Vocabulary acquisition is both one of the most important and interesting areas of language learning. In order to understand spoken and written...
Category: Chinese
The importance of tones is inversely proportional to the predictability of what you say
If you look online for an answer to the question of how important tones are when learning Chinese, you typically find two types of answers: Tones...
The Input Pyramid: Chinese Listening for Any Situation
When improving listening comprehension in Mandarin, there are three factors you should try to improve: Content: What you listen to Method: How...
The key to unlocking your first semester of Chinese
The autumn may be the end of summer, but for many, it’s also the beginning of something new. All over the world, millions of people enroll at...
The Chinese-Chinese dictionary survival guide
No, this is not related to anything written by Jorge Luis Borges, but it is related to both dictionaries and labyrinths anyhow. Although there are...
The most common Chinese words, characters and components for language learners and teachers
How much Chinese you learn depends on three things: how you study (method), how much you study (time) and what you study (content). If you want to...
The most serious mistake students make when learning Mandarin pronunciation
When we are born, our brains are open to the world of sound and we can perceive differences between sounds we as adults have learnt to ignore. To be...
The new HSK 3.0: What you need to know
As many of you already know, changes are coming to the HSK (Hànyǔ Shuǐpíng Kǎoshì, 汉语水平考试), the most widely used proficiency test for Mandarin...
The new paperless revolution in Chinese reading
This is a guest article by David Moser about the incredible changes the digital age has brought to learners of Chinese all over the world. David...
The nine principles of learning (and the mistakes from failing to follow them)
I first met Scott Young in 2014 in Taiwan when he was doing his year without English, spending 100 days learning Chinese. I gave him some advice...