Chinese the Hard Way

Practise every day

Sat, 29 May 2021 16:16:19 +1000

In my final year of university I joined the university Kungfu club. One day the head instructor asked the class who wanted to get good at Kungfu. Almost everyone in the room put up their hand.

“Right”, said the instructor, “I’m going to tell you the secret for getting good at Kungfu. It’s simple. All you have to do is practise every day. If you practise every day, you will eventually get good.”

About a month later, the instructor once again asked the class who wanted to get good at Kungfu, and once again, almost everyone in the room put up their hand. He then asked how many people had been practising every day since he last asked. Most people, myself included, put their hands down.

That question, and my response to it, left a lasting impression on me and it changed the way I went about learning things. Although I later stopped training that style of Kungfu (I graduated from university and went to see the world), I did learn a valuable life lesson - if you want to get good at something, you need to practise it regularly (and preferably daily). This was something I found to be true not just in my training but for any other skill I wanted to learn.

Natural talent might make a difference for beginners or for world champions, but with regular practice you won’t be a beginner for long, and without regular practice you’ll never be the world champion anyway.

What this means is that for most people and for most skills, lacking natural talent at something shouldn’t prevent you from being able to acquire a useful level of skill in that thing, so long as you are prepared to put in the time and effort.

“Practise, practise, practise”, is a worn out and clichéd phrase, but it’s also valuable advice - you just have to put it to practise ;-)

Unfortunately finding the motivation to keep practising can sometimes be difficult.

It helps if you have a strong interest or desire to learn that thing, but even then it’s still easy to be lazy and/or procrastinate. Instead of relying on motivation you should rely on developing habits instead. Luckily, there are tools that can help with that.

Put your hand up if you want to get good at Chinese.

Now you know the secret, there’s nothing stopping you.

Practise every day.

Developing a reading habit

Fri, 28 May 2021 16:16:36 +1000

Once you reach an upper-intermediate/advanced level of Chinese, one of the most beneficial things you can do for your language skills is develop a reading habit. Regular reading will:

Expand your vocabulary
Expose you to common sentence structures and grammatical patterns and help you develop a feel for the language
Reinforce your existing knowledge of the language
Increase your ability to read for long periods of time
Show you the world as seen through Chinese eyes, which can be invaluable in helping you understand the Chinese thought process

It’s something that requires little investment from you (apart from your own time), and if you’re the sort of person who likes reading, it can also become an enjoyable pastime.

You can choose to read anything you like - newspapers (online or offline), comics, magazines, novels, Internet forums, blogs, graded readers - just make sure it’s something you find interesting. Nothing will kill your motivation faster than reading something you find boring.

Unfortunately, developing a reading habit can be hard because unless you already have a lot of reading experience, reading for sustained periods of time will be difficult and tiring. Not just because of all the unknown words and characters that you’ll be encountering, but also because it takes effort for your mind to process and parse the sentences that you are reading, and the concentration that this requires means that you will tire of it quickly (far more so than if you were reading in your native language).

When I first started to build a reading habit, I found that reading for extended periods of time (half an hour or more) was a struggle and it was easy for me to get distracted. This was despite already being able to read and understand Chinese well. It took about four novels before reading for this length of time or longer became enjoyable and not just something I was forcing myself to do. It probably took a further four novels after that to get to a point where I could be engrossed enough in a book that I wouldn’t notice that three or four hours had passed.

If you want to develop a reading habit, you need to prepare yourself for the fact that you’re going to need to put in hard work and effort for a sustained period time before it becomes rewarding. Regardless of your current level it’s going to be difficult when you start out but the good news is that like most things, the more you practise, the easier it gets, and the stronger your skills will be - you just need to push through the difficult early stages.

The way to do this is to set yourself a target of reading at least half an hour a day and stick to it every single day no matter what (tools like 100% or Don’t Break the Chain can help with this).

This half hour should not include time for learning or memorising new vocabulary. That is, don’t spend ten minutes reading and twenty minutes looking up words. You need to make sure you’re putting in the reading time. This means you may need to set aside at least an hour a day - half an hour for reading, and another half hour for learning new words and revising previously learnt ones.

Whatever happens you need to make the time for this, and you need to keep at it every day in order for it to become a habit. In the beginning it will be painful and slow, but it will get easier the more you do it, especially as you will be learning new words as you go and this in turn will make future reading easier, creating a virtuous cycle.

Another important thing to do is choose material at the right level. If you start reading something and there are too many new words it will mean constant interruption to the reading process, which will make things less enjoyable and also give you the feeling that you are making no improvements. If on the other hand you pick something that is more suited to your level the opposite will be true.

For a real world example, when I first decided I was going to do more reading, the book I chose to start with was 金庸’s 《书剑恩仇录》. Although I could read it, there were too many unknown words per page to strike a balance between reading and learning new words. It’s not that I couldn’t have read it, but more that I wanted to focus my time on reading rather than on learning new words, and so 10-15 pages in, I put it aside in favour of something easier.

9 months, 10 books and some 2 million characters later, I picked it up again and this time was able to breeze through it. This was partly because I was now much more comfortable reading for extended periods of time and partly because by reading those other novels, I’d already learnt many of the words that had previously been new to me. All that other reading of easier novels meant that I had been exposed to those words gradually and it was great to do something like this because it provided positive feedback showing me the progress I’d made over the year and how much my vocabulary had grown.

This leads in to another important thing, which is not to learn too many new words per day. Even once you’ve picked something at about the right level, you will still be getting exposed to many new words.

Don’t feel that you need to learn all the new words at once.

That will just suck up your time. Instead, set yourself a daily quota of new words, and then don’t worry about learning any words after that. The important ones will come up again another day, and the ones that don’t are not worth spending time on until they do start appearing more frequently.

It’s also a good idea to prepare in advance what you are going to read next, especially if you are reading novels/comics. By having your next few books planned out and in your possession (physically or electronically), then as soon as you finish you can start on the next one without stopping for a few days to decide what you are going to read next. Otherwise those few days will probably turn in to a few weeks and then suddenly you’ve dropped out of your reading habit.

If you find something too difficult or if it can’t hold your attention, don’t be afraid to put it down and pick up something easier or more interesting. It’s important not to stress out over what you are reading because that will make you less likely to spend time reading. If it’s something you really, really want to read, you can always come back to it later once your reading skills have improved.

Finally, don’t think you have to wait until some indeterminate point in the future when your Chinese will be ‘better’ before getting started. Reading is how you will make your Chinese better.

Even if it seems difficult at first, doing the thing that you want to be able to do is the best way to learn.

