Hacking Chinese

A better way of learning Mandarin

Articles published in August 2012

  1. The time barrel: How to find more time to study Chinese

    If we want to combine studying with a normal life or if we want to get the most out of pure language studying, we really need to examine the time we have available and see if it’s possible to learn more without removing other important things. This article uses the metaphor of a barrel with rocks, pebbles, sand and water to show that most people have more time available than they think.

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  2. Kickstart your Chinese character learning with the 100 most common radicals

    This is a list of the 100 most common radicals among the 2000 most common characters, meaning that it’s excellent for beginners who want to boost their understanding of Chinese characters. The list contains simplified, traditional, variants, meaning, pronunciation, examples, helpful comments and colloquial names.

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  3. Why learning Chinese through music is underrated

    Learning Chinese through music is underrated. Music is a very efficiently way of improving your Chinese in an enjoyable way that won’t interfere much with other things you’re doing (simply decrease your exposure to music in English and replace it with Chinese). This article contains five songs I like, but there will be much more in future articles.

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  4. Website restructuring completed

    This is just a small post to inform you that my restructuring of Hacking Chinese is now complete. This is cooler than it sounds, because it actually means that a lot of new content has been added. This is especially good news for beginners, but should be interesting for others as well. I have done […]

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