Christmas Reflections & Ambitious New Year Goals
Reflecting on my progress over the past year I am left with a strange feeling. On the one hand I believe my spoken proficiency, listening comprehension and character recognition have…
Tag: Reading Chinese
Christmas Raffle: Win Twelve Chinese Graded Readers!
Update, 17/12/2021: The winner of the raffle has been announced as Søren Friis Hansen, from Denmark! Congratulations Søren and thank you to everyone who took part! — I’ve previously written…
Can you be Literate Without Writing Chinese Characters by Hand?
Recently one of my Tweets sparked a lively discussion among Mandarin learners, teachers and the wider language learning community. I recalled an encounter with a beginner Mandarin learner who told…
Why I Don’t Believe in Language Talent
I used to think there was such a thing as language talent. I used to think I had language talent. At school, teachers would tell me I was good at…
Learning Characters with Hack Chinese (Podcast)
One of the most daunting aspects of learning Chinese is the sheer number of characters required for basic literacy. It’s estimated that comfortably reading a newspaper requires around 3000 characters,…
Immersion Vs Structured Learning (Podcast)
Anyone who studies a language has to combine a mixture of approaches which broadly fall into two categories: naturalistic and structured. Naturalistic approaches involve learning through immersion in the target…
Reading Novels is the Best Mandarin Hack
Those of us learning Chinese from abroad often struggle to replicate the levels of immersion students based in China take for granted. This is especially true for speaking and listening,…
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