In summary:

You don’t need to wait until your Chinese is ‘better’ before starting to read (even beginners should be able to find suitable content)
Mentally prepare yourself that it’s going to take months before you are comfortable reading for an extended period of time
Commit to spending half an hour a day on reading (not including time to look up and revise new words)
Choose content suited to your current level, leaning towards easier content rather than more difficult content
Prepare content in advance so you don’t need to think about what to read next
Be willing to put aside anything that is too difficult or too boring. You can always return to it later once your level improves.
Don’t try to learn every new word. The useful ones will appear again later, and if they don’t, then by definition they are not useful to you yet.
Read. Every. Day.

Setting a quota for daily learning

Fri, 28 May 2021 07:04:03 +1000

If you are getting a large amount of exposure to native content as part of your learning process (something that I highly recommend), one problem you are going to have to contend with is learning all the new words.

This is especially so if you’re just starting to read native content, because you won’t have a sufficient vocabulary base and it will be easy to become overwhelmed with the amount of new vocabulary to learn.

One of the best ways to control this is to give yourself a quota of new words per day, and make sure that you don’t exceed it.

The quota should have a hard and a soft limit, with the soft limit being the minimum number of new words to learn per day, and the hard limit being the maximum number of words to learn.

What you set those limits to will depend largely on how much time you have available to study and also your Chinese level, but generally speaking, I think it’s a good idea to aim low on these limits and then gradually increase them once you find you can handle the load, rather than trying to go all out at the beginning. The key is to encourage sustainable learning because you’ll get greater benefit from regular, consistent learning over a long period of time compared to short bursts of intense learning at irregular intervals.

When I’m in ‘vocabulary learning mode’ I’ve found that a quota of 5-10 words a day is a nice comfortable and sustainable rate (with a word possibly containing 1 or more new characters). It’s something I can easily do day in, day out, without any pressure, and without too much build-up of revision time. I could learn more but then I’d find I’d be spending more of my time learning and revising new words instead of consuming native content, which is not a trade-off I want to make (consuming native content essentially doubles as a natural form of revision anyway). 5-10 words a day doesn’t really seem like much, but over time it all adds up.

If you set yourself a quota that is smaller than the amount of new words you encounter, you might start to worry that you’ll miss out on learning important/useful words by not learning everything at once. This fear of missing out has become especially pronounced in the age of SRS which offers the seductive promise of being able to remember everything forever simply by adding words to your revision queue.

The thing to realise however is that you don’t need to learn everything immediately and in fact doing so is not productive, firstly because you’ll spend a lot of time learning words that won’t end up being useful, and secondly because you’ll spend too much time on vocabulary learning and revision at the expense of other skills.

You should set aside concerns about missing out on useful words because as long as you are getting regular exposure to native content, you won’t miss anything important.

This is quite logical once you think about it, because by definition, important words will show up on another day and you can add them to your quota then.

The ones that don’t show up again are not important or relevant to you yet, and therefore aren’t worth your time learning until they start showing up more.

It’s a more productive use of your time to focus on words that are appearing now rather than on ones that might appear again at some indeterminate point in the future.

Having a limited number of places in your daily quota combined with so many new words to choose from means you’re going to need to prioritise which words will fill up your quota, and which words you can leave to another day.

I tend to prioritise in the following order:

Names of people/places. These take top priority for me because in a given novel/T.V. show the names will be repeated often enough that it should be quite trivial to keep them in memory, likewise for people and places that regularly appear in the news. Common characters used in names and surnames will also continue to pop up in different variations in other novels/shows as well as newspaper articles or anywhere else you might expect to find a name, so they’re always useful in that respect.

I typically don’t place too much emphasis on learning the meaning of the rarer characters used in names, more just the pronunciation.

It’s also a good idea to look up the pronunciation of surnames even for characters you think you know, because quite often the pronunciation of a character when used as a surname is different from the pronunciation you might be more familiar with e.g. 单 Shàn, 曾 Zēng, etc.
Words that look suspiciously like words I already know how to pronounce. At higher levels, I’ve found more often than not that less-common words containing parts of characters I already know typically contain different pronunciations to what I’d expect. A few off the top of my head include 倩 qiàn, 栉 zhì, 狄 dí and 耿 gěng. If you don’t make sure to learn the correct pronunciation, you’ll fall in to the trap of guessing the incorrect pronunciation and then start to reinforce that mistake each time you see the character, which will make it that much more difficult to correct later.
Words that I’ve seen previously, but that I didn’t learn because I’d already filled up my quota for the day. Logic dictates that these words are more common (at least in the context of whatever content I’m reading/watching at the time) and therefore more likely to be worth learning ahead of others.
Other new words. If I’ve still got room to spare in my quota after all of the above, then it’s first come, first served.

When learning a new word, I’ll look it up in the dictionary to get the meaning, and then relate it back to the part of the novel where I read it, or the T.V. show where I saw it.

Even now, I can still think back to the stories where I learnt many words in my vocabulary because those stories serve as a memory hook that helps define the words for me. Having vivid context from a surrounding story makes it easier to remember words, so I typically won’t need to spend much effort trying to memorise the meaning because I can just think back and remember the context of when I first learned the word.

I’ll also add the word to a flashcard program. Pleco is my flashcard program of choice due to the excellent dictionaries available, but I don’t like to build up large flashcard decks, and typically delete my deck once reviews start to take more than 30 mins a day and start over (see here for discussion on why this is a good idea). Instead I use flashcards to get vocab in to short-term memory, and then use regular reading and exposure to help with long-term retention.

Having a daily quota helps keep vocabulary learning manageable. Regular reading helps you catch common words that you missed in previous days and reinforces knowledge of existing vocabulary.

Combined, these two techniques are a fantastic way to build your vocabulary and improve your Chinese.

The mathematics of learning Chinese

Thu, 27 May 2021 07:34:49 +1000

I like maths. Maths helps us solve numbers problems.

In some ways, learning Chinese is a numbers problem and therefore it’s reasonable that many people turn to maths to try and help them solve the problem of learning Chinese.

You need to be careful though to make sure that you are doing the right kind of maths.

For example, it’s not uncommon for a mathematically inclined person to approach learning Chinese by breaking down the numbers and figuring out how many characters they need to learn per day in order to be able to learn Chinese in the fastest amount of time.

The Chinese government defines basic literacy for white collar workers and urban residents as knowing at least 2,000 characters (source).

