Hacking Chinese

A better way of learning Mandarin

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  1. Chinese listening challenge, May 2024

    Enrol in this month’s Chinese listening challenge, starting May 10th! Listen more and learn more through daily practice and friendly competition. This article contains more information about the challenge, as well as tips for what to listen to and how to get the most out of it.

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  2. Student Q&A, May 2024: Understanding strangers, listening with transcripts, and which podcasts to avoid

    Why is your teacher is so much easier to understand than anybody else? Should you read transcripts or subtitles before, during or after listening? And why do I refuse to recommend certain podcasts?

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  3. Beyond tīng bu dǒng, part 6: Why is listening in Chinese so hard?

    Many people assume that the hardest part of learning Chinese must be the characters or the tones, but it turns out that most learners struggle more with listening comprehension. Why is that, and what can you do about it?

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  4. Student Q&A, April 2024: Learning chengyu, listening to yourself and using role-playing games to learn Chinese

    Is recording and listening to your own Chinese useful for improving your speaking ability? How can you use chengyu to expand your repertoire? And how can role-playing games be utilised to improve your spoken Chinese?

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  5. Is speaking more important than listening when learning Chinese?

    What languages do you speak? Do you speak Chinese? We often use speaking to represent language ability in general, but does that mean that speaking is more important than listening?

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  6. 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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  7. 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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  8. 100 hours of Chinese listening in 3 weeks: What I learnt and how to apply it

    The more you listen, the more you learn. That’s why I listened to one hundred hours of Chinese in just three weeks. Here’s what I learnt and how you can apply that to your own learning.

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  9. Student Q&A, September 2023: Listening more than once, assessing pronunciation and the merits of flashcards

    Is it good to listen to the same passage more than once? How do you assess progress with pronunciation? And are flashcards really all that good for learning Chinese?

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  10. 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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