I have a question for the advanced learners here: pts, thinkbuddha, 穆儿, Nick, and anyone who considers themselves in this category.

How good is your reading? After learning as many characters as you have, what sorts of things can you read comfortably? What can you read quickly?

Has learning to write Chinese greatly improved your ability to read it?

Any tips on improving reading speed?

I'm getting better. I can read things where there aren't too many new characters and I understand the context. For example, if I'm looking at a list of ingredients on some packaged food item I have an idea of what might be in there (white sugar, processed crap, etc.) so I'm looking for particular words. When I'm reading something where I have some context, I can guess meaning from radicals.

Learning to write forces you to understand the radicals which is absolutely key to reading. I'd say learning to write words with all the radicals is the most important (if you don't want to learn to write every word individually - though by learning the radicals and how they fit together you've pretty much learned it - of course it's much easier to confuse two words if you've never written them out).

For reading speed, read things over and over until you can read them at a native speed - ideally with someone to check to make sure you're not making mistakes. Read 10 of the passages in your textbooks every day for 20 days, re-reading where you stumble. Common phrases and words will be drilled in so you know them instantly on-sight (much better than drilling in stuff you say by saying it over and over - the reading passages will be 'normal' words where the way I at least put oral speech together is sometimes a bit off or unusual).

I'm only moderate, but I can read most of the characters and words in a lot of 海子's poetry (recommended by a Chines friend as the best modern Chinese poet, and fairly readable for a Chinese learner). Now, getting the full meaning is still difficult, and I'm missing a fair amount of vocab (which is mostly doom and gloom stuff - his poetry reads a lot more hopefully when you don't know a fifth of the vocabulary...). The one I've done best on so far is 四姐妹 - you can search it up easily enough.

I also do fairly well with Chinese friends on QQ - though I usually have to look up a word or two a minute in a fairly consistent chat session.

If we're talking about understanding what 穆儿 himself writes, though - I'm usually at least halfway lost - that guy's good at learning and assimilating new stuff; one shortcoming I have is that I don't use a lot of what I learn nearly enough to really know it.

I'm not actually that advanced. I've hardly done any practice in the last two years besides an average of 13 minutes per day of Skritter, because I'm lazy to death. (If I wasn't so lazy, I wouldn't have made Skritter but instead sucked it up and reviewed using flashcards.)

I have learned 2400 characters' writings and tones on Skritter (1300 readings and definitions) and 3700 words' writings and tones (much fewer definitions and readings). I posted here about how much my reading had improved after a year:
http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=40952419

But my reading is still slow, since I don't practice it. My plan for increasing reading speed is to read more. I'm just at the level where I can read Normal Stuff enough to get it, even if it takes a long while, but stuff aimed at younger audiences is still probably better for me. Chloe just bought me Journey to the West. Ambitious for me, she is! Looking through that, I have a long way to go.

ximeng had a great writeup about how he made a ton of progress (he did a lot of things besides Skritter):
http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=23367286

@nick I started with flashcards; Skritter is a whole hell of a lot better.

Journey to the West is one of the things that made me want to learn Chinese, particularly this version:

http://www.china-on-site.com/pages/comic/1.php

James

(this thread is a good follow-on from the one Nick linked to in the posting just above)

I checked out the Breeze graded readers and found them not challenging enough for my level... not that I am so advanced, really. I am sticking with my children's books for a few reasons. I can read them with only a few dictionary look-ups, I can learn usable words and constructs (not ones extracted abusively from the dictionary), the stories make sense (not bizarre archaic stuff that I am not ready for in any language) and I have them. That last point is not insignificant to anyone without access to a Chinese bookstore.

Right now my method for reading faster is just what Doug recommends, reading over and over again. My 8 year old daughter laughs at my reading right now. So we have a competition: she has to get through her 100 math flashcards and I through one book... who is faster?

I like the Chinese breeze series but I really want them to come out with some higher-level stuff. I like how they have ambitious vocab. thrown in there as new words but it is too easy now for me as well. I'd almost like a review-summary of the books I've read that include all the new words but are way shorter (so I can review the new words in context without having to re-read all the simple language).

wow, ximen's testimonial is great, too bad this forum can't have stickies.

Just like Doug and Sarac, I think reading over and over again is helpful, even if it gets boring.
What I like to do is highlight words that I don't know on my first read, then read it over and over, then when you review the text again after a long period of time, it's a great boost to see that all those highlighted characters are no longer unknown.

Something else telling me I am starting to get the hang of it is how I am able to guess when a string of character is actually a proper noun, or an idiom.

Studying the HSK lists are very helpful too, in my current reading practice, I'm seeing quite a few recenlty learned HSK words, so it'nice to know I've not been learning in vain.

What frustrates me the most with my reading is stalling on some words or expressions which I cannot find any informations for in all my sources available. For this reason, I think I'll soon start one on one online tutoring, I think that'll greatly.

Practicing regularly is key, but that's easier said than done :(

@balsa The highlighting idea is a great one. A Russian friend of mine used to watch English-language TV with the closed captioning turned on and write down unfamiliar words with the idea that he would look them up later. Of course he never did. But after a couple of years of living in the US he found his old lists and was thrilled to find that he knew every word.