Articles in the ‘Key study hacks’ category Page 5
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Chinese listening strategies: Background listening
Background listening is not a substitute for more active forms of listening practice, but it’s still very useful. Think of it as a way of filling your days with learning opportunities without requiring much extra time.
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Defining Language Hacking: Lessons Learned From Hacking Chinese
This is just a short notice to let you know that Defining Language Hacking: Lessons Learned From Hacking Chinese, an article written by me, has been published over at The Mezzofanti Guild. As the title implies, it deals mainly with language hacking, but I also talk a little bit about my own background and my approach […]
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Use the benefits of teaching to boost your own Chinese learning
Teaching is a very powerful way of learning. Explaining complicated topics with simple language helps you grasp them and remember them. If you don’t have someone to teach, you can imagine that you have and teach yourself. Making simple explanations explicit works almost as well as real teaching.
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When perfectionism becomes an obstacle to progress
Perfectionism is usually regarded as something positive, perhaps even necessary. Scoring 100% on an exam is good, isn’t it? No, it’s not. In this article, I explain why perfectionism is bad when learning a language. Aiming for 90% is far better than aiming for 100%. This is being smart, not lazy.
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Learn by exaggerating: Slow, then fast; big, then small
If you want to speak or write quickly, you should start out by doing it slowly. Mimicking native speed early will just lead to sloppy language and bad communication. Expose your errors so that you have a chance to correct them.
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If you want to master Chinese, make long-term investments
It’s easy and perhaps natural to spend the minimum amount of effort to overcome a problem, but this will bring problems in the long run. If we want to reach long-term goals such as mastering Chinese, we need to adopt a long-term approach. What makes sense to pass your next exam isn’t necessarily what makes sense if you want to really learn what you’re studying.
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Benchmarking progress in Chinese to stay motivated
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, I discuss benchmarking and how it can help us stay motivated.
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Learning Chinese the holistic way: Integrating knowledge
Holistic learning is about integrating what you learn into a web of things you already know and thus making it much easier to learn and remember. This is in contrast with traditional education methods which often emphasise isolated facts and don’t make proper use of what learners already know.
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Achieving the impossible by being inspired
Teaching and inspiring are two closely related things. If you can see all superiors as sources of inspiration and knowledge, you will advance faster than if you view them as rivals or opponents. Similarly, realise that you have your own strong sides that inspire other people. Don’t hesitate to teach others if they want to be taught. Inspiration is cyclic in its nature and should flow freely in all directions.
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Using memory aids and mnemonics to make Chinese easier
Remember almost anything is a skill that can be learnt. In fact, some of the methods I talk about in this article have been known for thousands of years. Most mnemonic methods use the power of association to enable us to remember things. In this article, I discuss how we can use this to help us learn Chinese much more efficiently than if we rely on conventional methods.
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