Articles in the ‘Recommended resources’ category Page 8
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Using Lang-8 to improve your Chinese
Learning a foreign language, most people lack proper feedback from native speakers. Even if we have friends and teachers, always having to ask for help isn’t very good. In this article, I explain how Lang-8 solves this problem for you. Useful for any language, not just Chinese!
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Review: The Phonology of Standard Chinese
Duanmu San’s “The Phonology of Standard Chinese” is by far the best introduction to Mandarin phonology that I’m aware of. It’s mostly useful for people who like phonology or are already at an advanced level and want to add a theoretical edge. This book contains tons of interesting material, all well-presented and well-argued.
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Learning simplified and traditional Chinese
Learning traditional characters if you know simplified or vice versa is a lot easier than beginners tend to think. Generally, you don’t need to worry, because at an advanced level, learning both is quite easy. This article is about simplified/traditional and how to learn both.
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About opening doors and the paths beyond
Hacking Chinese is about opening doors and showing the paths beyond, but what does that mean? Why is it useful to read other people’s advice? In this article I argue that it’s essential to familiarise oneself with many different methods, not to find the correct way of doing something, but to find better ways and provide contrast to one’s own learning process.
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The Chinese-Chinese dictionary survival guide
This article is about using Chinese-Chinese dictionaries, both from a personal point of view and in a more general sense. The goal is to provide tips and tricks for using Chinese-Chinese dictionaries, traps to avoid and other things that will be helpful for learners who intend to move from English-Chinese to Chinese-Chinese.
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Chinese vocabulary in your pocket
Having vocabulary with you so that you can study anywhere isn’t merely a handy trick, it’s essential. You don’t want to waste high quality time at home in front of your computer doing something you might as well do in the super market queue or while waiting for the bus. Study the right things at the right time!
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Review: Chinese Synonyms Usage Dictionary
This is a review of a very useful synonym dictionary, complete with detailed descriptions and comparisons of commonly confused words. It’s useful both as a dictionary and for studying vocabulary. I recommend the book for anyone from intermediate level and up, but some parts are useful for everyone.
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Using search engines to study Chinese
Studying on your own comes with certain problems I think all language learners have encountered many times. If you encounter a concept you don’t know how to say in the target language, you have to look it up. The first natural thing would be to look in a dictionary or a corpus, but some kinds of questions can’t be answered in this way. Asking a search engine is a very powerful but often neglected tool that I use on a daily basis.
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Anki, the best of spaced repetition software
Of all the various websites and programs out there to help you learning Chinese, Anki is probably the most important one. There are numerous software to handle vocabulary learning, but in my experience, none of them are as versatile and dynamic as Anki.
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