<p>TL;DR:</p>
<ol>
<li><strike>You need a bigger vocabulary to increase reading proficiency.</strike> Based on your comments, it sounds like you know a lot of vocabulary (perhaps orally), but you have trouble recognizing those characters in writing. So, instead of a bigger vocabulary, you need to increase your character recognition. Point #3 below + <a href="https://apps.ankiweb.net/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Anki</a> will help you do that.</li>
<li>Pronunciation and vocabulary size are correlated, so having good pronunciation and knowing the pronunciation of the words is important.</li>
<li>I wrote <a href="https://github.com/thinlines/zh-word-freq" rel="nofollow noreferrer">a Python script</a> that calculates word frequencies in
a given Chinese text that may be useful in pre-learning the vocabulary for a reading project. YMMV. Or, search online for a Chinese word frequency counter like <a href="https://easypronunciation.com/en/chinese-word-frequency-counter" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this one</a>.</li>
</ol>
<p>Like L Parker mentioned in his comment, there are many reasons why you have difficulty reading a &quot;difficult adult book&quot;. Is that adult book fiction or nonfiction? If it's nonfiction, does it contain a lot of jargon from a specific field? How familiar are you with the content?</p>
<p>In general, one popular area of research into reading comprehension is that of lexical coverage and lexical thresholds — i.e. what percentage of the vocabulary of a given text do you need to know in order to be able to comprehend it? <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/43267941?seq=5#metadata_info_tab_contents" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Laufer (2013)</a> seems like a relatively recent, short, and decent introduction to this problem:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>&quot;Most researchers agree that only when readers possess a critical mass of second language (L2) knowledge (lexical and grammatical) can general reading skills, such as distinguishing between main and peripheral information, ... operate most efficiently ... <em>vocabulary knowledge is a good predictor of reading proficiency, if not the best</em>&quot; (Laufer, 2013, p. 868, emphasis my own).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In other words, <strong>vocabulary size is key</strong>. Laufer (2013) summarizes research which suggests a lexical threshold of 95% to 98% coverage as optimal, but there are many factors that would determine what threshold you'd need for your own situation.</p>
<p>Since you mention pinyin, here's a side note about pronunciation:</p>
<p>Learners with unstable pronunciation have trouble putting words into working memory (<a href="http://www-personal.umich.edu/%7Encellis/NickEllis/Publications_files/Ellis%26BeatonLL1993.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Ellis and Beaton, 1993  (PDF)</a>), and <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0749596X9190040Q" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Papagno, Valentine, &amp; Baddeley (1991)</a> showed that verbal working memory and vocabulary size are correlated. So, pronunciation is critical for vocabulary in the long term, and Chinese has the problem of not easily being able to derive pronunciation from the written form.</p>
<p>However, I don't have any citations about pinyin and reading in Chinese, but I imagine that learning the pronunciation of characters in context through ruby pinyin may not be recommended as a learning strategy, because you may find that you associate the sound and meaning more with the pinyin than with the character itself.</p>
<p>As an L2 learner of Chinese myself, I created <a href="https://github.com/thinlines/zh-word-freq" rel="nofollow noreferrer">a Python script</a> to count all the Chinese words (not characters) in a text and sort them according to frequency. It also takes a stop list of words to remove the words you already know. It's not very flexible, but if you know how to run a Python script, it may be helpful to you. It helped me when I decided to read a translation of <em>1984</em>.</p>
<p>There are probably also user-friendly online solutions you could put your text into, like <a href="https://easypronunciation.com/en/chinese-word-frequency-counter" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this one</a> I found with a Duckduckgo search.</p>
<p>Hope that helps!</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-05-14T15:47:01.330Z
Well, the thing is... I AM Chinese and I lived in China for five years. My accent in pinyin is good but I'm just having trouble reading words without pinyin.
Artemis Silver
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-05-14T16:21:54.577Z
So is Chinese your L1 or your L2, or are you bilingual? When did your family start teaching you Chinese? I assume from your question that your problem isn't just a matter of literacy, that is, learning the characters for words you already know. In that case, maybe simply studying character composition, common radicals and how they can hint at the sound of most characters might be enough. (Actually this would probably be helpful if you know the words already or not, I think.)
kGdmioT
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-05-14T16:25:36.527Z
One other thing that we haven't touched on is the question of which dialect of Chinese you and your family speak. If it's a dialect close to Putonghua like the Beijing dialect or Dongbei dialects are, then learning the characters and so on through pinyin would be pretty straightforward. But if you speak Shanghainese, or a dialect from Anhui or somewhere, then this could present a different problem.
kGdmioT
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-05-14T16:28:13.120Z
Well, I already know how to write and speak, and I already know how to read with the pinyin on the top. That when the difficulty increased to the point where pinyin is no longer on the pages, I'm stumped. I learned Chinese when I was four and entered America at five. From then on, my parents teach Chinese at home and English at school.
Artemis Silver
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-05-14T16:33:50.310Z
Fuzhounese is my family dialect but right now, I'm more focused on Mandarin Chinese. And I already know all the difficult words, it just hard to remember them since the words aren't often used.
Artemis Silver
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-05-17T02:49:45.973Z
OK, assuming you have a digital version of a text you want to read, you can do what I suggested in my answer and develop a frequency-based review strategy for those words you know but have difficulty reading. Then, use a tool like [Anki](https://apps.ankiweb.net/) to help you review those characters. This is what I do to help improve my character recognition, and I'm reasonably certain it will help you too, if I understand your problem correctly.
kGdmioT
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-05-14T15:15:04.020Z
2021-05-17T02:58:02.543Z
2021-05-17T02:58:02.543Z
kGdmioT
<p>I was taught Chinese by my family and could do the memorizing of many words. The thing that had me worried is that while I could read without pinyin in some parts, I couldn't in others. If I was given a children's storybook, I would read it aloud, knowing each lashes of the word. If I was given a difficult adult book, I'm not able to easily read it without the pinyin on the top.</p>
<p>Is there a way to solve this problem?</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-05-14T13:15:18.693Z
There are many possible reasons, e.g. incorrect sentence parsing, difficult words, difficult grammar etc. It's hard to receive a satisfactory answer with the scope of the question this wide.
L Parker
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-05-14T13:41:09.960Z
It was the difficulty of the words that increased. I have a total of ten books of Chinese that are labeled 一年级 上册 and so on. I manage to get to 三年级 上下册 before I can't go on to the next grade level.
Artemis Silver
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-05-17T03:37:30.170Z
It's not a problem, you need time and a lot of repetitive practices - read out loud and remember the words and the meanings. Buy a good dictionary, and find time to read it as a book. It builds up your vocabulary, pronunciation, and usage very quickly.
r13
<pinyin>
Without using the help of Pinyin
# Without using the help of Pinyin

