In the first article about learning Chinese through wuxia, Sara K. explained what wuxia is, why it’s relevant for Chinese learners and how to get...
Category: Chinese
A learner’s guide to TV shows in Chinese, part 1
Last week, we looked at how and why to learn Chinese through television. In this article, Luke Howard will introduce several different genres of TV...
A learner’s guide to TV shows in Chinese, part 2
Earlier, we looked at how and why to learn Chinese through television and we have also looked at a learner’s guide to TV shows in Chinese. In this...
A minimum-effort approach to writing Chinese characters by hand
Chinese characters are beautiful and fascinating, but learning to write them by hand is time-consuming. If you want to learn to write Chinese...
A smart method to discover problems with Mandarin sounds and tones
Even people who haven’t studied Mandarin knows that it can take some time to learn the tones and some of the trickier sounds, but there are actually...
About cheating, spaced repetition and learning Chinese
Cheating is an interesting phenomenon, especially when it concerns motivated students who cheat even though this can only have negative effects on...
About fossilisation and improving your Chinese pronunciation
Image credit: David Monniaux Having studied a significant amount of phonology and phonetics, as well as focusing my research more and more into...
About opening doors and the paths beyond
Image credit: Mei Ying Chan (flickr.com/photos/jayna/) When describing Hacking Chinese, I usually say that it’s about opening doors rather than...
Can native speakers be wrong about Chinese grammar and pronunciation?
Have you ever asked a native speaker how to say something and then said that yourself to someone else, only to hear that it’s wrong and no-one says...
The importance of counting what counts when learning Chinese
Have you ever felt that your teacher is correcting the wrong things or that she says that one thing is all-important but then ignores that when...