Hacking Chinese

A better way of learning Mandarin

Articles tagged with ‘Recording’

  1. Student Q&A, April 2024: Learning chengyu, listening to yourself and using role-playing games to learn Chinese

    Is recording and listening to your own Chinese useful for improving your speaking ability? How can you use chengyu to expand your repertoire? And how can role-playing games be utilised to improve your spoken Chinese?

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  2. Improving your Chinese pronunciation by mimicking native speakers

    The best way to improve your Chinese pronunciation is to mimic native speakers. But why, and how exactly should you go about it?

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  3. 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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  4. How to find out how good your Chinese pronunciation really is

    Evaluating pronunciation needn’t be hard, but many methods commonly used by teachers are deeply flawed, resulting in inaccurate error analysis. If we want to improve, we need to be clear about what we need to improve first. This article looks at some problems with commonly used methods to evaluate pronunciation and suggests some alternatives.

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  5. 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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  6. Benchmarking progress in Chinese to stay motivated

    When we set out to learn Chinese, everything we learn is new and we can feel that we improve for each day that goes by, for each time we are exposed to the language. We know this because, in relative terms, we’re learning so much. As we progress, this feeling weakens. In this article, I discuss benchmarking and how it can help us stay motivated.

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