Recent articles
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Training your Chinese teacher, part 1: Introduction
Finding a good Chinese teacher is not easy, but there are many things you can do to get more out of the time you spend with your teacher. In this article, I discuss being taught Chinese in general, including things you should do as a student, as well as things you might want to train your Chinese teacher to do, if they aren’t already doing them. This article is the first in a series focusing on how to train your Chinese teacher.
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Chinese New Year and New Semester Course Discount
To mark the Chinese New Year and the start of a new semester, I offer a time-limited discount for my video/audio/text course, valid until the end of this week (February 10th).
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Chinese listening challenge, February 2019
It’s time for a listening challenge! It starts on February 1st, so enrol, set your goal and listen as much as you can before the end of February. This article contains more information about the challenge, some important things to keep in mind as well as suggestions for what to listen to.
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Review: Language Empowerment: Demystify Chinese culture and fire up your Mandarin + interview with the author
Language Empowerment is a neat little book that manages to pack a lot of information and inspiration into relatively few pages. I highly recommend it for people who have just started learning Chinese or who are interested in doing so. This book covers many topics that you need to know about, but which few textbooks or teachers mention! It is also easy to access and enjoyable to read.
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Best of Hacking Chinese 2018
This post summarises the best articles on Hacking Chinese from 2018. It’s an excellent way to make sure you haven’t missed the most interesting content from the past year! The ranking is based on a combination of visitor statistics and editor’s opinion.
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Chinese translation challenge, December 2018
It’s time for a translation challenge! It starts on December 10th, so enrol, set your goal and improve your Chinese by translating to/from Chinese as much as you can before the end of the month. This article contains more information about the challenge, some important things to keep in mind as well as some advice about using translation as a method for learning Chinese.
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36 samples of Chinese handwriting from students and native speakers
This article features 36 samples of Chinese handwriting. The same text was written by native speakers and students with varying backgrounds and time spent learning Chinese.
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Chinese handwriting challenge, November 2018
It’s time for a handwriting challenge! It starts on November 12th, so enrol, set your goal and improve your handwriting ability as much as you can before the end of the month. This article contains more information about the challenge, some important things to keep in mind as well as some advice about improving handwriting in Chinese.
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How to improve your Chinese handwriting
Learning to write Chinese by hand is a complex task. This article gives an overview of what it means to write by hand, answering questions like: “Do I need to learn to write by hand?”, “What skills does handwriting in Chinese require?” and” How do I improve my handwriting?”
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The Hacking Chinese guide to Mandarin tones
Learning tones is one of the major challenges of learning Mandarin and other Chinese dialects. This guide describes what tones are, why they are important and how to learn them. The article collects information and advice from more than twenty articles about learning tones, along with resources and references for further reading.
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