Let’s ignore for the moment the fact that ‘number of characters known’ is a poor indicator of literacy for Chinese learners (even though it’s a useful one for native speakers), and instead focus on something which is all too common - a newcomer to Chinese seeing a statistic like the one quoted above and thinking:

“If I learn 5 characters a day, then in one month I’ll know 150 characters, but if I learn 50 characters a day, then in one month I’ll know 1,500, and in two months I’ll know 3,000 which is more than enough to be able to read. Therefore if I can study hard for 2 months I’ll be literate by the end. Problem solved.”

The problem with this approach is that Chinese is not made up of characters.

I mean, it is at the base level in the same way that English is made up of letters of the alphabet, but the language is made up of words and you need far more than 2,000 words in order to achieve literacy. You’re probably looking at around 5,000-6,000 words for basic literacy (simple comics, content aimed at younger children, HSK level 6 and around 10,000 words before getting to a point where newspapers and novels become approachable without heavy reliance on a dictionary.

Undeterred, an interepid newcomer takes the same approach as before and thinks “HSK 6 requires a vocabulary of 5,000-6,000 words, I’ll learn 50 words a day, study hard for 4-5 months and achieve basic literacy by the end. Problem solved.” More ambitious learners might even decide to up the rate to 100 words a day in order to achieve maximum results in the shortest amount of time possible.

They have broken down the maths to the following equation:

Total words learnt = words per day * days spent learning

and decided that the optimal way to increase ‘total words learnt’ is to increase the ‘words per day’ variable.

This approach is flawed however because 50 (or 100) words a day is an unsustainable rate.

Learning 50-100 new words a day is definitely doable (including time to revise words learnt from previous days), as long as you are able to devote several hours per day to full-time study. It’s not sustainable however and although you might be able to keep it up for a short time, if you do it for too long you’ll burn out, stop doing any learning for a few months and forget most of what you ‘learnt’ anyway.

Note the quotes around ‘learnt’ though, because the next flaw with the ‘learn as much as possible in as short an amount of time as possible’ approach is that if you are learning 50 words a day you probably aren’t learning each word well, at least not in terms of long-term retention and ability to use the word.

Learning 50 words a day is not a problem. Remembering all those words and being able to use them well one year later is.

To learn a word well for the purposes of literacy, you need repeated exposure and usage over time, and SRS tools aren’t going to be nearly as effective as you think at helping you with that because the skills required for reading are different from the skills developed by reviewing flashcards.

Assuming that you are going to be spending at least 2-3 years studying Chinese, and that you’re still going to have an interest in the language in 5 years time, you are better off considering strategies that use time as the multiplier rather than words per day.

I know there are people who think “I’m in a rush. I don’t want it to take 2 years before gaining literacy, I want to do it in months”, but you’re not going to be able to do that. Even if you learn a massive number of words and characters, you’ll run in to the problem where you understand all the characters in a sentence but you don’t have any idea what the sentence means.

You are going to be much better off in the long term if you are realistic about the challenge you face and set appropriate goals and strategies.

If you’re working with the same equation mentioned above, and if you want to maximise the ‘learnt’ component of ‘total words learnt’, then the part you should be focused on is not ‘words per day’, but ‘days spent learning’.

If you take the long view, and accept it’s going to take at least 2-3 years (and probably longer) to obtain basic literacy, you might as well set yourself a nice easy pace for ‘words per day’ that will guarantee you get where you want to go so long as you keep at it.

Slow and steady wins the race.

How many words per day is a good amount to learn? The answer will be highly dependent on each person and the time they are able to put in, but I have found that 5-10 words per day to be a good, sustainable amount. Sustainable being the key word.

Learning 5-10 words a day is easy, trivial almost. It’s such an easy target to achieve that you’d not expect it to be the recommended amount on a site called ‘Chinese the Hard Way’, and yet that’s the amount that I recommend.

Where does the hard part come in? The hard part comes in doing it every day.

5-10 words. Every day. Without fail.

If you can do that, then before you know it you’ll be reading Chinese.

Here’s a table that breaks down the maths.

Years	5 Words per day	10 Words per day
1	1,825	3,650
2	3,650	7,300
3	5,475	10,950
4	7,300	14,600
5	9,125	18,250

For example, if you learn 5 words a day, then in 1 month you’ll know 150 words, in 6 months you’ll know 900 words, and in 1 year you’ll know 1,825 words. After two years that number will be 3,650, and in three years you’ll be at 5,475 words.

Those 5,475 words will contain somewhere in the region of 2,000-3,000 characters, and if you’ve been learning useful words you’ll be on the right path to reaching basic literacy. All from 5 words a day. You might scoff at 5 words a day, but no-one will scoff at knowing 2,000-3,000 characters.

The numbers look even better if you learn 10 words a day, and if you can keep up that pace, then 2-3 years from starting you should be able to read simpler newspapers and books without too much difficulty, and in 5 years you’d have a sizeable vocabulary.

Beyond 10 words a day and you’ll start to hit the laws of diminishing returns in terms of effectiveness because everyone has a finite amount of time per day they can spend studying Chinese and this means that 1) learning too many new words per day decreases the amount of time you can spend on each word, and 2) spending too much time on vocabulary acquisition decreases the amount of time you can spend practising other skills.

Don’t be in such a rush to learn Chinese that you lose sight of your long-term goals, and don’t focus on the wrong part of the Chinese learning equation.

Chinese is a numbers problem, but more importantly it’s a problem of time.

Internalise the tones

Fri, 27 Sep 2019 14:37:04 +1000

A common mistake people make when learning Chinese is to treat tones as a separate part of the pronunciation.

For example they’d look at the characters 妈、麻、马 and 骂 and think of the pronunciation as:

    ma + 1st tone  
    ma + 2nd tone  
    ma + 3rd tone  
    ma + 4th tone

This represents an incorrect mental model of the Chinese language that makes it difficult to learn and remember the tones.

By way of comparison, consider the English words: bat, bet, bit, bot and but.

You would never tell someone learning English that the pronunciation of these words was:

    bt + a  
    bt + e  
    bt + i  
    bt + o  
    bt + u

And then tell people to learn them as the bt sound plus the 1st vowel or the bt sound plus the 2nd vowel and so on. That would be insane and would make it more difficult to remember the pronunciation.

And yet that is what many people do with Chinese by splitting the tone from the initial+final and thinking of it as ma + 1st tone or ma + 3rd tone.

If you do this, you are making life more difficult for yourself by using an incorrect mental model of Chinese pronunciation that requires more effort to remember.

The correct mental model is to see tones as an integral part of the pronunciation that can’t be separated from the sound.

Just like you wouldn’t confuse ma with na when remembering 马, you shouldn’t confuse mā and mǎ because you should see ā and ǎ as completely separate sounds, that are as distinct and clear in your mind as m and n.

