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Currently viewing the tag: "Efficiency"
Many people regard chengyu as the golden key to the Chinese language and believe that learning chengyu will impress native speakers and take their Chinese to the next level. However, learning chengyu in the wrong way is likely to have the opposite effect (“oh, the foreigner is trying to use chengyu, how cute!”). Focus should be on chengyu that are truly useful and frequently used, the rest should be left for those who really like chengyu or for truly advanced students.
In this article I argue that there is a significant difference between efficiency and speed when it comes to learning a language. Everybody should be interested in learning Chinese efficiently, but using the word speed comes with a number of problems.
As I have written before, listening is mostly a matter of practice. There are some things you can do to increase the time, however, such as eliminating practical problems, but if you really want to listen a lot, you need to really make an effort. If you want to improve your listening ability to a [...]
Leeches are words or characters that you keep forgetting and therefore consume much more time than other words or characters. Rather than trying to hammer these words into your brain, a specific strategy is needed to kill the leeches. This article deals with just that, how to handle difficult vocabulary you keep on forgetting.
Time quality means that there is time with different levels of quality that can and should be used for different kinds of tasks. If you’re at home and have access to the internet, books and a reasonably peaceful studying environment, this is considered the highest quality time, because you can spend this time on virtually anything you like. On the bus or waiting for a friend, however, your studying options are severely limited, or in other words, the time quality is lower. Read more to find out how to make better use of your studying time.
This article isn’t about discouraging people to go abroad. Instead, it’s a rational analysis of when to go abroad to learn Chinese if you’re limited by money or time. My conclusion is that you should not go immediately, but wait until you’ve learnt some basics at home.
