There’s an expression in Chinese, 一目十行, meaning to read ten lines at a glance. While this speed may be out of reach, the idea behind it - reading rapidly - is still very much worth pursuing.

After all, if you can consume a larger volume of foreign-language input in the same timeframe, without much of a hit to comprehension, your gains will be greater. You’ll be able to come across the same words more frequently, encounter grammar patterns at a faster rate, etc. - reinforcing and building upon your Chinese. While there is a slight trade-off in the fact that reading will be more likely to be extensive than intensive (as you’ll be looking up unfamiliar words/pronunciations less often), the benefits more than outweigh this.

With this in mind, I thought I’d write this post and share my experiences achieving a relatively decent reading speed. Native speakers typically read between 300 to 700, largely thanks to a few useful strategies I want to outline today.

Before beginning, I’d just like to clarify that this is discussing ‘normal’ reading as opposed to speed reading - both have their uses but this is the one most likely useful to us as learners.

<aside> ⭐ Read Extensively

</aside>

Before even getting started with the real tips, let’s have a look at what exactly this applies to. When I’m talking about reading fast and cpm here, it’s in relation to extensive texts. This is content that you understand at least 98% of the words of - content where you can pick up the remaining unknown words through context; where you experience reading gain rather than pain.

Between the 90th and 98th percentiles, content is ‘intensive’, and requires lots of concentration and dictionary lookups to understand - obviously not conducive to improving speed. Anything lower than that is simply ‘painful’, and so frequent will the lookups be, you’re more likely than not to be understanding the content in English rather than Mandarin. That’s not to mention the demotivating factor of reading such difficult content. So when working on your cpm, keep in mind that it’s with texts that you can read pretty fluently.

To put things into perspective, it’s the equivalent of you only not understanding 1-2 words in the above paragraph.

Perhaps you’re burning to read 三体 or 西游记, but they’re not extensive, curb your passion! There’s a time and place for intensive reading - you can go ahead and read these on the side intensively - but stick with extensive texts most of the time. This includes simpler/learner-oriented content such as DuChinese, graded readers, or children’s novels.

<aside> ⭐ Listening while Reading

</aside>

This could - and will be - a whole post in and of itself. In short, Listening while Reading (LWR), is just that - playing along a native audio recording to whatever it is you are reading. I used to leverage this technique a lot, and found it directly helped improve my reading speed.

The audio file playback speed is generally very flexible, and so you can try setting it to just above your comfortable reading pace. By doing so, you’ll still be able to read along, but at a slightly quicker pace than you might be used to - vital practice that can help bring your long-term average up.

By having the audio playing and requiring effort to pause, you’ll be less likely to stumble before unfamiliar words or pronunciations (there’s little time to look up new words, which you’ll likely be able to pick up through context, and the tone police won’t bother you over what some character’s tone is as the narrator’s voice will replace them).

Lastly, through LWR you strengthen the connections between a character’s sound and shape in your mind - those words that are subvocalized (more on that later) are done so with less hesitation. Where it might’ve taken half a second to recall some word’s tones before, it may be a quarter that later after you’ve had its sound hammered into your brain thanks to constantly simultaneously listening and reading it.