when I read a Chinese sentence, I find it quite hard to read it fast in a way where I can distinguish the individual words.
I managed to read Japanese relatively fast to some degree, but there the word boundaries are relatively easily distinguished by the Kana in between. In Chinese, I find it very hard. I do not have so much of a problem with individual characters or words, but somehow an entire sentence with characters without any space is quite difficult to read.
Is there maybe any way to speed things up? Some way of practicing (Yes, I know, reading But something faster?)?
This is a kind of strange suggestion, but send yourself an email with the text you want to read and use Google Chrome to look at it. When you double click on a character, Chrome often (but not always) will select an entire phrase, letting you know where to “chunk” each sentence. Try it with the following:
論文的進度目前不如預期，我懷疑都是forumosa害的。
I’m behind on my thesis and I suspect Forumosa is at fault.
It should highlight 論文, 進度, 目前, 不如預期, and 懷疑 as phrases.
The root cause is just insufficient knowledge of words. Knowing more words and knowing them more deeply will make the word boundaries more evident.
When you just have to read, try the reader thingies on Pleco’s dictionary. It does quite a good job of parsing and doesn’t require emailing (though the Google Chrome trick is free, which is always good )
[quote=“Hokwongwei”]This is a kind of strange suggestion, but send yourself an email with the text you want to read and use Google Chrome to look at it. When you double click on a character, Chrome often (but not always) will select an entire phrase, letting you know where to “chunk” each sentence. Try it with the following:
論文的進度目前不如預期，我懷疑都是forumosa害的。
I’m behind on my thesis and I suspect Forumosa is at fault.
It should highlight 論文, 進度, 目前, 不如預期, and 懷疑 as phrases.[/quote]
great suggestion, and the reverse works too. Entering a Chinese sentence, and mouse oer the english words will highlight Chinese words.
Wenlin and Key can both add word spacing to Hanzi texts. Both are good, though Key does the more thorough job unaided because its dictionary has a lot of proper nouns.
In Wenlin, choose Edit --> Make Transformed Copy --> Segment Hanzi.
Basically it all goes down to my reading speed of Chinese texts. I just read waaay to slowly. This is, i guess, because the text just looks like a huge junk of characters to me. I do not have problems (well sometimes, but usually not) to grammatically distinguish words in a Chinese sentence. It just doesn’t work fast when I read something.
I don’t really think that it is because of insufficient knowledge of words. Actually I thought about the problem today when I was writing a text on the computer in Chinese. So I already knew all the words, still, I just couldn’t get a glympse of my text fast.
I will try to segment it, but somehow I wonder if this will help me with natural texts. Usually I am against artifically making the texts easier (e.g. by adding the pronunciation to the words), because it will just come back to you when you want to read real texts.
I have to say that I would consider my character skills relatively advanced. A Japanese text is much easier for me to read. Somehow Chinese suffers from the Kana between the characters.
Then concentrate on improving your recognition – immediate recognition – of the grammatical particles that usually appear in complex sentences and help with parsing. Things like 以， 的，之，所 and the like.
But I still say that if you can’t tell where a word ends, you probably don’t know the words in written form at least. Your brain isn’t “thinking” of the words when you see the characters.
hmm, now I recall when i first started to learn English, I had the exact same problem. I read extremely slow because it just looks like a sea of alphabets. I eventually got better when I developed enough skill to just glance at the word and immediately know what it is .
There’s an issue with “word” here, since most things which translate into individual words in English can very well be whole phrases in Mandarin, and vice versa.
What if you did this: Learn a lot of one-character sentences, two-character sentences, then three-character sentences, then four-character sentences, and so on, and so on? Eventually, the length doesn’t matter, and you have enough pieces to get a sense for the construction. That’s the new approach that I’ve taken to rebuilding my deck more concisely, and it’s been hella interesting.
You’ll also get to learn all of the fun expletives and warnings first when you go about it this way. Also, you’re learning shorter, full-fledged words before you learn the longer ones. Mandarin is chock-full of compound nouns and compound verbs, which you’ll soon discover.
But something faster?)?