This is how native Chinese speakers see their language. A native speaker doesn’t pay attention to the tone of the word, they just see the tones as separate sounds.

If you ask a native speaker the tone for “马” most of them won’t have an immediate response, rather they will say “马” and then “mā má mǎ mà” to see which sound matches the sound of “马” and then tell you that as the answer.

Native speakers don’t know the tones as separate parts of the pronunciation, they just know the complete, full sound, tone included, and this is what you should try to emulate.

For speakers of non-tonal languages, it can be difficult to treat the tones as unique sounds and so you need to expend effort to internalise the tones such that each of them are as distinct in your mind as if you had heard a different vowel or different consonant.

The way to do this is by mindfully listening to recordings of the tones over and over again, not paying any attention to meaning, and just paying attention to how the sounds are different, until you get to the point where you can “hear” and distinguish the different tones in your head without needing any audio prompt.

There will be some people who argue that they are not aural learners and they don’t have the ability to recall sounds like this, but this is almost certainly not true.

If I told you to think of the tune to “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” or the “Happy Birthday” song, you could almost certainly hear them in your head without needing any prompt.

If you think about why you can recall these sounds, it’s because you listened to those songs hundreds of times while growing up, to the point that you have completely internalised the sounds.

Likewise I’m sure you could think of your favourite character from a television show or movie and “hear” them speak lines in your head with varying emotion and inflection in their voice.

You can do that because you’ve invested hours and hours listening intently to what they had to say, playing back your favourite scenes in your mind over and over again, and now you are at the point where you have internalised their voice and speaking patterns.

This is what you need to do with the tones.

Listen intently, over and over again, for hours, focusing only on the sound rather than the meaning and playing the sounds back in your mind until you can recall them with ease.

No one is good at it at first, but it is something that can be trained.

Once you’ve done that, then remembering the tones is no more difficult than remembering the vowels or remembering the consonants, because you’ll remember the whole sound rather than a sound split in to multiple parts that you then have to try and put back together.

Although it takes effort to get to this point, spending time developing this ability pays off in the long run, and leaves you with a much simpler mental model of the language, with less to remember.

Finding suitable reading content

Wed, 19 Jul 2017 10:24:04 +0800

Finding Chinese content suited to your current level is one of the most important things you can do if you want to read native materials.

If you try to read something too far above your current level then reading it will feel like a chore and it will also destroy your confidence. This is because even after learning hundreds (or even thousands) of new words you will still need to perform frequent dictionary lookups to understand the text and it will feel like you aren’t making any progress, despite the large number of words already learnt.

On the other hand, reading something at the right level, or only slighly above your level, will make you feel energized and give you a huge sense of satisfaction because you will feel that you can read Chinese! Which is an awesome feeling to have.

You’ll also be picking up new vocabulary which will make content that was previously too difficult much more accessible. It becomes a positive feedback loop where you feel good about reading, which makes you read more, which makes you learn more vocabulary, which makes it easier to read, which makes you feel good about reading, and so on.

Finding something at the right level can be a challenge however, because it’s difficult to know beforehand how suitable a given text is based on your current vocabulary, and that’s where a program like Chinese Text Analyser can come in useful.

Chinese Text Analyser analyses Chinese text and provides you with statistics you can use to compare the relative difficulties of different texts based on your known vocabulary. It works with novels, newspaper articles, blog posts or any other Chinese text that has an electronic copy, and it’s fast enough that it can be used to analyse a full novel, or even several novels, in just a few seconds.

To make a comparison, simply open the texts you are interested in, and compare the various word statistics. This can be done by opening files from disk, or directly pasting from the clipboard.

For example, the table below shows the ‘Total Percent Known’ statistics for HSK 4, 5 and 6 level vocabularies for the 5 novels 《许三观卖血记》,《活着》,《圈子圈套》,《雪山飞狐》and《天龙八部》:

Title	HSK 4	HSK 5	HSK 6
许三观卖血记	61.5%	65.9%	67.3%
活着	60.7%	65.4%	68.4%
圈子圈套	58.7%	64.4%	67.4%
雪山飞狐	41.5%	45.9%	49.0%
天龙八部	40.8%	46.0%	49.0%

Although not a perfect indicator of difficulty, if you’ve been using Chinese Text Analyser long enough and it has built up an accurate model of your vocabulary, then the percentage of total known words in a text will be a reasonably proxy for difficulty, especially when comparing the relative difficulty of multiple texts against each other.

From this table, we can see that《许三观卖血记》,《活着》and《圈子圈套》have approximately similar difficulty in each of the above vocabulary levels, with the first two novels being slightly easier at the HSK 4 level. By comparison 《雪山飞狐》and《天龙八部》are significantly more difficult across all levels.

If you have read these books, you’ll find this closely corresponds to their actual difficulty.

The amount of currently known words is not the only thing you should consider when deciding which book would be easier to read. It’s also important to get an idea of how many words it will take to reach a certain percentage of understanding of the text.

In Chinese Text Analyser you can do this by looking at the ‘Unknown’ tab of the word list view, sorting by the ‘Frequency’ column in descending order, and then scrolling down until the ‘Cumulative % Frequency’ is at the level you’d like to reach. Now you can look at the row number to get the approximate number of words you’d need to learn to reach that level.

98% is generally around the point at which unknown words in the text do not hinder understanding. See this video for a good explanation of why. ‘Sinosplice’ also has demonstrations of this in English and Chinese.

If we take the same novels above and look at the number of words it takes to reach 98% comprehension of the text starting from a base of HSK 4, 5 and 6 then we get the following results:

Title	HSK 4	HSK 5	HSK 6
许三观卖血记	2,400	2,100	1,910
活着	2,910	2,570	2,300
圈子圈套	5,350	4,650	4,060
雪山飞狐	5,630	5,280	4,850
天龙八部	9,920	9,370	8,560

For someone at HSK 4 level trying to choose which book to read,《许三观卖血记》would probably be the best choice out of these five texts.

Not only does it have the largest amount of known words, it also has the smallest amount of words needed to learn before being able to understand 98% of the text.

For someone at HSK 6, it’s a bit less clear. 《活着》has the most currently known vocabulary, but 《许三观卖血记》requires learning less vocabulary to reach 98%, and ultimately that probably makes it a better choice to read. In any case, those two books have the same author, style and setting and so many of the words you learn in one novel will be directly relevant to the other one.

