Articles in the ‘Beginner’ category Page 22
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What your Chinese course will not teach you
Taking a Chinese course will give you a framework for learning the language, but it’s far from enough. This article is about what you need to do apart from going to class.
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Learn Chinese character meaning and pronunciation together
A large majority of all Chinese characters look the way they do because of how they are pronounced. You can use this to your benefit if you learn Chinese character meaning and pronunciation together.
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Listen before you read: Improve your listening ability
Listening ability is often overlooked when learning Chinese. Make sure you get the most out of the listening resources you do have and improve your Chinese listening ability.
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Can you use English learning materials to study Chinese?
There’s a very large number of books available for Chinese people learning English, but even if it’s tempting to think that we can use these to learn Chinese, doing so comes with several problems. ESL books have their use, but not as many as you might think.
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Learning tones in Mandarin is not optional
Learning tones in Mandarin is not optional. The longer you wait before paying attention to tones, the more you will have to relearn later. If you don’t know the tone, you don’t know the word. It takes time to learn to hear tones and treat them as integral parts of syllables, but the sooner you start, the better.
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The Hacking Chinese free tone training course
Learning to hear the difference between tones is difficult for many learners. Research shows that speaker variability and a systematic and predictable approach are key to overcoming the problem. With this article, I launch a tone training course, which is meant to provide you with just that. For free!
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Learning to hear the sounds and tones in Mandarin
Learning to hear the difference between tones in Mandarin can be difficult for adult learners. In this article, I introduce two effective ways of overcoming this problem, as well as my own research project, which is meant to help students and will be available soon.
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How to verify that you use the right Chinese font
For second language learners, using the wrong font can make learning characters very confusing. In this article, I will help you verify that you have the right fonts installed and discuss what happens if you don’t. This is a follow-up to an earlier article about Chinese fonts for students.
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Chinese character variants and fonts for language learners
Chinese character variants and regional font standards can be really confusing for language learners. As if simplified/traditional wasn’t enough, characters can look different depending on the font used or where the text was printed! This article will help you understand what’s going on.
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Which words you should learn and where to find them
When learning a language, it’s important to know many words, but it’s also important that you learn the right words. How do you know which words to learn? Where should you find those words? And how much can you express using the ten hundred most common words?
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