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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!

Get your copy today!

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!

When Jane Austen sat down in January of 1814 to write about “a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like”, she could have never imagined that one day her story would be adapted into a Chinese setting hundreds of years in the future. This adaptation of “Emma” spans approximately 200 years, from the Victorian to the Digital age, into two widely different cultures. Although there are great differences in time and culture, we were able to find direct parallels between these two different time periods to bring this classic story to you.

However, bringing Emma into the hustle and bustle of 21st century Shanghai was no small task. Fortunately we had a resident Jane Austen expert in the Mandarin Companion family. My wife, Heather, discovered her works as a young girl and since has devoured all things Jane Austen (she has read Pride and Prejudice over 50 times, literally). Having lived in China for many years, she was uniquely qualified to help with this special adaptation.

In the original story, Emma was born into a wealthy family whose mother died when she was a young girl, sees no need for a man in her life, and spends much of her time dabbling in the lives of her friends and neighbors. To set it in modern day China, we realized that Emma had to be much more than a woman of leisure in the big city. We envisioned Emma as the only daughter of a wealthy real estate tycoon who had sent her to all of the best schools and supported her in pursuing her dreams. We felt the best career fit was for Emma to be fashion designer who was married to her job and was not only uninterested in a boyfriend, but also had no time for one. Instead of trying to play matchmaker with friends and neighbors, she would try to orchestrate office romances among her coworkers.

We had a lot of fun setting the story in modern day because this brought in a number of new possibilities that fit in perfectly with the original story. Hand-written letters sent via courier, commonly used in Victorian England, are replaced with text messaging. Community newspapers and bulletins as a way of spreading local news are replaced with social media, complete with likes, comments, and selfies. We were even able to incorporate Wechat (微信), the dominant social media platform in China, into the story.

It is fun to note that the cover image pays homage to the 1995 movie “Clueless”, perhaps the most commercially successful modern adaptation of “Emma” yet.

Despite the time difference between the original and adapted version, the core essence of Emma’s personality remains intact: a spoiled, headstrong, and self-satisfied heroine who greatly overestimates her own skills and is blind to the dangers of meddling in other people’s lives. We hope you enjoy this story as much as we did in creating it!

Visit the book page for Emma to get your copy!

Mark Twain’s classic novel, The Prince and the Pauper, has been the subject of countless retellings, but has never been done in such a uniquely Chinese way before.

The story follows two nearly identical boys born into vastly difference circumstances. One into poverty on the streets and the other as a prince in the royal palace. After a chance encounter, they both think the other lives a more interesting life and swap places. The pauper, now living in the royal palace, lives in constant dread of being discovered for who and what he really is while he struggles to learn the customs of royal life. In the meantime, the prince is living on the streets where he is exposed to the harshness of society and the injustice of the laws of the kingdom over which he rules. Both children discover that neither life is as carefree as they expected.

In order to put the focus on the story in our adaptation, we set our version of the story in a fictional Chinese kingdom in the remote past. We never say exactly what year or dynasty it is, and the character names used, while sometimes inspired by real historical figures, are not straight out of the history books. The location of the story, a city called 西京 (Xījīng), is also fictional.

Some elements of the story have a certain relationship to actual Chinese history, however. For example, although 宋 (Sòng) is the name of a historical Chinese dynasty, we chose it for the king’s name in our story precisely because there was no famous Chinese emperor with that surname. As for the name of the prince 宋知远 (Sòng Zhīyuǎn), we borrowed the given name from the actual historical emperor 刘知远 (Liú Zhīyuǎn).

One challenge in adapting this work was the title, The Prince and the Pauper. The word “pauper” means “beggar,” and can be translated as 乞丐 (qǐgài) in Chinese. However, this word is both formal and also contains two low-frequency characters, so it’s no good for a graded reader. The more colloquial option, 要饭的 (yàofàn de), also means “beggar,” but is so informal that it is not suitable for a book title (but it does appear in our book). Thus, we decided to go with 穷孩子 (qióng háizi), meaning “poor child,” a less literal translation of the English “pauper.”

Finally, our Chinese staff would like to make it clear to the reader that the hairstyle of the prince in our story does not conform to the actual historical royal hairstyles of ancient China (sometimes you just have to go with design choices that look a little cooler).

Get your copy today!*
*Note, all print versions are available. The ebook is currently unavailable on Kindle. It’s an Amazon issue, you’re welcome to help us pester them :-).

“The Prince and the Pauper”

The entire Mandarin Companion series is now available in paperback traditional character editions! Traditional Chinese editions of all of the stories have been available on ebook for a while and we’ve now taken it one step further and made available all of the traditional character versions in paperback as well!

We understand the difficulty for those studying traditional Chinese characters to find the best books to learn Chinese. Sometimes finding traditional Chinese textbooks or other traditional Chinese language books is about as difficult as remembering the stroke order for 齉.

So for all you traditional character types out there, whether your Chinese program only offers traditional Chinese, you have been learning Chinese in Taiwan, or if you have a Taiwanese parent, these traditional Chinese books are for you.

The bonus of the print editions is that you won’t have to download any traditional Chinese language pack! This is Chinese made easy…traditional style. The Mandarin Companion series will put you on the road to better Chinese!

To get your copy, visit our book page, select the title you are interested in, and follow the links to the traditional versions.

When John and I first started Mandarin Companion, “Journey to the Center of the Earth” was on a very early list of books that we wanted to adapt. We knew that it would be a more complex book that needed the flexibility that level 2 would offer. Reading the book over again brought back the excitement and fantasy I experienced as a young teen reading it for the first time.

In paying homage to the original story, we decided to base many of the illustrations of the Mandarin Companion version on the original illustrations by French painter and illustrator Édouard Riou who illustrated six of Verne’s novels. The original illustrations have long since entered the public domain and we hope you enjoy the artistry and talent of illustrators, then and now!

“这张纸上的每个字的意思我都知道，可是把它们放在一起以后我完全看不懂！这是为什么？！”

“叔叔跟老许两个人，一先一后，开始慢慢地往下。”

“我走过去看了看，前面有三个看起来很像的路口。”

“叔叔坐在我身边，把他最后一点水拿出来让我喝。”

“老许用工具在石头上打了一个洞，水一下子就喷出来了，我兴奋地大叫起来。”

“叔叔让我们每半个小时休息一次”

“这些植物不但高大，而且长得很特别。”

“我感觉海面一直在动，好像水下有很大的东西在动来动去。”

“我发现在离我们不远的地方，两只特别大的怪物打了起来。”

“前面有一个岛！”慢慢地，我才发现，水的声音是岛上的地下水在往上喷。

“海水就带着我们的船也掉进了那个大洞里！”

To check out the book or get a copy of your own, click on the image above or visit the book page!

If you have been waiting for the level 2 Great Expectations to be available, wait no longer. They are now available on all digital platforms:

Great Expectations Part 1 (Traditional character)
 
Great Expectations Part 2 (Traditional character)
 

The good news is that all future releases of new titles will have both simplified and traditional character editions available at the same time! We’ve spent a lot of time to create tools that allow us to make this conversion quickly, and with far more accurate results. The next step will be print editions of traditional character editions. It’s in the works!

And if you are wondering about that character that looks like a spooky animal, it’s pronounced “biáng“, a special type of noodle from northern China.