Articles in the ‘Listening’ category
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Chinese listening challenge, September 2020
It’s time for a listening challenge! It starts on September 10th, so enrol, set your goal and listen 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 suggestions for what to listen to.
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Diversify how you study Chinese to learn more
How is it possible to spend 80 hours a week learning Chinese? And what can you learn from that, even if you find it hard to find any time to study whatsoever, with work and family taking up most of your time? This article aims at widening the scope of what it means to learn Chinese, and shows you ways you can learn that you probably haven’t thought of before!
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Improving your Chinese while watching TV shows
Watching TV is a great way to learn languages. It combines lots of useful Chinese words and phrases while providing rich context because of the visual nature of the medium. This article introduces ideas for how to learn, as well as recommended TV shows for beginner, intermediate and advanced learners.
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Should you learn to speak Chinese before you learn Chinese characters?
The question of whether or not to delay learning Chinese characters in favour of the spoken language is an interesting one many arguments in favour of both approaches. For most people setting out on their Chinese learning journey, focusing on important aspects of the spoken language, such as pronunciation, is certainly more important than learning characters.
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Learning Chinese words: When quantity beats quality
Any teacher, student or researcher will agree that vocabulary is important, but how should you go about it? What’s the goal? This article argues that a common problem for learners of Chinese is that they spend too much time learning too few words, and that they would be better of aiming for quantity over quality in many cases.
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When spaced repetition fails, and what to do about it
Spaced repetition software, like Anki or Skritter, can boost your vocabulary learning significantly, but there are situations where it just isn’t enough. The idea is to delay each review as long as possible without forgetting, which leads to a great increase in efficiency. This sounds good in practice, but when it comes to learning languages, just being able to recall what something means often isn’t enough!
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Text adventure games and how to use them in the Chinese language classroom
Interactive text games work well for individual learners, but they are also excellent in a classroom setting. This article gives you everything you need as a teacher to play Escape! in your classroom. A Chinese version of this article is available as well.
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How to figure out how good your Chinese is
Figuring out how good your Chinese is can help you focus on the right areas and evaluate your learning methods. But language assessment is hard! This article describes how and why you should assess how good your Chinese is, and gives you tools and resources to do so.
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The simple trick I used to double the amount of Chinese I listen to
Learning to understand spoken Chinese requires an awful lot of practice; you need to listen much more than most people do. In this article, I introduce and explain a simple trick that allowed me to listen much more than I did before!
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Does using colour to represent Mandarin tones make them easier to learn?
Some learning materials, apps and tools allow you to add colours to show Mandarin tones, but is this really helpful? This article discusses the ins and outs of using colour to learn and remember tones, along with some practical considerations.
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