《圈子圈套》has a similar amount of known words as the first two books, however by looking at the second table we can see it requires learning a much larger number of new words to get to 98% understanding of the text. This means that if you were trying to choose between these 5 books, you’d be better off leaving this book for later. As you read other texts, you’ll expand your vocabulary and that will eventually make this novel more accessible.

Rounding out the 5 books we have《雪山飞狐》and《天龙八部》, which by both metrics are significantly more difficult than the other texts and therefore they would be poor choices to read at this point in time.

Regardless of the text you are comparing, Chinese Text Analyser provides a quick and easy way to compare which of several texts is the most suitable for you to read at a given point in time.

Just open the texts, compare the relevant statistics, choose the one that’s easiest - either in terms of how well you can currently understand it, or how many words you need to learn to reach a certain level of understanding of the text, and then get reading!

By choosing content suitable for your level, you can make reading (and studying) an enjoyable process rather than a chore, and improve your Chinese at the same time.

Confidence in knowing a word

Wed, 12 Jul 2017 10:45:19 +0800

Sometimes it’s easy to convince yourself that you know a word even though your actions demonstrate that this is not the case.

For example, imagine you are reading something in Chinese and you encounter a word that you’re 90% sure of.

You look it up in the dictionary ‘just to check’, and sure enough, it means what you thought it did and it’s pronounced how you thought it was, and you think to yourself ‘yes, I was right, I do know that word’, and so you keep reading, oblivious to the fact that actually you were wrong and you don’t know that word.

You might have learnt that word before, but you don’t know it because if you knew it, you wouldn’t have needed to look it up in the dictionary.

At this point you might protest that you did know the word, you just weren’t 100% confident that you were right.

The thing is though, for reading, confidence is just as important as knowing every other aspect of the word. If you are not confident about the word then you don’t know it well enough yet and would benefit from spending time studying it further.

If you convince yourself that you know words that you clearly and demonstrably don’t, you’ll never spend the effort required to learn them properly.

The next time you look up a word ‘just to check’ that should trip a mental trigger that you need to spend time studying that word, even if you ‘got it right’, to make sure you’ll be 100% confident of it in the future.

Maybe that means you spend a minute or two going over the word in your mind, paying attention to the parts you were not 100% sure of and telling yourself that you’ll be sure of them next time. Maybe it means adding it to a flashcard deck for further revision. Maybe it means both, or something else entirely. The important thing is to pay attention to any word you look up in the dictionary, regardless of how well you ‘know’ it, and spend some more time learning so that next time you won’t need to look it up.

Otherwise you’re not learning the word well enough to use in real life situations, and you’ll never be able to free yourself from using a dictionary.

More haste = less speed

Wed, 05 Jul 2017 10:12:07 +0800

It’s not uncommon for some learners of Chinese to decide that they want to learn Chinese as fast as possible, and they decide that the best way to do this is to try and learn as many new words per day as they can.

Although they have the best of intentions, this can be a flawed approach because increasing the number of words you learn per day can decrease the amount you learn, especially if you are talking about learning words in the long-term such that they are useful to you in daily life.

Although this might seem counterintuitive, if you think about it for a bit it does make sense.

Each day, everyone has a limit to the amount of time that they can spend studying vocabulary (whether that’s half an hour, or four, five or even more hours), and whatever amount of time that is, you need to distribute it amongst the words you want to learn. The more words you learn, the less time you have per word, and/or the less time you can spend doing other learning activities because vocabulary acquisition is taking up all of your study time.

For example, let’s say you have 1 hour per day for studying Chinese vocabulary.

If you set yourself a goal of learning 10 new words, that’s about 6 minutes per word.

If instead you decide to learn 20 new words a day, this reduces the amount of time per word to 3 minutes each.

Perhaps 3 minutes is still plenty of time for you to learn a new word well, but you should be able to see the basic principle that’s at work here - by increasing the amount of words you learn on any given day, you are decreasing the amount of time you can spend on each word. Either that or you are decreasing the time available to spend on other activities that can help improve your Chinese.

Add too many new words, and eventually you’ll hit the point where you are decreasing the quality of the learning that you are doing.

Obviously each person has their own sweet spot for the amount of time to spend learning a word, and it’s something that will change over time for each person as their Chinese ability improves.

It’s important for Chinese learners to find the correct balance between quality and quantity, and it’s important to consider what it means to have learnt a word. If you’re not careful and you don’t pay attention to this and simply think that adding a word to your SRS program means that you’ve learnt it, then you’ll end up with a whole bunch of half-learnt words that you can’t really use in practice, even though you might be getting all these words ‘correct’ on your SRS revisions.

This problem will become apparent when you try reading an article and you think “ahh, I know I’ve learnt that word but I can’t remember what it means”.

Actually, what that indicates is that you haven’t really learnt that word properly yet.

This is a common problem when vocabulary acquisition drives your learning process, especially if you are doing vocabulary acquisition to the exclusion of other activities such as reading, listening or watching native content.

Getting back to what it means to learn a word, consider the following questions:

Can you read it?
Can you write it?
Do you understand the meaning?
Can you understand it if you hear it in isolation?
Can you pronounce it?

If you can do this, you’ve learnt the word to a basic level, but that’s not really enough to use it in real life. Consider the next set of questions:

Can you read it and instantly know the meaning and pronunciation without thinking?
Can you understand it if you hear it in a sentence spoken at native speed?
Can you use it in a sentence without pausing and thinking?
Will you still be able to do all of the above in 1 month’s time?
In 1 year’s time?

These are the things you will need to be able to do if you want to be able to comfortably read a book or watch TV or converse easily with a native speaker.

Obviously it takes more time and effort to learn words to this level, which then gets back to the main issue, because spending more time per word means learning less words per day.

Learning less words per day is not a bad thing and is not something you should worry about as slowing down your learning.

You don’t need to learn every new word right now. The important ones will come up regularly and you can learn them then. The ones that don’t come up regularly are, by definition, not as important to you and so you can safely ignore them until later. As long as you are learning things and you are consistent and regular in your study you will make progress.

Learning Chinese is a long-term endeavour and is something that will take you years.

Rather than setting your goal as ‘x number of words per day’ you should set your goal as ‘x number of days in a row learning Chinese’. It’s a far better way to make progress and it will help you develop sustainable study habits.

Learning from general word lists is inefficient

Wed, 28 Jun 2017 10:13:43 +0800

If you are at the point where you are starting to read native content but you find that your vocabulary is lacking, one of the least effective things you can do to boost your vocabulary is learn from word lists such as the HSK or other word lists based on general frequency.

