Hacking Chinese

A better way of learning Mandarin

Articles in the ‘Recommended resources’ category Page 4

  1. The most common Chinese words, characters and components for language learners and teachers

    A good principle for choosing what to learn is to focus on the most useful things first, but how do you know what’s most useful? Frequency lists can be helpful, but are often misused.

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  2. Free and easy audio flashcards for Chinese dictation practice with Anki

    Audio flashcards can be great for improving basic listening ability or preparing for 听写/聽寫 or dictation. It used to be time-consuming and difficult to do, but with Anki and good text-to-speech engines, it’s now both easy and free!

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  3. Focusing on Chinese tones without being distracted by Pinyin

    When Chinese characters appear next to Pinyin, the familiar letters distract us from the characters. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could keep information about the tones, but throw Pinyin away?

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  4. How and why to learn and teach Chinese through games

    This article is a follow-up to a keynote presentation and a workshop held at the 15th Annual Chinese Teaching Conference at University College London. Even though the original target group is teachers of Chinese, the article is relevant for students as well.

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  5. 866 digital textbooks for expanding your Chinese

    Using textbooks written with the aim of teaching Chinese children about history, mathematics and biology can be great learning resources for adult foreigners as well. This article discusses how to do that, and also introduces a resource that offers almost a thousand textbooks, all easily accessible online.

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  6. Best of Hacking Chinese 2017

    Here are the top ten articles on Hacking Chinese in 2017, based on page views and editorial opinion. Even if you haven’t had time to read many articles over the year, at least make sure you have checked these out!

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  7. Introducing Chinese quiz tournaments on WordSwing

    Playing games, especially with other people in a situation of friendly competition, is a great way of boosting motivation. This post introduces a first version of a Chinese quiz tournament (free) that Kevin and I have created over at WordSwing.

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  8. Best of Hacking Chinese 2016

    Here are the top ten articles on Hacking Chinese, based on page views and editorial opinion. Even if you haven’t had time to read many articles over the year, at least make sure you have checked these out!

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  9. Expanding your Chinese with 一步一个脚印

    一步一个脚印 is a blog about translating and interpreting Chinese, providing high quality posts about vocabulary and expressions in Chinese and English, as well as interpretation and translation exercises.

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  10. Escape: A text adventure game for Chinese learners

    Escape is a text game for Chinese learners. It works like a graded reader with level-adjusted content, except that it’s also interactive! You have been captured and need to escape. To do this, you need to understand what happens and make the right choices based on what you read.

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