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Depending on how 'in touch' with the language (in terms of understanding grammatical constructions and context clues) you may be considered fairly fluent with 80% or so character recognition Think about your vocabulary in English. If you pick up a book with many words you dont know, you may still be able to comprehend it based on the context of the words ...

Yes, for example these characters are taken from a Chinese grammar textbook: There are obviously others, but as you can see, it's possible to guess the pronunciation. In other cases, according to the radicals, you can understand if they refer to a certain "topic", for example, the third one in that list is the radical for "water", the last one is the ...

There are books specifically designed for learners, such as the Chinese Breeze Graded Readers. These books are small, have constrained vocabulary, and relatively simple stories, but not so basic that you don't feel some sense of accomplishment after reading one. I read the book 错，错，错！ which features police officers investigating a suspicious suicide. The ...

I had heard various numbers over the years, so I guessed at 4000 and generated computer flashcards for reading and writing all the Chinese vocabulary I'll need for the foreseeable future. There are currently 32614 cards with 4166 characters and 18385 words. They are divided into separate files, each with about 100 cards in it. You can download the flashcards ...

This research seems to be relevant. Your question seems to be closely related to rapid reading techniques. Looking on those techniques, you may notice that many of them don't apply to Chinese, simply because logographic writing systems naturally allow rapid reading with no extra training. There is even an idiom, 一目十行 -- "reading ten lines at the same time"; ...

I built some tools to help me with reading practice. I sieved through Chinese text looking for sentences that use only the characters I know. My first attempt was with Twitter updates, but it was kind of a slow process to find and translate them. More recently, I found a huge collection of translated sentences on Tatoeba. I've collected all the sentences ...

I have been able to purchase in China books that have different styles of handwriting including shortcuts. They also have a layer of thin paper over the top of each page so you can trace. You can also look for books that show common characters written in different styles from print, traditional to script etc. This is not something you will be taught unless ...

My personal preference is children's books and television. If you have a China town section of your local city you should be able to find a book store with children's books in them. You usually won't find these books in a regular foreign langauges store or even large chain book stores. The alternative is to go to the children's second language section of a ...

too many characters can be classified into "形声字", which consists of two parts, one (the radical) indicates the topic the character is referred to and the another indicates the possible pronunciation. xiaohouzi79 shows a good example. But remember, there are some commonly used characters that don't follow this, when you can't read a character, dictionary is ...

I don't think that you are taught to write "cursive" in Chinese, most of it is something people just adapt naturally. You just need a really good grasp of characters to understand it. Sometimes people write fast and tend to simplify parts. There is no standard mold for cursive like in english. But what you can do is read a lot of handwritten documents, just ...

It is very likely because you are still learning. When I started learning I had the same experience. At a regular font size, some characters that were different looked indistinguishable. As you become more familiar with the characters, you will find that you are comfortable reading them at smaller font sizes. My suggestion is to use whatever size feels ...

As a native speaker, I'm trying to introspect my understanding process: 借支 is not a common term. Even in the right context (the money business), it may take a while for a native speaker to realize these two characters are meant to be a word. 笔 isn't really ambiguous as its position in the sentence dictated it has to be a noun, so 支 is the measure word and ...

I would recommend 思想与社会 (can't find a link, sold in Taiwan) 博雅汉语 （upper levels） and I would also recommend preteen/teen books like Harry Potter and Twilight. The story isn't too complicated, and you get a chance to enhance your reading speed and smoothness level. I read Percy Jackson and Twilight. The story of Twilight was a little too cheesy for me, ...

In general, we don't care if it is grid aligned or not. And even in fonts that are not fixed-width, the Chinese characters usually have the same width. To make it to look better, it is better to make the right boundary a straight line, not zigzaged. If you find it hard to achieve, then just leave it as it is. Some punctuations, such as commas(，), ...

Based on my experience, about 2000 characters will give you command of most texts. Perhaps 4,000 will make you fluent. For the first 2,000, I recommend, http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Characters-Learn-Remember-Meanings/dp/0982232403.

This is a very good question. Most Chinese would have no difficulty understanding your example sentence due to the sentence structure as explained by tomriddle_1234 in his answer. Once you master the basic grammatical structure and improve on your vocabulary, most of it will fall in place. In cases where Chinese do encounter ambiguities, most of it can be ...

First analyse the context in this sentence, this action happens between you and me. so 借支笔 must be predicate and the object. and "借支" is intransitive or noun, so it cannot point to "笔", if you have more vocabulary, you know "支" is the quantifier for "笔", then 借支笔 = 借 + 支笔 = adverb + object. The original complete phrase should be 借一支笔, as here "一" is saved ...

Other than what others have already said No extra space after period /full stop (。) Use full-width punctuation You also need proper line spacing and paragraph spacing, as Chinese can be read left to right or top down. In many case (eg. newspaper), there is no paragraph spacing, but the first line of each paragraph is indent with 2 full-width character ...

Adding a point to bytebuster's answer: from my own experience, "trackback cost" is another major factor. During fast scanning it is common that I need to go back a few words/characters to get the context or resolve ambiguity. In English, in most cases going back one word or two is not sufficient, I need to go further back or even reread the whole sentence ...

Personally I found learning Chinese after Japanese a very positive experience. Indeed having a good knowledge of Kanji made a big difference and eased the learning of Hanzi. At first it took me a while to get used to simplified characters. Knowing radicals has helped me a great deal. Also I tend to use a lot of technology that was not available when I was ...

Anna mei Banfa! (an early level 2 reader) may be excruciatingly repetitious, but it's a good way to pound those most frequent characters into your head. It's used in high school classes in the US. Make it a bit more interesting by making up a parallel story in your mind about another girl who's a lot more interesting (using the same vocab, or looking up just ...

As far as I know, there isn't any great computer game just for reading and listening practice, especially in Chinese. I recommend that you can just play some famous and traditional computer games in China, such as THE CHINESE LOVE STORY(Chinese name is: 仙剑奇侠传). Many young Chinese people grown up with this game.