Learning to read Chinese fluently is a lifelong project for people who do not grow up in a Chinese-speaking environment. Learning to write Chinese fluently is even tougher.

You can only write a language if you can read it. So let’s start with reading. The primary obstacle to reading Chinese is learning to recognize, identify the meaning of, and pronounce each word you come across, including each character within the word. There are about 5,000 such characters [hanzi] used in everyday Chinese writing. Memorizing these is an enormous task. (Japanese, which uses around 2,000 Chinese characters [kanji] in addition to 71 phonetic kana characters, presents a similar obstacle.)

To get to an advanced level—but not fluency—you need to learn around 5,000 words and the 2,663 characters within those words. Those last two numbers come from the highest level of the HSK test, a standard for students learning Chinese as a second language.

Memorizing characters is not enough. It is not enough to know the general meaning of each character. You must also be able to pronounce each character, and you must learn the meaning of the words in which the character appears. Most Chinese words are “bigrams” with two characters. The individual characters’ meanings are clues to the word’s meaning, but the word itself must be learned. In practice, here is what this feels like to the language learner:

Naive view of reading Chinese: 人 = person. It looks a bit like a person, so that was easy to learn.

Actual experience of reading a simple Chinese sentence containing that same character:

我是美国人。

Explanation:

我 | wǒ | I
是 | shì | am
美国人 | měi-guó-rén | American

As for writing: Writing is much harder than reading because it requires active recall whereas reading requires passive recognition (a much easier cognitive task.) Personally, I believe that if you want to learn Japanese or Chinese, you should master writing the first 500 or so characters so that you fully internalize the stroke order (the mechanics of writing) as well as the components (a.k.a. radicals) that make up each character. For most real-world writing tasks, however, I recommend using a word processor.

Speed and automaticity: Another aspect of reading that confronts intermediate and advanced students of Chinese and Japanese: speed. Reading and writing these languages can be frustratingly slow even for advanced learners. After four years of university Japanese and a summer living with a family in Tokyo, my Japanese was advanced, but reading a novel or newspaper was unrealistic for me because my reading speed was too slow relative to my motivation, attention span, and available time for reading those materials. Fluent reading requires automaticity. If you want to read quickly and fluently, it is not enough to be able to remember the meaning and pronunciation of the language’s words. You must learn to immediately recognize and understand most of the words you encounter.

Conclusion: Learning to read and write Chinese is a valuable use of time and a lifelong mental adventure. It is one of the biggest challenges available for language lovers, self-educators, and memory aficionados. But it is important to be realistic about the task.

You will find people claiming to have learned to write Chinese in six months or a year, but you should be very skeptical of such claims. It is possible for people with extraordinary visual memories to memorize characters quickly, but, as explained above, memorizing characters does not automatically mean that you can read or write the language.

— Ryan from WordBrewery