words.
• Lack of age-appropriate material: Most material I could find at my level was for kids which was not interesting to me as a teenager or an adult.
• Lack of a strong need for the language: This is a hard one. However, I feel the strength of the Mandarin Companion series gives me a very interesting story-line that fuels the “need” to keep reading.

I read almost all the books available. I can’t wait to read more books! Ever since, it has been hard to find another graded reader that I have enjoyed reading as much. Thanks for all the great work! I’m amazed to see how suitable materials for learning Chinese as second language have bloomed! Also, ebook are great because of the integrated dictionary! Thanks so much and keep up the great work! 加油！

Shang Zhu, we created Mandarin Companion for people like you. We also know you are not alone. We feel honored to be part of your success story!

If you have a story you’d like to share, drop us a note. We can’t wait to hear from you!