Hacking Chinese

A better way of learning Mandarin

Articles published in July 2012

  1. Chinese listening strategies: Diversify your listening practice

    It’s essential that you diversify your listening practice, otherwise you run the risk of performing below your actual level, not because your listening ability is poor, but simply because you’re not used to different people speaking Chinese. The only way to acquire a complete listening ability is by listening to as many different speakers as possible.

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  2. 31 Twitter feeds to help you learn Chinese

    Twitter is an excellent source for learning Chinese. In this article, I list my favourite Twitter feeds in three categories: learning how to learn Chinese, learning how to learn languages in general and finally Chinese input on Twitter. Something missing in the article? Let me know!

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  3. A language learner’s guide to reading comics in Chinese

    This article is a guide to reading comics in Chinese, suitable for beginners as well as those who already have some experience. Reading comics is an excellent way of attacking the Great Wall of Chinese (the daunting effect of seeing a whole page of text and not knowing what to do). It’s also fun, which is arguably the most important thing.

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  4. Approaches to reading in Chinese

    Reading is one of the best ways of picking up new vocabulary once we reached an intermediate or advanced level, but it’s also necessary to read a lot to be able to write Chinese properly. Reading also enables us to understand word usage and brings us closer to the culture behind the language. This article is focused on reading in Chinese, including reading method, book selection, benchmarking, vocabulary and more.

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  5. Chinese Language Learner Interview Series – Olle Linge

    I’m happy to announce that an interview with me have been published over at FluentFlix. To see what other things I’ve written elsewhere on the internet, please see Hacking Chinese elsewhere. In this interview, I talk mainly about learning Chinese (no surprise there), including some personal comments on my own learning and some embarrassing mistakes […]

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  6. Chinese listening strategies: Deliberate practice and i+2

    Actively challenging ourselves is the best way to learn, but how can we cope with Chinese which is high above our current level? In this article, I discuss active listening and how to handle audio that is actually harder than we can manage. Gradually, we can remove these aids and handle the language on our own.

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