A poll I did a while ago showed that listening ability was the skill most learners struggled with. This is not obvious looking at Mandarin from the...
Category: Chinese
The Fluent Listener: Navigating Spoken Mandarin Like a Fish in Water is open until November 17
Unlock social interactions and cultural understanding, connect with people and accelerate your learning with my new course, The Fluent Listener:...
Course open for registration: Unlocking Chinese – The Ultimate Guide for Beginners
Do you want to learn Chinese but don’t know where to start? Have you already started learning, but feel lost? Are you worried you can’t learn...
Cramming vs. spaced repetition: When to use which method to learn Chinese
Reviewing is an integral part of learning Chinese, and students who don’t do it will forget most of what they have learned. Most students know...
cultivate-your-chinese-flashcard-garden-or-burn-it-down-and-start-afresh
Cultivate your Chinese flashcard garden... or burn it down and start afresh | Hacking Chinese
Dealing with Chinese characters you keep mixing up
To be able to read and write Chinese, you need to learn several thousand characters. For beginners, this looks daunting, because learning the first...
Beyond tīng bu dǒng, part 2: From sound to meaning in Mandarin
To understand spoken Chinese, we need to convert sounds to meaning. We need to identify sounds of particular interest in Mandarin, combine these and...
Beyond tīng bu dǒng, part 3: Using what you already know to aid listening comprehension in Chinese
At first glance, listening comprehension seems to be about extracting information from spoken language. That is indeed part of it, but speech never...
Beyond tīng bu dǒng, part 4: Learning to process spoken Mandarin quickly and effortlessly
To understand spoken Chinese, we need to both extract information from what we hear, but we also need to use what we already know to interpret it....
Beyond tīng bu dǒng, part 5: Becoming a better listener as a student of Chinese
Listening comprehension in Mandarin is challenging, perhaps the most challenging part of learning the language. Many things need to come together to...