Beginning reading

The most important milestone in language learning is getting to the point where you can actually read in the language. Many language classes never actually get to this point.

As you work towards your beginner goals, you should pick out a beginner reader to work towards. You should look at from the start. It will be impossible at first, but as you come back to it, you will notice it seems less and less formiddable.

If you don't have a beginner reader in mind, here are two popular publishers which make graded readers in Mandarin:

• Chinese Breeze
• Mandarin Companion

More important than the exact level of difficulty is the interest in the story.

Don't expect that you will magically know all of the words, even if you know more words than the stated word count. As you start off, expect that you will need to use your dictionary.

Once you reach the level required for the book, you should expect to use the dictionary to look up a word on average once a sentence. This means while you will know all of the words in a few sentences, most sentences will have a handful of unknown words.

It's not required that you look up every word you come across. As long as you can follow the gist of what's going on, you are doing it right.