What’s the Big Deal About Sentence Mining? (Podcast)

Mining for Treasure

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Last Christmas I set myself a new year’s resolution to improve my spoken Chinese to the point where I’d feel comfortable recording podcast interviews in Mandarin.

Of all the methods I’ve used this year the one that I feel has helped me the most towards my goal is sentence mining. The term basically means collecting large numbers of sentences conveying key grammatical structures before revising them later.

Each time you’re watching a TV programme or have a conversation with a native speaker, you listen out for sentences you feel you might want use yourself and record them down in a document or using flashcards.

The idea is that by collecting and learning hundreds of these sentences you will start to develop 语感, or a deeper sense of the language.

I recently wrote a guide to sentence mining for my blog and in this episode I’ve invited a few of my Chinese learning friends – Karl, Ryan and Jorge – to share they’re approaches and discuss how the technique has helped them.

*To contact Karl about his sentence mining app email ActiveLearningApps@gmail.com

*For a full guide on recommended apps for learning Mandarin please visit this link

*Join the I’m Learning Mandarin Facebook Community on this link

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