Another year has come to an end. Which were the most popular articles on Hacking Chinese in 2024? The most popular podcast episodes? It’s time to summarise the year that was and highlight the things you really shouldn’t miss!
Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episode (#232):
Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and many other platforms!
Hacking Chinese in 2024: New course, articles, podcast episodes, resources and challenges
The most notable milestone for Hakcing Chinese in 2024 was the launch of my new course The Fluent Listener. After investing more time than I’d care to count into structuring the course, drafting content, recording videos and creating study materials, the course was finally launched in November. The course was warmly received and will open again for registration in February.
Moreover, I successfully maintained my publishing schedule throughout 2024, reaching a streak of 232 consecutive weeks with one article and one podcast episode released each week. This brings the total to 540 published articles and 232 podcast episodes. Woho!
If you’re very observant, you’ll notice that the number of articles grows more slowly than the number of podcast podcasts. This is because while each podcast episode is entirely new, I often rewrite, merge, replace, upgrade, or otherwise reorganise articles to refine and consolidate the content on Hacking Chinese. Some articles on the site were written more than a decade ago and badly need an upgrade!
I’ve also kept updating Hacking Chinese Resources, which reached the significant milestone of 500 last year. I think this is probably the largest curated collection of links for Chinese learners. I’ve also run one challenge per month over at Hacking Chinese Challenges and participated in many myself. I even managed to break my old record of 100 hours of Chinese in one challenge by listening for 145 hours in the January 2024 challenge. I didn’t write about that, but the article about listening 100 hours in three weeks contains everything you need to know.
How was your 2024? Did you reach any goals or milestones last year?
What were your goals for 2024? How did things turn out? Did you achieve any big milestones over the past year, perhaps something you’ve been aiming for since you started learning? Maybe you finally accomplished something that once felt out of reach. Or perhaps you didn’t quite hit your targets but picked up valuable lessons along the way.
Previous Best of Hacking Chinese articles I’ve written almost all articles on Hacking Chinese. When selecting what to write, I try to balance what I think is important with what people want to read, although I’m always able to find topics that cover both. Sometimes, I write articles that I think are more important than others, even if I suspect that it’s not what students want to read. Below, I have chosen the five most important articles on Hacking Chinese from 2024. In essence, these are articles that I think you really shouldn’t miss! Don’t trust the search algorithm, trust me; you don’t want to miss these articles. Interview: Insights from Skritter’s Complete Guide to Learning Chinese I wrote a book about learning Chinese almost ten years ago. Since then, I’ve gained insights into project planning, structuring text, selecting content, and writing clearly about learning Chinese. I’ve also learned a lot from teaching and reading. I’m not entirely satisfied with that earlier book. Fortunately, I published a new one in 2024! Or rather, as lead author of Skritter’s Complete Guide to Learning Chinese, I created a book focused on vocabulary and aligned with what I would write today. It emphasizes three key factors for better learning: content, method, and time. The best part? The book is completely free! You receive a copy when you sign up for Skritter, which is free to try (and you get the book whether you decide to subscribe or not). Check it out! Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episode #193: On Hacking Chinese, I mostly write for learners, but much of my time is spent working with language teachers. I work with professional development for language teachers at a national level in Sweden. This involves considering not just how to learn languages independently, but also aspects such as classroom pedagogy and curriculum design. Occasionally, this results in articles for teachers on Hacking Chinese. In 2024, a new book about the role of e-writing was published. It is titled Transforming Hanzi Pedagogy in the Digital Age (电写时代的汉字教学) and was released by Routledge. I contributed a chapter discussing the importance of a balanced approach to handwriting in Chinese language curricula, using Sweden as an example. To summarise, if students are expected to handwrite everything they can say in Chinese, they will end up spending most of their time on handwriting. If the primary goal is communication, this approach is unreasonable! Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episode (#199): In this article, I explore how adult learners can train themselves to hear the sounds and tones of Mandarin, a skill that often feels challenging after childhood. In short, there are two proven methods: high-variability training, which uses input from multiple speakers to help learners distinguish key tonal features, and perceptual training through exaggeration, where exaggerated pronunciation gradually approaches normal tones while maintaining the ability to distinguish them. Both methods emphasise the importance of varied, systematic input and focused engagement to develop the ability to hear sounds and tones in Mandarin. I chose this article because it’s something almost nobody talks about. It’s almost always about how to pronounce tones. Most teachers have no (literally zero) training in this area, so I hope this article helps those of you who struggle with tones! Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episode (#198): I’ve spent the past few years researching and learning about listening comprehension. The more I dig into it, the more interesting it becomes. This work has led to my new course, The Fluent Listener, which is built on four key principles: Most of the content on Hacking Chinese is free. However, since this course is not, I feel this article is particularly important. While it doesn’t cover everything included in the course, it highlights some essential ways to improve your Mandarin listening practice. Most students don’t follow any of these principles (and it’s often not your fault if you don’t), so reading through this article can have a huge impact on your listening skills! Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episode (#223): I often write about specific aspects of learning Chinese, such as how to hear tones, the role of handwriting, or how to learn Chinese characters. Occasionally, I zoom out to look at the bigger picture. These broader articles tend to be the most popular on the site but are extremely time-consuming to write. They also typically rely on the foundation of hundreds of articles about smaller topics, which can then be combined into one comprehensive overview. I’m cheating a bit here when it comes to selecting my favorite article because this is actually a series of three articles. The premise is that I have a time machine and can give myself advice as a beginner, intermediate, and advanced student. I limit myself to three pieces of advice per stop, each summarized by one underlying principle. These articles are probably the best place to start if you’re new to Hacking Chinese or want to know what to focus on at different stages of learning. Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episodes (#211, #215 and #219): Chinese character variants and font differences for language learners When learning Chinese, it is important to understand that small differences in how characters are written or displayed can stem from font variations or regionally preferred variants. These differences don’t typically affect meaning but can be confusing, especially for beginners. For instance, characters like 户 (mainland China) and 戶 (Taiwan) are considered the same but are still distinct characters on your computer. Chinese fonts also vary widely. Fonts like 明体 (Míngtǐ) and 楷体 (Kǎitǐ) are common in print and digital texts, with the latter resembling handwriting and dominating textbooks. Understanding these distinctions helps you adapt to different digital or print styles. While handwriting differences are less critical, knowing how fonts and variants work can make reading and writing more manageable and reduce confusion in your studies! Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episode (#207): I already discussed this article in the editor’s choice category, so I won’t repeat what I sad there. My guess is that this article became popular, not because the content is favoured by search algorithms or the average reader, but because several people involved in the project, or who are otherwise sympathetic to it, helped promote the article. Thank you! Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episode (#199): A problem learners face when trying to master Mandarin pronunciation is that there are so many resources available, yet most of them are not very good. There are even errors in supposedly reliable textbooks, not to mention YouTube videos that prioritize production quality over pedagogical principles or linguistic accuracy. Naturally, the problem doesn’t become apparent until much later, when you realise that the cute video about tones was actually wrong or that the description of the neutral tone in your textbook wasn’t as helpful as it could have been. To help you out, I’ve collected the best resources I know of. I’ve been obsessed with pronunciation for a long time, so this collection didn’t come about overnight! The best way to get reliable information is through my pronunciation course, but if you want free alternatives, this article is great too! Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episode (#197): This article wins the prize for taking the most time to write out of all articles published in 2024. Just like the time machine series mentioned above, it’s a comprehensive overview of one of the most important areas of learning Mandarin, namely tones. While most of the world’s languages are tonal, most learners speak languages that don’t have tones, which makes tones a daunting challenge to overcome. In this article, I go through everything you need to know about tones. Just look at the table of contents and you’ll understand both why it took time to write and, presumably, why people also found it helpful: Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episodes #183, #184 and #185: After having sampled almost every single available podcast for learning Chinese, I