Hacking Chinese

A better way of learning Mandarin

Articles tagged with ‘Tricky cases’

  1. How to create mnemonics for general, abstract or overlapping character components

    Mountains, trees and rocks are easy to use in mnemonics. But what do you do with character components whose meanings are general, abstract or overlapping?

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  2. Horizontal vocabulary learning in Chinese

    The normal thing to do when we learning characters or words is to focus on deepening our knowledge, researching components and understanding more about what we’re trying to learn. Some problems can’t be alleviated this way, however, instead they call for horizontal vocabulary learning, i.e. to putting the character or word into context and to compare it with similar characters or words. Only then can we grasp the bigger picture.

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  3. The Cthulhu bubble and studying Chinese

    The Cthulhu bubble and studying Chinese

    What does learning Chinese have to do with the Cthulhu Mythos? Quite a lot, actually. This article is about your bubble of safety and what happens when monsters (weird, difficult cases) appear and what you should do to avoid insanity. In short, don’t poke the monster in the eye; when encountering strange cases, either ignore them or memorise them, don’t waste time understanding everything you hear or see.

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