Hacking Chinese

A better way of learning Mandarin

Articles tagged with ‘Scaffolding’

  1. 8 great ways to scaffold your Chinese listening and reading

    Listening and reading in Chinese can be a challenge, especially when your level is not high enough. To understand more and thereby also learn more, use scaffolding!

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  2. Student Q&A, November 2023: Reading Pinyin or characters, comprehensible vs. compelling content and reading tools

    How do you transition from reading Pinyin to reading characters? Are compelling texts better than comprehensible texts? And which tools should you use when reading Chinese?

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  3. How narrow reading and listening can help you bridge the gap to real Chinese

    Varying your diet of Chinese reading and listening practice is often considered good, indeed necessary, for your learning, but this could be wrong. In some cases, variation makes things too difficult, and then narrow reading and listening is a better option!

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  4. Review: Learning Chinese by video immersion with FluentU

    FluentU offers authentic as well as learner-oriented videos for learning Chinese. A neat interface allows you to use an excellent pop-up dictionary and other useful features to watch and learn from videos. This is an in-depth review of FluentU Chinese.

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  5. Easing yourself into reading novels in Chinese

    Reading a novel in Chinese is the goal for many learners, but perhaps it’s easier to accomplish than you think. This article discusses various methods of making novel reading easier in Chinese, mainly focusing on the benefits of re-reading books you are already familiar with and know you like because you’ve read them before in your native language.

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  6. Chinese listening strategies: Deliberate practice and i+2

    Actively challenging ourselves is the best way to learn, but how can we cope with Chinese which is high above our current level? In this article, I discuss active listening and how to handle audio that is actually harder than we can manage. Gradually, we can remove these aids and handle the language on our own.

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