When we are still in the initial stage of learning to read Chinese, we often find ourselves trying to translate every Chinese character into English (or whatever our native language is) and then combine the meanings of all the characters to figure out what the sentence is talking about. The reason why we keep translating is because it gives us a sense of security, it’s like a stepping stone that we know how to get across with. But if you keep translating every single Chinese character into English, you will find it very hard to speed up your reading, not to mention that you are not going to get used to how Chinese presents an idea. Therefore, if you could manage to see the meanings instead of translating, that will be great.
Let’s take a simple Chinese sentence for example. Take the sentence “我喜欢茶” for example. When you try to read a Chinese sentence, don’t translate every character immediately, try to observe the positions of every character and see the relationships between them. If you see that the sentence is talking about the speaker, followed by the action and then the object, you will soon get the idea of what this sentence is talking about. If you practice reading several Chinese sentences like this, you will start to observe the relationship between the characters instead of translating.
Many times we stop reading a Chinese sentence when we see a Chinese character that we don’t know its meaning. Then we pull out our dictionaries and try to look up every single character we don’t understand. This is a very bad reading habit because it stops you from reading and you can’t really get the meaning of the sentence. In stead, when you see a character you don’t recognize, try to go ahead and finish reading the sentence. Try to figure out what the sentence is talking about and see if you can get any clue of what that character means.
You can practice reading Chinese like this in a short amount of time. Let’s say you have 15 minutes time to practice reading, pick up two or three simple Chinese sentences and practice reading them. First spend a couple of minutes to read the sentence slowly and observe how the characters relate to each other. Then spend another couple of minutes to read those sentences again and try to get the meaning without translation. Whenever you find any part you don’t understand, go back to try to see the relationship again instead of translation.
As you read more Chinese sentences, you will start to see the same patterns reappear in different sentences. Words for time often come near the beginning, descriptions appear before the object they describe, and actions sit comfortably between the subject and the object. When you start to see those patterns reappear, reading will become very easy and natural. You will not have to translate every single character in order to understand the sentence.