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Currently viewing the category:
"Writing"
I think translation is one of the best ways of keeping on improving writing beyond the intermediate level. Translation forces you into linguistic environments you wouldn’t have ended up in if you wrote the article yourself. This article is about how translation can be used to improve your written Chinese.
Written Chinese characters are regarded by some as the true essence of Chinese; without learning to write by hand, you’re not learning Chinese. Others go to extremes in the other direction, claiming that handwriting is a waste of time since we normally type Chinese nowadays anyway. The answer lies somewhere in between. This article addresses the question if you should focus on handwriting, and if so, how much.
This article is about using time and space in your shower to learn more Chinese. This might seem extreme, but it’s just another method of diversifying your learning. Why spend high quality time in front of your computer or in the library learning things you could equally well learn in your shower?
Chatting is an excellent way of learning a language. Some people think chatting online is a waste of time, but in this article I list and explain a dozen reasons why this is wrong. In fact, chatting offer many advantages that are very hard to find elsewhere.
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.
Learning to write well in Chinese requires lots of practise, which presents us with a number of problems. How do we find suitable topics? How do we avoid performance anxiety? How can we benefit from the mistakes we will make? These are some questions I discuss in this article.
I won’t join the group of language bloggers who claim that classroom learning is meaningless, but I do believe there are good reasons to create links to the real world. Not only is this a motivational booster, it’s also an excellent way of identifying problems you might have with your Chinese.
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!
Perfectionism is usually regarded as something positive, perhaps even necessary. Scoring 100% on an exam is good, isn’t it? No, it’s not. In this article, I explain why perfectionism is bad when learning a language. Aiming for 90% is far better than aiming for 100%. This is being smart, not lazy.
Praise is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s encouraging and makes it more rewarding to study. On the other hand, however, if you use other people’s praise as a true indication of your own ability, you’re in deep trouble. Feel encouraged, but it’s essential that you don’t trust native speakers when they tell you your Chinese is great!