The reason for this is quite simple - generic word lists are derived from a large body of content, spanning multiple fields, genres and topics. They contain a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and therefore only a little bit is going to be relevant to what you are currently reading and the rest will be words you are not going to use or encounter for months (or maybe even years).

Eventually you are going to want to know all of those words, but right now, whatever you are reading is going to be on a reasonably specific topic of some sort and it will be a more productive use of your time to learn frequently occurring words from that content rather than learning from general lists.

How much better? As it turns out, significantly better. In fact it will probably be orders of magnitude more effective to learn currently relevant words than it will be to learn words from a pre-compiled list such as the HSK word lists.

That’s a bold statement, but the numbers back it up. For example, imagine you had studied to HSK 4 level (which going by the HSK word lists is around 1,200 words) and have now decided to start reading native content.

You’d heard that the novel《活着》was a good first book for Chinese learners because it has relatively simply grammar and vocabulary, and so you decide to give it a try.

You load it up in Chinese Text Analyser and see that with an HSK 4 level vocabulary, you will understand approximately 61% of the total text (HSK 5 and HSK 6 aren’t much better, giving you 65% and 68% respectively). That’s not great, and in fact it’s probably a little too far above your current level, but you decide that you’re going to stick at it anyway, and each day you’re going to learn the 10 most frequent unknown words.

Every day you open an electronic copy of《活着》in Chinese Text Analyser and export the 10 most frequent unknown words. You’ll study these words in some flashcard program such as Pleco or Anki, and so you also get Chinese Text Analyser to mark these words as known so that each day you’ll be getting a list of 10 new words.

If you do that every day, and learn all those words then after:

1 month you will know an extra 300 words, and understand 83% of the text.
2 months you will know an extra 600 words, and understand 88% of the text.
3 months you will know an extra 900 words, and understand 91% of the text.

By comparison, if you decided instead to learn all the HSK 5 vocabulary before starting to read《活着》you would need to learn 1,300 words (starting from HSK 4), but after doing that, you’d still only be able to understand 65% of the text.

In other words, you would have put in more effort, for worse results.

Going even further, if you thought that 65% was still not enough and so you decided to learn all the HSK 6 vocabulary first, you would need to learn an extra 3,300 words (from an HSK 4 base), and would still only reach 68% coverage of the total text.

That’s heading in to orders of magnitude territory -

900 words for a 30% increase in understanding (0.03% increase per word) vs
3,300 words for a 7% increase in understanding (0.002% increase per word)

Those numbers are pretty clear, but for this example, learning vocabulary up to HSK 6 instead of learning words based on frequency within the text is especially a waste of time once you consider that if you’d learnt the 3,300 most frequent unknown words from the novel itself (starting from an HSK 4 base), you would have 98% comprehension of the text - a large enough amount that you’d be able to imply the meaning of most of the remaining unknown words from context.

The benefits also carry over in to new content.

Say that after 3 months (and 900 new words) you finish reading《活着》and decide to try another novel from the same author《许三观卖血记》.

You’d start with 83% comprehension of the new text, compared to 65% if you’d just learnt HSK 5 words, and 68% if you’d learnt HSK 6 words.

Or perhaps you want a break from rural China during the Cultural Revolution and decide to read a different novel from a completely different author in a completely different setting, for example《圈子圈套》which is set in the Beijing IT industry in the early 2000’s.

After learning 900 of the most frequent unknown words from《活着》(starting from a base of HSK 4) you’d have 72% coverage of the new novel, compared to 64% for HSK 5, and 67% for HSK 6.

As you can see from the numbers, the HSK list, with it’s ‘little bit of this and little bit of that’ approach does a great job at being consistent across novels and genres (high 60’s for HSK 6, low 60’s for HSK 4). However, in terms of being able to understand the content you are trying to read right now, learning high-frequency words is significantly more effective.

Whatever way you slice it, you will almost always come out ahead if you learn the most frequent words from what you are reading rather learning from a pre-compiled list, and using a program such as Chinese Text Analyser you can quickly and easily find that vocabulary and extract it from the text you are reading.

Train what you want to learn

Wed, 21 Jun 2017 10:18:01 +0800

Think for a moment about the things you’d like to be able to do in Chinese.

Would you like to be able to read a newspaper?

Would you like to be able to understand T.V. shows?

Would you like to be able to speak fluently using well-formed sentences?

Probably you’d like to be able to do all of that and more, unfortunately, there might be a large gap between your current level and the level required to be able to do those things, and so the question you find yourself asking is: how can I improve my Chinese so that I will be able to do X?

Regardless of X, the answer to this is simple.

If you’d like to be able to do X, the best way to learn it is by doing it.

The reason for this is that by doing the thing you want to learn you’ll quickly bump in to problems that are holding you back.

Each bump is something specific that you can work on and improve so that it doesn’t hold you back as much the next time, and each time you fix one of those bumps your ability will improve. Once you’ve fixed many bumps, you’ll find that you have made noticeable improvement.

Which is to say, by practising the things that you want to improve, you’ll find out where any problems and weaknesses are, and once you know that, you can devote time to fixing them.

If you don’t practise the actual thing that you want to learn then you’ll never get a good understanding for the things that are holding you back, and there’s a good chance you’ll be spending your time on things which you think are important, but in reality might not be relevant to whatever it is that you are trying to learn.

Yes, there will always be some degree of crossover with other skills, so the vocabulary and grammar you learn when reading newspapers will help you watching T.V. dramas, and watching T.V. dramas will help you with conversation, and so on, but there is no substitute for actually doing the thing you want to learn in order to learn it.

Therefore, if you’d like to be able to read newspapers, the best thing you can do is start reading newspapers and learning the things that you don’t understand.

If you’d like to be able to watch T.V. shows, the best thing you can do is start watching T.V. shows and learning vocabulary and expressions that you don’t understand, while repeatedly looping sections of audio that you can’t process quickly enough until you reach a point where you can process it quickly enough.

If you’d like to be able to speak fluently using well-formed sentences, the best thing you can do is practise speaking well formed sentences out loud, recording yourself and making corrections, and once you are comfortable with a sentence try dropping it in a conversation with a native speaker and see how it goes.

Initially, you will find it difficult to do things that you are not yet good at, but it will get easier with regular and consistent practice. You’ll also be learning vocabulary and skills that are directly relevant to you at that point in time - unlike say learning from a pre-made deck of flashcards that may or may not contain vocabulary relevant to you and that won’t involve practising the skills you need (unless you are training to become the world flashcard champion).

Doing the thing that you want to be able to do will give you concrete feedback about specific points that are causing you trouble and it gives you something tangible to fix and improve. You just need to do that thing regularly and consistently, and make improvements whenever something causes you to stumble.

