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"Learning outside class"
Rigorous scientific research typically requires large sample sizes, otherwise it isn’t possible to draw any conclusions about the population at large, which is the goal of most studies. However, experimenting with yourself as the only participant might not be relevant for other learners, but it’s highly relevant for you. This article is about how to use self-experimentation to learn Chinese.
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.
You don’t have to go abroad to learn Chinese. The main difference between staying at home and going abroad is that it requires less effort to learn once you’re there (although it still requires quite a lot of effort). This means that you can learn Chinese at home, provided that you are determined enough and create an immersion environment yourself. This article gives suggestions and advice on how to achieve that.
If you use spaced repetition software like Anki for learning Chinese and do so for a few years, you will end up with a very large flashcard deck. Some people advocate deleting the deck if it becomes too big. This article looks closer at the pros and cons of keeping large decks and why you might want to consider starting over from scratch.
This is the fourth and possibly final article about Chinese music. As before, the goal this time is to expand your horizons a bit and help you find music you like. Music is useful because it’s fun and is a relaxed way of learning. We need learning of all kinds if we want to learn fast, so music fulfils a really important function.
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.
The normal thing to do when we learning characters or words is to focus on deepening our knowledge, researching components and understanding more about what we’re trying to learn. Some problems can’t be alleviated this way, however, instead they call for horizontal vocabulary learning, i.e. to putting the character or word into context and to compare it with similar characters or words. Only then can we grasp the bigger picture.
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.
Mnemonics are really cool, but you shouldn’t overuse them. Chinese characters are very complex and the amount of information you might want to remember about them is large. Creating mnemonics for everything is very time consuming and difficult. Instead of doing this, create mnemonics only for things you actually find hard to remember.
Anyone who has tried mnemonics for learning Chinese characters knows that some components are easier to link together than others. This article discusses in detail how to deal with abstract or general character components and how to handle components with the same or overlapping meaning, an essential skill if you’re serious about character learning.
