Month: February 2026

It’s safe to say that pronunciation is an overlooked area of learning Chinese. Typically, pronunciation is covered in the first few weeks or...

Regular visitors to Hacking Chinese will know that I’m a bit obsessed with pronunciation and have spent an inordinate of time both on theory...

I have launched a podcast! Just like Hacking Chinese in general, it’s about how to learn Chinese. There are currently fourteen episodes available,...

Transcribing, or writing down something exactly as it is said, doesn’t sound like the most exciting way to learn a language, but in my experience,...

I have taught a fair amount of writing in various languages and have been on the receiving end of even more. The main problem as I see it is that...

Listening ability is often neglected in classrooms. Naturally, the students hear the teacher talk and might even hear other students talk, but...

The main reason for having a teacher is that they teach you things; that’s what teachers do. In an ideal world, you would be able to find a great...

Part of a breakdown of a student’s bottom-up listening ability. Listening should come before speaking. I think this is true for language learning...

How important are tones, really? They are an integral part of Chinese, we all know that, but do you actually need them all the time? In this...

Tones are important when learning Chinese. I usually explain this to beginners by saying that tones carry about as much information about the...