Can Speak - Can't Read

Question

Good Day!

I have an interesting conundrum - I can speak Chinese just fine (in fact I just took an HSK placement exam at the local Confucius Centre and was ranked at 4 for listening and speaking). I however, cannot write (or type if you will) nor can I read past (approx. HSK 2). I would rather learn simplified characters as the people I converse with use those (mainland-Chinese). Any advice? Some background, my wife is Chinese (but due to time constraints and work schedules can't teach me), I lived in China for 18 months, I have only be actively trying to learn Mandarin for about 3 years now, and we speak daily in the home.

Thanks!

EDIT: I have tried learning how to read by using Duolingo which seeing as I can listen (and understand) it has helped a little by learning by association. I also took a class in 2012 as an elective in Uni, but the teacher wasn't great (just checked she has a whooping 1.9 on RateMyProf) and I struggled to understand her let alone a totally foreign language. I understand pinyin just fine, but want to be able to learn the characters.

So my question is -given the above information. Does any one have any resources they would recommend to me to help me learn to read.

Answer 1

A quick way to learn characters is grinding flashcards in the spaced repetition app Anki – there are plenty of existing HSK vocab sets that other users have made. You can also check out Remembering Simplified Hanzi by James Heisig and Timothy Richardson to help with making mnemonics.

For reading, I like Du Chinese and Decipher Chinese, which provide interesting articles with integrated word segmentation and a mobile-friendly pop-up dictionary. Du Chinese also has sentence-level translation, which is great when you can't quite figure out how the sentence works. You can filter articles by difficulty to something you're comfortable with.