Articles tagged with ‘Benchmarking’
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12 ways chatting online will improve your Chinese
Chatting is an excellent way of learning a language. Some people think chatting online is a waste of time, but in this article I list and explain a dozen reasons why this is wrong. In fact, chatting offer many advantages that are very hard to find elsewhere.
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Get to know your Chinese voice to level up your speaking ability
Have you listened to a recording of yourself speaking Chinese, only to find that your voice sounds unfamiliar and strange, like another person? Then you’re not alone!
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How to figure out how good your Chinese is
Figuring out how good your Chinese is can help you focus on the right areas and evaluate your learning methods. But language assessment is hard! This article describes how and why you should assess how good your Chinese is, and gives you tools and resources to do so.
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Transcribing Chinese audio as an active form of listening practice
Transcribing audio is a very active method of practising listening ability that encourages you to pay attention to detail. It works for all proficiency levels and is a great weapon in your arsenal to conquer Chinese listening ability.
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Are you practising Chinese the right way? Is your method valid?
The most efficient way of learning something is not necessarily the most straightforward one. However, the farther your way of practising is removed from the target activity, the more you need to make sure that you’re actually learning the right things.
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Chinese benchmarking challenge, June 10th to 30th
Benchmarking is about knowing where you are on your language-learning journey. In this month’s challenge, the idea is to assess your progress and try to measure your current proficiency in different ways.
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Why you should start blogging in Chinese today
Blogging in Chinese is a great way of improving your writing ability. It gives you structure and accountability, and people can help you by giving feedback.
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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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How knowing your best performance in Chinese can help you improve
When learning Chinese, it’s important to know how good your best performance is, because this determines the way you study. If your best performance is good enough, you mostly need high-volume practice, more of the same will get you there. But if your best performance isn’t good enough, you need to change tactics and go for high-quality practice instead.
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Using Audacity to learn Chinese (speaking and listening)
Audacity is a marvellous piece of software that allows you to record audio (yourself, other people or whatever is playing on your computer), mimic native speakers, edit and enhance the audio, as well as automatically manipulate multiple files, such as lecture or lesson recordings. In short, Audacity is a really good program for learning languages. This article introduces the software both through a video example and explaining text.
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