Hacking Chinese

A better way of learning Mandarin

Articles tagged with ‘Listening strategies’

  1. Student Q&A, January 2024: Chinese music, too much Mandarin in the classroom, and listening in noisy environments

    Is listening to music a good way to learn Chinese? How can you learn to understand Mandarin spoken in noisy environments? And what if your teacher speaks only Chinese, but you don’t understand what she says?

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  2. Beyond tīng bu dǒng, part 5: Becoming a better listener as a student of Chinese

    Many things influence listening comprehension in Chinese, some are related to the language, and some to the situation, but some are also related to you as a listener. How can you become a better listener in Mandarin?

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  3. Training your Chinese teacher, part 3: Listening ability

    Listening ability is generally overlooked in language teaching. At first glance, it might seem that having a teacher is not as useful for improving listening as it is for improving speaking, but is that really the case? This article covers both what you should and what you shouldn’t do with your teacher if improving listening ability is your goal!

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  4. Chinese listening strategies: Active listening

    This is the fifth article in my series about improving listening ability. After having covered background and passive listening, the topic this time is active listening, including a discussion of what it is and why it’s good, along with some exercises you can try.

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  5. 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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  6. Chinese listening strategies: Problem analysis

    Do you know why you don’t understand as much Chinese as you should/want/ought to? When solving a problem, the first step should always be to figure out what the problem is. Simply knowing that we don’t understand spoken Chinese at a certain level isn’t good enough, we need to know more than that if we want to improve. In this article, I discuss various ways of identifying and analysing problems with listening ability.

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  7. Chinese listening strategies: An introduction

    Listening ability is one of the cornerstones of language learning. Not only is it essential if we want to communicate with other people, it’s also necessary if we’re going to expose ourselves to natively produced language and learn from that. This is the introduction to a series of articles discussing listening ability.

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