Don’t expect to get good at something without practicising that thing, and don’t expect to get good at something without regular, consistent and correct practice over a sustained period of time.

This applies equally well to Chinese as it does to anything else you have a mind to learn.

HSK 6 gets you halfway

Wed, 14 Jun 2017 10:15:23 +0800

Imagine that you’ve been studying hard for a couple of years and have finally passed HSK 6. Going by the HSK wordlists, you’d know about 2,600 characters and around 5,000 words.

The Chinese government defines literacy for urban, white collar workers as knowing more than 2,000 characters (source), so congratulations, you’re no longer illiterate.

Unfortunately, you may still feel illiterate because if you try to read native level newspapers and novels, you’ll be overwhelmed by new words and characters.

How overwhelmed you ask?

Let’s look at the numbers and see how often you’ll come across an unknown character if you know all the characters from the HSK wordlists up to level 6.

Normally words rather than characters are the important unit to consider when learning Chinese, but this article looks at characters because that will let us establish the minimum baseline of unknown words that someone at HSK level 6 is likely to encounter. You might be able to guess the meaning of unknown words you read in context if you know all the characters, but a word with an unknown character in it is guaranteed to be at least partly unknown.

The following tables contain HSK 6 character statistics generated by Chinese Text Analyser for several novels of varying length and difficulty.

Each table contains the total number of characters in the novel (both unique and overall), along with the total number of characters from the novel that are also found in levels 1-6 of the HSK wordlists.

《活着》

Characters	Total	HSK 6	%HSK 6
Unique	2,015	1,776	88.14%
All	81,508	79,679	97.76%

《哈利波特与魔法石》

Characters	Total	HSK 6	%HSK 6
Unique	2,806	2,215	78.94%
All	132,950	128,044	96.13%

《哈利波特与死亡圣器》

Characters	Total	HSK 6	%HSK 6
Unique	3,221	2,241	75.16%
All	307,817	296,079	96.19%

《天龙八部》

Characters	Total	HSK 6	%HSK 6
Unique	4,118	2,552	61.97%
All	1,023,987	983,936	96.09%

What’s interesting about the above numbers is that even though the more difficult texts have a much higher percentage of unique unknown characters, the percentage of all characters you’d be able to recognise is roughly similar at 96-97%.

You might look at those numbers and think that 96-97% recognition of all characters seems pretty good, but for the purposes of reading comprehension it’s actually quite terrible. If you do the math, that’s 3-4 characters out of every 100 that are unknown, which works out to one unknown character for every 20-30 characters you read. For reference, that’s about this much text:

我比现在年轻十岁的时候，获得了一个游手好闲的职业，去乡间收集民间歌谣。

Or one unknown character per sentence.

A typical Chinese novel has about 500-600 characters per page, and at the above rate, that works out to roughly 20 new characters per page.

That’s what HSK 6 gets you in real terms when reading a Chinese novel, approximately one unknown character per sentence and twenty new characters per page.

If your goal was to have no more than one new character per page of text, you’d need to recognise 99.8% of all characters on the page.

According to the JunDa character frequency list for imaginative texts you’d need to know ~4,400 of the most frequent characters to get that level of coverage.

In other words, HSK 6 gets you about halfway there.

If that seems disheartening, it gets worse.

Those 2,600 characters you already know get you 96-97% recognition of all characters you are likely to encounter in a novel. The next 2,000 characters will only get you an extra 3-4% recognition, and that makes learning them a long hard grind, with little reward along the way.

The point of this article is not to demotivate you though, rather it’s to help you set expectations.

If you’ve passed HSK 6 and are wondering why you still can’t read novels without being overwhelmed by new vocabulary, well, don’t worry, it’s completely normal and as the numbers show, it’s to be expected.

How long does it take to learn Chinese?

Wed, 07 Jun 2017 10:11:49 +0800

It’s quite common for people starting out with Chinese to want to know how long it will take to learn the language.

The answer to this depends a lot on what you consider it means to have “learnt” Chinese, after all, Chinese is deep enough that there will always be something more to learn if you want to, even after decades, so really, the learning will only stop once you decide you’ve had enough and are happy with your level.

What you really need to ask is at what point will you be happy with your Chinese such that you feel you have “learnt” it, and then you can consider how long will it take to reach this target.

For me, if someone says they know Chinese, then at a minimum I would expect them to be able to do the following things:

Converse reasonably fluently with native speakers on any given general topic, and if they don’t understand something, other people in the conversation can use Chinese to explain the meaning.
Watch and understand general TV, film and other native content, perhaps not picking up on everything, e.g. certain cultural references, but for the most part being able to follow and enjoy what is going on, and be able to discuss it afterwards with others if needed.
Read and enjoy general Chinese language materials such as websites, newspapers and novels without needing to resort to a dictionary except occasionally (and when they do, a Chinese-Chinese dictionary is enough).
Send email, chat online and/or be able to write (type) about general topics entirely in Chinese.

I think the above serves as a reasonable baseline for being able to say that you know Chinese.

It’s not saying that you understand absolutely everything, or that you never have any problems or make any mistakes, but it demonstrates a level of skill that allows you to function entirely in Chinese without too much difficulty for most situations if you wanted to.

Now some people might say that and that there are plenty of native speakers who can’t read and write Chinese and therefore based on the above definition, I’m saying that they don’t know Chinese.

To this I would say that illiterate native speakers have a little bit more leeway than people who are learning Chinese as a foreign language.

Obviously I’m not going to say that an illiterate native speaker doesn’t know Chinese, but at the same time I will say that being illiterate isn’t really a desirable quality, and it prevents you from being functional in many aspects of the language (this goes for native and non-native speakers alike). So, yes, I have different standards for native speakers vs learners.

If you are illiterate in your native language, then perhaps I’d be prepared to give you a pass if you are also illiterate in Chinese. Otherwise, I see basic literacy as a core skill that I’d expect of any non-native speaker who said they know Chinese.

Definitions aside, we can now start to ask how long it would take to reach that level of Chinese.

Based on my own personal experience, and also on that of others I know (or know of) who have reached that level, I would say that if you are able to devote yourself full-time or almost full-time to your Chinese language studies, and if you work hard and have a good study methodology, then you are probably looking at around 2-3 years to reach this point. If you are unable to commit to full-time study, or if you go at a slower pace, then maybe it will take 4-5 years. If Chinese is just a casual hobby, and you only study on and off, you might not reach that level even after 10 years.

