Welcome!

Hacking Chinese focuses on how to learn rather than what to learn. This website is about unveiling the mysteries of learning a language in general and about learning Chinese in particular. If you’re new to Hacking Chinese, please check the essential articles. You can also see the most recent articles below:

Recent articles

What now?

Apart from checking out the articles above, there are many other ways you can access the content of Hacking Chinese, depending on if you ‘re looking for something specific or just general ideas on how to improve your learning. Here are some suggestions:

• Browse the archive – The best way of accessing the content on Hacking Chinese is by visiting the archive. Here you will find all content sorted by category (such as vocabulary, listening or living abroad), as well as all articles in chronological order.
• Sign up for the newsletter – I don’t write about everything on the website, so if you want to receive tips, tricks and other information that isn’t available online, fill in your e-mail address in the box to the left and sign up!
• Join Hacking Chinese on Facebook - Facebook is an excellent way to join the community. Although all important articles are posted here on Hacking Chinese, discussions, announcements and much more will be posted on Facebook.
• Follow Hacking Chinese on Twitter – On Twitter, I share things that are interesting, useful or otherwise worthwhile, but are too small to write entire posts about. This is an excellent way of keeping track of what’s going on in the Chinese learning world.
• Subscribet with RSS - Hacking Chinese is updated at least once every week, so subscribing is a good idea if you want to follow what’s going on and are keen not to miss anything important.
• Ask a question - Do you have a question about learning Chinese? You can access the Question page via the top navigation bar. If you have questions about particular articles, please post comments instead.
• Support me - Everything here is for free, but I have spent hundreds of hours writing all the articles on Hacking Chinese! If you like what you see, please consider supporting me so that I can continue providing free content.
• Give feedback - Do you have ideas, suggestions or comments regarding Hacking Chinese? Feel free to use the Guestbook to leave a message. If you want to contact me personally or want other ways of getting in touch, please see the Contact page.
• Tell your friends - If you know other people who study Chinese, why don’t you tell them about Hacking Chinese? Everything here is free and more visitors means more activity and more suggestions for how to improve the site.

Hacking Chinese? Hacking? Chinese?

“Hacking” means to gain access to hidden information using a skilled and sometimes secretive method. The ideas shared on this website aren’t secrets as such, but since I find that very few people indeed speak about them, in some cases they might as well have been highly guarded state secrets. To learn Chinese, you need to to unlock and unveil the language and understand how it works, and you need to know how you can do this in a skilled way. In other words, you need to hack it!

To the outsider, “Chinese” might seem like a straightforward term. It isn’t. However, what I mean here is simple enough: I mean all aspects of modern Chinese as it’s spoken, used, studied or otherwise exists in the world today. Most of the articles will be applicable to learning languages in general, others will even be relevant for completely different subjects. As for spoken Chinese, I’m going to focus exclusively on Mandarin, but if you for some reason want to learn another dialect, I can assure you that over 95% of the articles are still relevant.

Opening doors rather than showing the correct way

The primary goal with Hacking Chinese is not to tell you the ultimate solution to all language learning problems, because it’s naive to think that there is such a thing. Research and science might lend credibility to certain methods, but even so, students and their learning environments differ wildly across space and time. My mission is to open as many doors as I can to show you a multitude of ways to reach efficient learning, but it will be up to you to walk the roads behind those doors. Only you know if a road suits you or not.

Hacking Chinese is for everyone

This website is meant for anyone who is interested in learning Chinese, regardless if you haven’t started yet or if you have been studying for ten years, if you study a few hours every week in your home country or if you study full-time living in China, if you study because you think Chinese is the most interesting language in the world or if you study because circumstances force you to do so. Naturally, different sections will be relevant for different groups, but I’m sure that you find many articles of interest regardless of who you are.