1. Find a right book
First of all, choose a right book.This is the most necessary thing.You won’t be able to improve quickly if you don’t do this and reading will be a terrible and boring burden.So, choose a suitable book at your level or a little higher. And, don’t get too far away from your interests.
There are lots of textbooks,some of them are really good, some are just so-so. New Practical Chinese Reader and Road to Success are a couple of good textbooks.As for regular reading,it’s better to choose books written for Chinese people, especially after you get to an advanced level. Sooner you’ll find yourself tired of reading all the things your Chinese teachers thought you to be interested in. This means you’ve finally made a progress. So, make an own decision about what to read. This will be very meaningful to you. It’s not about what kind of book or what the story is. Just remember to find a book at your current level or a bit higher .
2. List the new words and rewrite the passage with them
The key to be fluent in a language is repetition.You need to repeat new words and phrases time after time no matter how badyou are at learning a language . The only difference is that if you’re good, you can repeat fewer times, if you’re bad, you have to repeat more times.How could you remember the new phrases and characters you’ve just read? One good method is tounderline or highlight them, write them down in a notebook, get the pinyin, get the meaning and find examples of using the character. You could review them by reading again and again, which is very inefficient and boring. A better way is to rewrite the story with the new characters, find if you can use them correctly or at least make a few sentences with them. Those characters and phrases will go through your mind again and again when you do that.
3. Get some good examples
Internet is a nice tool to get some examples.Even though you have tried various kinds of ways to improve Chinese reading skills, you probably would still have some characters and phrases you can’t understand well.Don’t lose heart because that’snormal.Just google them. Find the meanings and compare each other. This also works when you’re writing an article and not sure which phrase to use. Search the two phrases, using them in separate sentences, then choose the one which has more searching results on Google. The most efficient way of checking your accuracy is to find a Chinese people as your teacher.