Articles tagged with ‘Comprehensible input’
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Is speaking more important than listening when learning Chinese?
What languages do you speak? Do you speak Chinese? We often use speaking to represent language ability in general, but does that mean that speaking is more important than listening?
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The best podcasts for learning Chinese in 2024
Podcasts let you create your own Chinese immersion experience, with level-appropriate stories and authentic conversations. Learn flexibly on the go with the best podcasts for beginners, intermediate and advanced students!
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Listen more and learn more by building a personal Chinese audio library
The more you listen, the more you learn, but listening more is not as easy as it sounds. By building a personal Chinese audio library, you ensure that you always have something suitable to listen to, no matter what situation you’re in.
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8 great ways to scaffold your Chinese listening and reading
Listening and reading in Chinese can be a challenge, especially when your level is not high enough. To understand more and thereby also learn more, use scaffolding!
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Student Q&A, November 2023: Reading Pinyin or characters, comprehensible vs. compelling content and reading tools
How do you transition from reading Pinyin to reading characters? Are compelling texts better than comprehensible texts? And which tools should you use when reading Chinese?
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How narrow reading and listening can help you bridge the gap to real Chinese
Varying your diet of Chinese reading and listening practice is often considered good, indeed necessary, for your learning, but this could be wrong. In some cases, variation makes things too difficult, and then narrow reading and listening is a better option!
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Beginner Chinese listening practice: What to listen to and how
The best way to learn to understand spoken Mandarin is to listen as much as you can to engaging content you can make sense of without looking things up. In this article, I go through the best types of beginner Chinese listening practice!
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Why you should use more than one Chinese textbook
A textbook can only provide a sliver of the content and activities you need to learn Chinese, but rather than throwing your textbook away, try using several of them in parallel.
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An introduction to extensive reading for Chinese learners
Too many students of Chinese spend most of their time reading a small number of difficult texts, whereas they would actually be much better off reading a larger number of easier content. Are you focusing on extensive reading enough?
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Learning Chinese words: When quantity beats quality
Any teacher, student or researcher will agree that vocabulary is important, but how should you go about it? What’s the goal? This article argues that a common problem for learners of Chinese is that they spend too much time learning too few words, and that they would be better of aiming for quantity over quality in many cases.
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