Hacking Chinese

A better way of learning Mandarin

Listening

Chinese listening ability

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Improving Chinese listening ability is very important for all learners. It’s the door to all other skills. The other skills are also important, but none improves your general ability as much as listening. Added to that, you can spend far more time listening than you can with any other skill. On this page, I discuss how to your Chinese listening ability.

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Now over to more listening, though. The better your listening ability gets, the more you get out of listening. You can extract vocabulary from what you hear, you learn how words are used in context and you can polish your understanding of Chinese pronunciation.

I have written a lot about listening ability, but some articles are more important than others. To begin with, I’ve written a series of articles about listening ability, containing the following articles.

Listening strategies

Introduction
Problem analysis
Background listening
Passive listening
Active listening
Listening speed
Deliberate practice and i+2
Listening resources

Apart from these articles, there are also others that focus directly on specific aspects of listening ability.

Articles directly related to listening ability

Listening ability, a matter of practice?
Make sure listening isn’t a practical problem
Listening to the listener
How to find more time to practise listening
Triggering quantum leaps in listening ability

Articles indirectly related to listening ability

The importance of knowing many words
Pros and cons with travelling to learn a language

Diversified learning is smart learning
Benchmarking progress to stay motivated
Reading manga for more than just pleasure
Mapping the terra incognita of vocabulary
Can you become fluent in Chinese in three months?
The 10,000 hour rule – Blood, sweat and tears

A complete list of all articles about listening ability: