Hacking Chinese

A better way of learning Mandarin

Articles tagged with ‘Textbooks’

  1. Should you throw away your Chinese textbook?

    Many students rely on textbooks to learn Chinese, but is this a good idea? Some people say that to unleash your full potential, you should throw your textbook away.

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  2. Seeing through the illusion of advanced Chinese learning

    Courses and textbooks encourage narrow but advanced proficiency in Chinese, but if you want to be able to communicate well, you need to see through the illusion.

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  3. Vocabulary lists that help you learn Chinese and how to use them

    Learning new characters and words from a list is rarely a good idea, but there are exceptions! Let’s have a look at five types of vocabulary lists how to use them to learn Chinese.

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  4. Beginner Chinese listening practice: What to listen to and how

    The best way to learn to understand spoken Mandarin is to listen as much as you can to engaging content you can make sense of without looking things up. In this article, I go through the best types of beginner Chinese listening practice!

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  5. Why you should use more than one Chinese textbook

    A textbook can only provide a sliver of the content and activities you need to learn Chinese, but rather than throwing your textbook away, try using several of them in parallel.

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  6. Can too much guidance make you learn less Chinese?

    Guidance and support can make learning Chinese easier, but could too much of it make it harder? This article discusses the downsides of receiving too much help and the benefits of engaging more with the Chinese language on your own, without having everything explained to you.

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  7. 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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  8. How I learnt Chinese, part 4: My second year in Taiwan

    How I learnt Chinese, part 4: My second year in Taiwan

    This post covers my third year of learning Chinese, which was spent at NTNU in Taipei and at Wenzao in Gaoxiong. I round off with important lessons I learnt about learning Mandarin during this time.

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  9. 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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  10. Which words you should learn and where to find them

    When learning a language, it’s important to know many words, but it’s also important that you learn the right words. How do you know which words to learn? Where should you find those words? And how much can you express using the ten hundred most common words?

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