Hacking Chinese

A better way of learning Mandarin

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  1. Panning: How to keep similar Chinese characters and words separate

    The real challenge when learning Chinese characters and words isn’t to remember them, it’s to keep them separate from each other. This article concludes my series about zooming and panning to integrate your knowledge better.

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  2. Sensible character challenge, January 11th to 31st

    It’s time for the first challenge of 2015! I have a feeling I’m not the only one who has fallen behind on vocabulary learning and reviewing, so this month’s challenge will focus on learning and characters and words. There are prizes on offer and the challenge starts on the Sunday 11th.

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  3. Learning to write Chinese characters through communication

    How much of your character learning is done through communication? It should be a significant part, but I think this is very rare, both inside and outside classrooms. This article is about using communication to make character writing more fun, meaningful and effective.

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  4. How to reach a decent level of Chinese in 100 days

    Scott Young has written a lot about how to learn more efficiently and this year he has turned his focus entirely on languages. He spent three months in China and managed to reach a very decent level of Chinese in that time, including passing HSK4. In this article, he shares his experience and the strategies he used. The article also contains two video interviews, one with John Pasden (Sinosplice) and one with me.

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  5. Learn to read Chinese… with ease?

    Can you learn to read Chinese with ease? ShaoLan, among others, claims that you can. However, these arguments involve a lot of cherry-picking and are mostly exaggerated.

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  6. Three ways to improve the way you review Chinese characters

    In this article, I discuss three things you can do to improve the way you review characters, mainly focusing on avoiding rote learning, time quality and making sure your study method really prepares you for what you want to use your Chinese for. The article also contains a video about how to improve your character reviewing with Skritter!

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  7. Sensible Chinese character learning revisited

    In a way, learning Chinese characters is very much like learning vocabulary in any foreign language and much of the efficient methods developed there works well for Chinese as well. However, characters are also fundamentally different from words in English and this influences how we should learn them as well. This article is a recap of how to learn Chinese characters in a sensible way. It is also a prologue for the upcoming character learning challenge.

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  8. Flashcard overflow: About card models and review directions

    The question of how to design flashcards is faced by all learners who use them. What should you put on the front? What should you put on the back? Should you add single characters or whole words? Or perhaps sentences are better? The general answer is that it depends and this article discusses some of the factors the answers depend on.

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  9. Phonetic components, part 2: Hacking Chinese characters

    This is the second and final article about using phonetic components to hack Chinese characters and make it considerably easier to handle similarly looking characters. This article describes both the principles and gives plenty of examples that might resolve some of your current problems for you.

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  10. Skritter review: Boosting your character learning (2013 edition)

    Skritter is the best character-learning app/service available. In this Skritter review, we look at why and how you can use it to learn in a better way.

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