Hacking Chinese

A better way of learning Mandarin

Articles in the ‘Immersion and integration’ category Page 8

  1. 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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  2. Listen before you read: Improve your listening ability

    Listen before you read

    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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  3. 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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  4. Why you should read Chinese on your phone

    Reading Chinese in this digital age is a lot easier than it used to, but it’s actually even easier than many students think. The benefits of reading on your phone are important, including instant access to vocabulary, smaller chunks of text, portability and a sense of getting somewhere when you read. If you haven’t read a Chinese text on your phone yet, you really should give it a try.

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  5. Chinese listening practice with 锵锵三人行

    锵锵三人行 is one of the few Chinese TV programs I actually like. It’s also one of the best ones for language learners too, mostly because of it’s heavy focus on talking, availability of transcripts and variety of both guests and topics. This should be a key component of any immersion effort, but you probably need to be upper intermediate or above to benefit.

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  6. Learning Chinese through audiobooks

    Listening to audiobooks in a very good way to improve your listening ability beyond the basics. This article contains advice about how to choose a suitable novel, where to find it and how to listen to it.

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  7. Bite-sized learning isn’t enough to learn Chinese

    Bite-sized learning is great, but it’s not enough if you want to build real competence in Chinese listening and reading. To expose yourself to enough text and audio, you need long-form content that you can keep using even when you’re energy levels aren’t at 100%.

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  8. Why you should learn Chinese in Chinese

    It’s helpful to use your native language to learn Chinese, but one of the first things you should do is to convert anything you use often in the learning process into Chinese. This includes common classroom expressions or other phrases used when learning. Advanced students will find challenges in Chinese-only learning materials and dictionaries.

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  9. Review: Mandarin Companion graded readers (Level 1)

    Graded readers are an important step on your journey to becoming literate in Chinese. In this article, I review five books in the Mandarin Companion series, level 1, which uses only 300 unique characters. These books are useful for both beginners (extra reading) and intermediate learners (extensive reading).

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  10. The best Twitter feeds for learning Chinese in 2015

    The 9 best Twitter feeds for learning Chinese

    Who should you follow on Twitter if you want to learn Chinese? There’s an increasing number of people who tweet excellent language content within the 140 character limit, often with pictures. This article contains a list of the 9 best ones, including a short intro and examples of what they tweet.

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