This is not to say that after 6 months or 1 year of study you won’t be able to do anything in Chinese, just that at this point you’re still far away from being able to conduct yourself in Chinese for the majority of situations you’d encounter in your daily life without running in to language related difficulties, and trying to read newspapers and books either with or without the aid of a dictionary will be a frustrating experience.

Once you can do all the things mentioned above, you will still have plenty more to learn, but at least you will have a reasonable degree of comfort in going about your life entirely in Chinese if you want to, and your language ability should not cause too much discomfort to those you are interacting with.

Learning Chinese (or at least learning it well), is a long-term endeavour that is going to be measured in years. This in turn means you should adopt appropriate learning strategies that take this into account, and prepare yourself to be in it for the long-haul.

This way, one year into your journey, when you’re still having the same basic conversations you’ve always had, and you still can’t read a book or a newspaper, you won’t decide to give up.

Learning Chinese is a marathon, not a sprint. Although there might be times where you sprint for a bit, you need to pace yourself if you want to go the distance.

Improving your reading speed

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Reading speed is an important, but often overlooked part of learning a language.

Why is it important you ask? Well, imagine that it takes you 1 month to read a book. If you could double your reading speed, you could read the same book in 2 weeks. Or perhaps you’re taking an exam and it takes you 20 minutes to read a long passage of text. If you could double your reading speed, you could read the same passage in 10 minutes, giving you more time to answer the questions.

Maybe you usually try to spend 30 minutes per day reading newspapers or other Chinese material. If you could double your reading speed, you’d be able to read twice as much in the same time, which means greater exposure to the language and greater reinforcement of vocabulary and grammar structures, ultimately leading to better Chinese. The benefits of increasing your reading speed will flow on to almost every other aspect of your Chinese.

Doubling your reading speed might seem implausible, but unless you have already made a conscious effort to improve it, you likely fixed your reading speed at a slow pace during the beginner and intermediate stages of learning and habit has kept it at this level even as you advanced your other skills.

If this is the case, then you’ll have plenty of room for improvement, and with a little effort you can make large gains in reading speed and reap the benefits of being able to do more with the same amount of time.

To improve your reading speed, the first thing you need to do is make sure you are not sounding out and/or sub-vocalising words as you read them (a common habit picked up during beginner stages). To check if you do this, choose a passage of text and read it to yourself. As you are reading, pay attention to what you do as you read. Do your lips move along as you are reading? Does your tongue move at all when you encounter words like 知、吃，师 and 日 because it helps you ‘hear’ the sound better? Are you sounding out the pronunciation of each word (or even each character) as you go at a speed that matches a clear, slow audio recording? If you do any or all of these, then you should focus on trying not to do that because each of those habits will slow your reading speed.

The ideal situation is have the words go straight from the page to your brain without the need to wait for various muscles in and around your mouth to move. This is what happens when I read in my native language (English). I don’t even have to try to read something. My brain will process the meaning of words without me having to think about them. That is the ideal state that I want to reach with my Chinese and it’s not easy to get there (it’s still something I’m working on).

Once you’ve made yourself aware of the things that might be slowing you down, the next thing to do is practice speeding things up. First you need to select a passage of text - this can be anything from a few hundred to a few thousand characters, but make sure to choose something appropriate for your Chinese level. Nothing slows reading down like not understanding what you are reading, so go over the passage slowly, making sure you understand the meaning of every word and sentence. You should look up and learn anything that you don’t know - although you want to keep this to a minimum, hence the importance of selecting the right text. If you find the text has too many new words then it is above your level and you need to find a more suitable passage.

Next, get a stopwatch (most mobile phones have them) and time yourself reading your chosen passage at your normal reading speed. When you finish, calculate your reading speed in characters per minute (cpm = characters / seconds * 60). Let’s say it came out to 100 cpm. Now set yourself a target goal of 110 cpm and read the same passage again but purposefully try to read it faster. Note any places where you got stuck or slowed down, and go over them closely until you are sure that they won’t slow you down the next time. Repeat the process until you can read the passage at your target speed. Once you can do that, switch to a new passage of text and repeat the process. Once you can reach your target level on a new passage the first time you read it, set your target higher (say 120 cpm), and begin everything again.

Every now and then, it’s also good to try reading the selected passage at a significantly faster pace, e.g. if your current reading speed is 150 cpm, try to read it at 400 cpm. Practice doing this 10-20 times and then try dropping back to 200 cpm. You’ll find it much easier to do this than if you’d tried to jump straight from 150 cpm to 200 cpm.

The keys to make these drills effective are:

Select material at the right level - doing this sort of exercise is not about learning new words/characters, it’s about improving the reading speed of things you already know. You don’t want to be bogged down by unfamiliar words and sentence structures, so choosing the right material is key.
Time yourself - having empirical evidence about your current reading speed is vital to helping you set realistic targets. It also helps show you the progress you are making, which can be a useful motivational tool when you find this sort of repetitive process bores you to tears. Have a stopwatch and a calculator handy. Tabulate your results in a spreadsheet that tracks progress over time. Don’t just rely on “feeling”, because it can be difficult to notice small day to day improvements.
Set small, easy to obtain targets for improvement - At lower speeds (i.e. < 300 cpm) 10% increases in speed are usually quite easy to reach. This adds up quickly, and after regular practice, you may well find that you’ve doubled your reading speed.
Keep using new material - this shows that your actual reading speed is improving, rather than you just being familiar with the same passage of text.
Regular practice - You’re better off doing 15 mins a day everyday, rather than 2 hours once a week, even though the latter technically requires you to do more work. The reason for this is that in the days where you don’t practice, you’ll lose all the gains in speed that you made during your previous study session. Aim for small improvements each day that allow you to maintain and build upon your speed over time.

To give you a gauge for the kind of speeds you should be looking at reaching, a native speaker typically reads anywhere from 300-700 c.p.m.

For the old HSK Advanced (back when they dialed it up to 11), you needed to be reading at around 200-250 cpm just to be able to read all the questions.

For the new HSK 6 the bare minimum you need just to read everything (but have no time left for answers) is ~170 c.p.m. so you should be aiming for a speed of 200-250 c.p.m. to read things comfortably.

If tests aren’t your thing, the average speaking speed for a native Chinese speaker is around 250 cpm, so this should be the minimum baseline to aim for anyway.

If your current reading speed is less than that, then you will benefit from doing this kind of drilling. After that point it starts to get more difficult to make the same sort of speed gains you can make at the lower levels, but it’s still possible to improve.

It’s tiring work to do this kind of drilling, but the benefits are huge, and improving your reading speed will give a boost to almost all aspects of your Chinese learning.