(Asked by: username_0 on 2021-05-14)

I was taught Chinese by my family and could do the memorizing of many words. The thing that had me worried is that while I could read without pinyin in some parts, I couldn't in others. If I was given a children's storybook, I would read it aloud, knowing each lashes of the word. If I was given a difficult adult book, I'm not able to easily read it without the pinyin on the top.

Is there a way to solve this problem?

**Tags:** pinyin

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: There are many possible reasons, e.g. incorrect sentence parsing, difficult words, difficult grammar etc. It's hard to receive a satisfactory answer with the scope of the question this wide.  
> **username_0**: It was the difficulty of the words that increased. I have a total of ten books of Chinese that are labeled 一年级 上册 and so on. I manage to get to 三年级 上下册 before I can't go on to the next grade level.  
> **username_2**: It's not a problem, you need time and a lot of repetitive practices - read out loud and remember the words and the meanings. Buy a good dictionary, and find time to read it as a book. It builds up your vocabulary, pronunciation, and usage very quickly.  

---

## 1 answers

### Answer by username_3 on 2021-05-14. Score: 2

TL;DR:

1. You need a bigger vocabulary to increase reading proficiency. Based on your comments, it sounds like you know a lot of vocabulary (perhaps orally), but you have trouble recognizing those characters in writing. So, instead of a bigger vocabulary, you need to increase your character recognition. Point #3 below + [Anki](https://apps.ankiweb.net/) will help you do that.
2. Pronunciation and vocabulary size are correlated, so having good pronunciation and knowing the pronunciation of the words is important.
3. I wrote [a Python script](https://github.com/thinlines/zh-word-freq) that calculates word frequencies in
   a given Chinese text that may be useful in pre-learning the vocabulary for a reading project. YMMV. Or, search online for a Chinese word frequency counter like [this one](https://easypronunciation.com/en/chinese-word-frequency-counter).

