Articles in the ‘Listening’ category
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New text game for Chinese learners: The Magistrate’s Gallery
The Magistrate’s Gallery is a new interactive text game for Chinese learners. A man knocks on your door with an unusual problem: his daughter has been trapped inside one of the paintings in the magistrate’s gallery. But which one? And how can you get her out? To rescue her, you will need to travel into the paintings and unravel the story about how the girl ended up there.
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Five text games for Chinese learners
This article is about five text games for Chinese learners. It both introduces the games and asks for feedback about how they can become even more engaging and fun. Each game contains on average roughly 10,000 characters, which makes them on par with a typical graded reader.
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Training and testing your ability to hear Mandarin sounds
Learning to hear the sounds in a new language is a very important step, both to understand it and to pronounce it yourself. This article gives you methods and tools for training and testing your ability to hear the sounds of Mandarin.
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Advanced listening and reading with Skeptoid Chinese
Skeptoid is a podcast about popular myths, using science and research to examine them critically. The Chinese version is excellent practice for advanced learners, with both text and audio!
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Let’s play 迷霧中 (Into the Haze)
Let’s play 迷霧中 (Into the Haze)! In this post, I share a video where I play a small part of the game, summarising and commenting on what’s going on in English (the game is of course in Mandarin).
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Into the Haze: A new text adventure game for Chinese learners
Into the Haze is an interactive text adventure game for Chines learners. Your brother is missing and you need to enter a city covered in a poisonous haze to find him. The story is presented through text and audio, and depending on your choices, the game will develop differently. If you make bad choices, perhaps because you didn’t fully understand the options, you might fail and will have to try again. Good luck!
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How narrow listening and reading can help you learn Chinese
Narrow listening and narrow reading involve limiting the scope of your input to lower the difficulty and allow for less stressful studying and larger quantity. By keeping some things constant, you allow for natural reviewing and make it much more likely that you enjoy what you’re reading or listening to.
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Comprehension-based listening vs deep end immersion
What works best for improving listening ability, graded content targeted at your specific level or deep-end immersion? The answer is that both approaches are necessary, but which you use depends a lot on practical considerations, as well as how much time and energy you have to invest.
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8 great ways to scaffold your Chinese learning
Scaffolding is a way of helping you cope with things that is actually too hard. As a student of Chinese, this is something you really need, because the listening and reading material on offer is often way too difficult!
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10 ways of using games to learn and teach Chinese
Playing games is a powerful way of learning languages. Apart from being fun, they also provide an active way to communicate in Chinese, within limits set by the game. This article gives a broad overview of ten different ways you can use games to learn or teach a foreign language.
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