Hacking Chinese

A better way of learning Mandarin

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  1. What your Chinese course will not teach you

    Taking a Chinese course will give you a framework for learning the language, but it’s far from enough. This article is about what you need to do apart from going to class.

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  2. How I learnt Chinese, part 2: Learning Mandarin in Sweden

    Chinese beginner textbooks

    My first year of learning Chinese was spent in an intensive but conventional university environment in Sweden. While I learnt a lot, many things were also left out!

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  3. Learn Chinese faster by leaving your comfort zone

    If you want to learn Chinese faster, you have to make sure you leave your comfort zone and challenge yourself as much and as often as you can. There are many things of doing this, including immersing yourself in language above your current level or putting yourself in situations that demand a higher level of performance. Leave your comfort zone!

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  4. Hacking Chinese New Year challenge, January 10th to 31st

    It’s time for the first Hacking Chinese challenge in 2016! The focus of the challenge is up to you to decide: choose between clearing unfinished projects from last year or establishing good learning habits for the rest of 2016. The challenge starts on January 10th.

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  5. Learning tones in Mandarin is not optional

    Learning tones in Mandarin is not optional. The longer you wait before paying attention to tones, the more you will have to relearn later. If you don’t know the tone, you don’t know the word. It takes time to learn to hear tones and treat them as integral parts of syllables, but the sooner you start, the better.

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  6. The Hacking Chinese free tone training course

    Learning to hear the difference between tones is difficult for many learners. Research shows that speaker variability and a systematic and predictable approach are key to overcoming the problem. With this article, I launch a tone training course, which is meant to provide you with just that. For free!

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  7. One year of language challenges on Hacking Chinese

    Hacking Chinese Challenges has now been online for more than a year and it’s time to take a step back to evaluate the service. Have you tried it out yet? What did you think? This article contains a short survey as well as some of my own reflections about the past and future of language challenges.

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  8. Improving pronunciation beyond the basics

    Learning pronunciation beyond the basics is about knowing where you want to be and where you are now. Then you identify which problems keep you from reaching your goal, and solve them one by one in order of importance. This starts with high-quality practice where you learn to pronounce something correctly, then moves to high-quantity practice where you gradually decrease the effort needed to get it right. After a while, no effort will be required and you will have successfully improved your pronunciation!

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  9. Which words you should learn and where to find them

    When learning a language, it’s important to know many words, but it’s also important that you learn the right words. How do you know which words to learn? Where should you find those words? And how much can you express using the ten hundred most common words?

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  10. Can native speakers be wrong about Chinese grammar and pronunciation?

    What does it mean when something is said to be “correct” in Chinese? Who’s right if all the people around you say something, but the dictionary says something else? Mandarin is a huge language spoken my a very large number of people, so some variation is to be expected. This article is about the flexibility of Mandarin and how to deal with it as a student.

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