I have published a book! It’s a print anthology that collects articles from the Year of the Snake (2025), hence the title:
Hacking Chinese: The Snake Collection:
Characters, tutors, input and more curated articles for Mandarin learners
You can order the book by clicking the link above.
Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episode (#311).
Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and many other platforms!
Curated articles from Hacking Chinese
If you’re a regular visitor to this site, you already know what these articles are about.
If you’re new here, you might want to familiarise yourself with Hacking Chinese before buying. The home page is a good place to start.
While the book does contain new tl;dr summaries for the articles, the rest of the content is already freely available here on Hacking Chinese.
The best way to access the articles in digital form is to browse the Best of Hacking Chinese 2025 overview or view all articles in chronological order here. I’ve also created a page with links to only the articles included in the book to make it easier to access links and podcast episodes.
The point here is not to publish new content, but to provide existing articles I’m happy with in a format you can leaf through, put on your shelf, or gift to your niece.
This is an anthology, not a textbook
Hacking Chinese: The Snake Collection is exactly what it sounds like: an anthology.
I took the articles I published in 2025 and gathered them in one place. The idea is to mark a year and keep it intact. Online articles tend to drift away, get updated, replaced, reorganised, or simply forgotten. A book does not do that; it stays where you put it.
Naturally, I didn’t just copy and paste all articles from 2025, but made sure to only include those with some long-term value (for example, announcements about courses, discounts and challenges are not included).
This book is not about snakes
The subtitle of the book is:
Hacking Chinese: The Snake Collection: Characters, tutors, input and more curated articles for Mandarin learners
While I don’t try to focus on certain topics or themes in any given year, what I find interesting and urgent to write about shifts over time, and in 2025, Chinese characters, tutors and input, especially listening and reading, were the dominant themes.
So, don’t worry, this book is not about snakes.
As you might have noticed, I’ve gone out of my way to show that this volume contains content that is already freely available online, but I’m sure I’ll get the occasional one-star review from someone who didn’t even read the subtitle.
Why put free articles into print?
The simple answer is that I wanted to.
And if I wanted to have my writing in print, why not make it available to you as well?
I like printed books, and I know that many of you do, too. I don’t expect this book to sell particularly well, but if it makes a small number of readers happy, I’m satisfied.
You can also buy a book to support Hacking Chinese, but you might consider enrolling in a course instead. That supports me and helps you learn Chinese.
Another reason to buy the book is the awesome cover design by Martin Ackerfors from Kulturgryning!
The second of twelve
As you might have guessed already from the title and cover theme, I plan to publish more anthologies, collecting articles from both previous and upcoming years.
There’s a limit to how far back I’m willing to go, but overall, I’m quite happy with articles written from 2020 onwards. This means that this anthology project will be finished in 2032 with 12 volumes, spanning 12 years of articles on Hacking Chinese.
As regular and long-term readers have noticed, I’ve been fishing out good article ideas from before 2020 and rewriting them, often from scratch, for years now. By the time this series of anthologies is finished, it should contain all the good articles on the site!
Thank you!
Before wrapping up, I’d like to thank you as a reader of Hacking Chinese. While I might occasionally write things about language learning even if nobody reads them, Hacking Chinese wouldn’t exist without its readers, listeners and students, and this anthology certainly wouldn’t have been published either.
So, thank you! If you do end up getting the book, please let me know what you think. And don’t forget to leave a review!
Hacking Chinese: The Snake Collection