Like L username_1 mentioned in his comment, there are many reasons why you have difficulty reading a "difficult adult book". Is that adult book fiction or nonfiction? If it's nonfiction, does it contain a lot of jargon from a specific field? How familiar are you with the content?

In general, one popular area of research into reading comprehension is that of lexical coverage and lexical thresholds — i.e. what percentage of the vocabulary of a given text do you need to know in order to be able to comprehend it? [Laufer (2013)](https://www.jstor.org/stable/43267941?seq=5#metadata_info_tab_contents) seems like a relatively recent, short, and decent introduction to this problem:

> "Most researchers agree that only when readers possess a critical mass of second language (L2) knowledge (lexical and grammatical) can general reading skills, such as distinguishing between main and peripheral information, ... operate most efficiently ... *vocabulary knowledge is a good predictor of reading proficiency, if not the best*" (Laufer, 2013, p. 868, emphasis my own).

In other words, **vocabulary size is key**. Laufer (2013) summarizes research which suggests a lexical threshold of 95% to 98% coverage as optimal, but there are many factors that would determine what threshold you'd need for your own situation.

Since you mention pinyin, here's a side note about pronunciation:

Learners with unstable pronunciation have trouble putting words into working memory ([Ellis and Beaton, 1993 (PDF)](http://www-personal.umich.edu/%7Encellis/NickEllis/Publications_files/Ellis%26BeatonLL1993.pdf)), and [Papagno, Valentine, & Baddeley (1991)](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0749596X9190040Q) showed that verbal working memory and vocabulary size are correlated. So, pronunciation is critical for vocabulary in the long term, and Chinese has the problem of not easily being able to derive pronunciation from the written form.

However, I don't have any citations about pinyin and reading in Chinese, but I imagine that learning the pronunciation of characters in context through ruby pinyin may not be recommended as a learning strategy, because you may find that you associate the sound and meaning more with the pinyin than with the character itself.

As an L2 learner of Chinese myself, I created [a Python script](https://github.com/thinlines/zh-word-freq) to count all the Chinese words (not characters) in a text and sort them according to frequency. It also takes a stop list of words to remove the words you already know. It's not very flexible, but if you know how to run a Python script, it may be helpful to you. It helped me when I decided to read a translation of *1984*.

There are probably also user-friendly online solutions you could put your text into, like [this one](https://easypronunciation.com/en/chinese-word-frequency-counter) I found with a Duckduckgo search.

Hope that helps!

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: Well, the thing is... I AM Chinese and I lived in China for five years. My accent in pinyin is good but I'm just having trouble reading words without pinyin.  
> **username_3**: So is Chinese your L1 or your L2, or are you bilingual? When did your family start teaching you Chinese? I assume from your question that your problem isn't just a matter of literacy, that is, learning the characters for words you already know. In that case, maybe simply studying character composition, common radicals and how they can hint at the sound of most characters might be enough. (Actually this would probably be helpful if you know the words already or not, I think.)  
> **username_3**: One other thing that we haven't touched on is the question of which dialect of Chinese you and your family speak. If it's a dialect close to Putonghua like the Beijing dialect or Dongbei dialects are, then learning the characters and so on through pinyin would be pretty straightforward. But if you speak Shanghainese, or a dialect from Anhui or somewhere, then this could present a different problem.  
> **username_0**: Well, I already know how to write and speak, and I already know how to read with the pinyin on the top. That when the difficulty increased to the point where pinyin is no longer on the pages, I'm stumped. I learned Chinese when I was four and entered America at five. From then on, my parents teach Chinese at home and English at school.  
> **username_0**: Fuzhounese is my family dialect but right now, I'm more focused on Mandarin Chinese. And I already know all the difficult words, it just hard to remember them since the words aren't often used.  
> **username_3**: OK, assuming you have a digital version of a text you want to read, you can do what I suggested in my answer and develop a frequency-based review strategy for those words you know but have difficulty reading. Then, use a tool like [Anki](https://apps.ankiweb.net/) to help you review those characters. This is what I do to help improve my character recognition, and I'm reasonably certain it will help you too, if I understand your problem correctly.  

---

