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Audacity is a marvellous piece of software that allows you to record audio (yourself, other people or whatever is playing on your computer), mimic native speakers, edit and enhance the audio, as well as automatically manipulate multiple files, such as lecture or lesson recordings. In short, Audacity is a really good program for learning languages. This article introduces the software both through a video example and explaining text.
There are many online resources for looking up Chinese characters and words, so many that it might be very hard for new learners to find what they need. This article introduces 21 dictionaries and corpora for Chinese learners, including what they should be used for in addition to some pros and cons.
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!
Recording one’s own voice is useful and should be a natural part of both learning and teaching. When we hear our own voice, we can often hear mistakes we’re making that we don’t normally hear. We become aware of the way we speak in a new way. Correcting oneself is also much cheaper and more convenient than hiring a tutor.
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 [...]
Learning a foreign language, most people lack proper feedback from native speakers. Even if we have friends and teachers, always having to ask for help isn’t very good. In this article, I explain how Lang-8 solves this problem for you. Useful for any language, not just Chinese!
Duanmu San’s “The Phonology of Standard Chinese” is by far the best introduction to Mandarin phonology that I’m aware of. It’s mostly useful for people who like phonology or are already at an advanced level and want to add a theoretical edge. This book contains tons of interesting material, all well-presented and well-argued.
Studying languages, questions crop up all the time. What’s the difference between X and y? Why is sentence Z written in this way? In this article, I argue that how we handle these kinds of problems is dependent on what resources we have available (teachers, friends, etc.), but regardless of that, what matters most is how we choose to use the resources we have at our disposal. If we aren’t careful, we might end up wasting them or even losing them entirely.
Spaced repetition is very powerful compared to massed repetition, which is why software utilising the spacing effect is growing ever more popular. I sometimes feel like an SRS missionary, writing articles about why everybody should start using SRS and which program I prefer myself (if you don’t know what SRS is, please read these articles [...]
This is just a short notice to let you know that “Defining Language Hacking: Lessons Learned From Hacking Chinese“, an article written by me, has been published over at The Mezzofanti Guild. As the title implies, it deals mainly with language hacking, but I also talk a little bit about my own background and my [...]
