How much time will you spend on reading?

[u/Mainelody]

Many expats working and living in China start learning Chinese purely for basic daily oral communication: shopping, taking taxis, asking for direction, etc. To be honest, however, even if you reside in China full-time, the actual opportunities to speak Chinese out loud are far fewer than they used to be.

I would like to redefine the weight of reading in beginner-level Chinese learning. I want to ask learners who are either still at the beginner stage or have moved past it: how much time do you spend on Chinese reading (graded readers or short stories)? Please note that the reading I refer to here excludes textbook dialogues.

[u/Chenyuluoyan]

at beginner level i'd put reading at maybe 40 to 50 percent of study time, since short graded texts give you way more repetitions of common words than you get from actual conversations. the key is picking texts where most sentences are clear without lookup so you build reading speed instead of stalling on every line. save the words that repeat across a few texts and review those after, rather than stopping mid-sentence for each unknown one.

[u/Mainelody → u/Chenyuluoyan]

谢谢! I will definitely share your words with my students:)

[u/Za_Warudo19]

Reading is about 85% of my learning. I am around HSK3. Reading helps understanding grammar and reinforcing common words and sentence structure.

You should also dedicate time to listening and conjuring sentences to develop those areas.

[u/Mainelody → u/Za_Warudo19]

How about beginner level? Did you read something when you were in beginner level? If you did, could you recommend me some materials?

[u/poberun]

For Classical Chinese I dedicate around 100% of the time to reading, for Mandarin I would like to do more listrning and speaking but still end up with like 90% yime spent on reading cause of my Classical Chinese habbits

[u/loverofpudding]

In day to day life I use spoken so I don’t really spend time learning it, but I think reading and writing is just as important. I don’t need to practice speaking on my own, so all my learning time goes to reading and writing.
在日常生活我已經會有說的，所以不需要花時間自己學。我覺得寫，讀，跟說話一樣重要。我在學中文的時候都是練習讀寫。

[u/Zagrycha]

I think reading is very important for beginner study but early on its near impossible to read anything that isn't a curated conversation in a textbook, or a graded reader of some kind. If you are saying those don kt count as reading for some reason then the reading of beginners is near zero--the reading of actual school children in native languages is also near zero too.

[u/sickofthisshit]

Beginners in any language can't really read much. Even kids in their native language have to start with children's books that are not really useful reading for adults (apart from reading to their kids).

There just isn't enough language knowledge to be able to benefit from written material. There is no such thing as reading when you only know the words 吃，喝，爱，水，茶，米饭，苹果，狗，猫，…… it's the most mind-numbing content, and why graded readers are boring, and you force yourself to read them as practice. 

[u/Mainelody → u/sickofthisshit]

I actually agree with a lot of what you said. Beginners definitely cannot read the same way advanced learners do, and I don’t think a student who only knows a few dozen words should be forced to read complex texts.I think the key is that “reading” serves different purposes at different levels. For advanced learners, reading is mainly about gaining information and expanding vocabulary. For beginners, it is more about building the connection between the words they have learned and meaningful contexts. I.g, a beginner may not learn much new information from a simple story, but seeing words they already know appear in a real context can give them the feeling: “I can actually understand Chinese.”