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Currently viewing the category:
"Reading"
Reading quickly is useful when taking tests and in any situation where you want consume large volumes of test. However, simply reading a lot is not the most efficient way to reach high speeds, you actually need to focus on reading speed to do that. In this article I discus various methods, tips and tricks, along with some thoughts on goals and problem analysis.
This article is about reading manga (comics) in order to improve your Chinese. Manga serves two important functions apart from being enjoyable in itself. Firstly, it gives us access to language we would otherwise hardly ever see in written form. Secondly, it lowers the threshold for reading books in Chinese. Reading manga just for fun is fine, but if you think about it, you’ll see that it can be very useful as well!
This article is about using Chinese-Chinese dictionaries, both from a personal point of view and in a more general sense. The goal is to provide tips and tricks for using Chinese-Chinese dictionaries, traps to avoid and other things that will be helpful for learners who intend to move from English-Chinese to Chinese-Chinese.
When we set out to learn Chinese, everything we learn is new and we can feel that we improve for each day that goes by, for each time we are exposed to the language. We know this because, in relative terms, we’re learning so much. As we progress, this feeling weakens. In this article, we look at benchmarking and how it can help us stay motivated.
Memorising a dictionary is of course not an optimal way of learning vocabulary, but I do think it’s good to use frequency lists (such as dictionaries listing the most common characters) to plug holes in your foundation and make it stronger.
After spending two articles building up our toolkit to learn Chinese more efficiently, the time is now ripe to actually use all these to something genuinely useful. It’s time to make those long-term investments pay off. This article explains how to learn new words really fast.
This is the second article in my series on creating a toolkit to enable efficient learning of words and this time the topic is individual characters. This article explains why individual characters are important to learn and there are links to other articles describing how to learn characters efficiently.
Learning to read Chinese requires intimate knowledge of individual characters (rather than words), not only because it allows us to decipher and guess the meaning of words we haven’t seen before, but also because it is necessary to understand the building blocks if we are to use mnemonics to remember a character.
If you plan to learn to read or write Chinese, you will need to learn parts of characters (components) and parts of words (characters). There are an untold number of combinations of these, and if you only study these it will be impossible. This would be a little bit like learning maths by studying thousands of examples, but never actually looking at the underlying equations.
People spend lots of time everyday using social networks such as Facebook and MSN. I do, too, but in a slightly different way. It might not be obvious how or why, but communicating with native speakers in a relaxed way over the internet can be incredibly useful. This article deals with how to use these social media to learn Chinese.
