Hacking Chinese

A better way of learning Mandarin

Articles tagged with ‘Dictionaries’

  1. Student Q&A, November 2024: Pros and cons of digital tools for Chinese reading, and the struggle to find comprehensible and interesting texts

    Is reading digitally in Chinese better than on paper? What are the best digital tools for reading? And what should you do if you can’t find texts that are both interesting and at the right level?

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  2. Student Q&A, February 2024: Typing or handwriting, using new words in texts, and how to use AI to improve your writing

    Is it better to practise writing Chinese on a computer or by hand? How do you find the right words when writing? And how can you leverage AI to improve your writing ability?

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  3. The benefits of using Wikipedia to look up words when learning Chinese

    Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a dictionary, but did you know that it can be better than a dictionary for looking up words when learning Chinese?

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  4. 20 tips and tricks to improve your Chinese writing ability

    Writing is one of the four basic language skills, and one that learners of Chinese struggle with a lot. Good writing is based on lots of reading, but beyond that, there are plenty of other things you can do to improve your writing ability in Chinese beyond the characters themselves. Here are twenty tips and tricks!

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  5. How to look up Chinese characters you don’t know

    Looking up an unknown character in Chinese is much trickier than looking up unknown words in most other languages. This article discusses various ways of looking up Chinese characters, including paper dictionaries, handwriting input, OCR and more.

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  6. Why using a good dictionary can be bad for your Chinese reading ability

    The advent of smart phones and digital dictionaries has brought great benefits to Chinese learners, who no longer need to waste much time flipping through pages, looking for the right entry. However, always having quick access to the right answer can actually stop you from learning some of the strategies you need to become a successful reader in Chinese.

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  7. How technology can help you learn Chinese

    How technology can help you learn Chinese

    Technology has changed the way we learn Chinese, mostly to the better. This article is about some of the most important implications of this, focusing mainly on the positive effects of technology.

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  8. Dealing with near-synonyms in Chinese as an independent learner

    Near-synonyms cause major headaches for language learners and it’s especially hard for Chinese learners due to the lack of adequate resources in English. This article suggests some ways of handling the problem of near-synonyms when learning Chinese.

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  9. 21 essential dictionaries and corpora for learning Chinese

    There are many online resources for looking up Chinese characters and words, so many that it might be very hard for new learners to find what they need. This article introduces 21 dictionaries and corpora for Chinese learners, including what they should be used for in addition to some pros and cons.

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