compiled everything I lerant into one giant article. This also double d as research for The Fluent Listener, where I included many more podcasts and listening resources, but this article stands on its own. It’s often hard to predict which articles become popular, but this was an exception; I was fairly sure that this one would do well. And it did! The table of contents summarises the article quite well: Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episode #190: The podcast sometimes has a life of its own. Despite most listeners likely finding it through the website or newsletter, which link to both articles and episodes, the popularity of individual episodes doesn’t seem to follow a clear pattern. Some topics are better suited to written articles, while others work better in audio format, but this doesn’t always align with listener statistics. Below, I’ve listed the top five podcasts from last year, determined by the number of plays. If a related article has already been summarised above, I’ll simply note that to keep things concise. How I used a notebook to learn more Chinese, and why you should too This episode is a good example of how difficult it can be to guess what readers and listeners want. As I was writing it, I thought to myself: “This is too detailed and too nerdy; no one is going to read this, let alone find it interesting.” Thus, I scheduled it for the middle of the summer, when articles and episodes typically receive less attention anyway. The result? It made the top 5 this year! Either I misjudged what people want to learn about, or summer is a better season for the podcast than the website. In essence, the episode explores the importance of taking notes when learning Chinese, including how to do it properly. If you never take notes, I’ll try to convince you to start (I used to skip taking notes myself). If you already take notes, the practical advice here can help you get even more out of your notetaking! Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episode (#205): I have already discussed this series of articles and episodes before! Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episodes (#211, #215 and #219): Beyond tīng bu dǒng, part 6: Why is listening in Chinese so hard? I was very close to calling this article “Why is listening in Chinese so damn hard?” in reference to David Moser’s famous article from the 90s. Listening in Chinese is hard! Some of the challenges stem from the general difficulty of listening in a new language, while others are more specific and unique to Mandarin. If you’ve ever wondered why listening feels so overwhelming, this article is for you. As you might have noticed, this is part 6 in a series. To truly understand listening comprehension, I recommend checking out the five earlier parts as well. I also created The Fluent Listener to help learners tackle these challenges, so be sure to take a look if you haven’t already! Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episode (#195): I already discussed this series of episodes above. If you haven’t read or listened to the one(s) most relevant for you, please do so! It’s likely to be more important than any other article or episode I’ve published in recent years. Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episodes #183, #184 and #185: This was also the most popular article, and considering that the topic is podcasts, it’s not surprising that it was also the most popular podcast episode! I already discussed this article and episode above. Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episode #190: The above list only contains articles along with their podcast episodes, but there are also pages on Hacking Chinese that are much more popular than most articles. Pages are what I use to organise articles, so it’s one step up in the hierarchy. You can see most pages in the top menu or the sidebar (bottom on mobile). Here are the top five most visited pages (disregarding the front page, blog and archive pages, because those have many views): Last but certainly not least, I want to thank all of you who visit, read, listen to or otherwise engage with the content that I create. It’s feedback from people who find Hacking Chinese helpful that motivates me to keep the website and podcast going. So, happy new year, and let’s hope 2025 will be a good year for you and for Hacking Chinese!
Best articles on Hacking Chinese 2024: Editor’s choice
五 Interview: Insights from Skritter’s Complete Guide to Learning Chinese
Available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, YouTube (with video) and many other platforms!四 Chinese character learning for all students
Available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, YouTube and many other platforms!三 Learning to hear the sounds and tones in Mandarin
Available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, YouTube and many other platforms!二 Four key principles to improve your Mandarin listening comprehension
Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and many other platforms!一 Three things I wish I had known as a beginner/intermediate/advanced student of Chinese: The time machine
Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and many other platforms!Best articles on Hacking Chinese 2024: Popular vote
五 Chinese character variants and fonts for language learners
Available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast, Overcast, Spotify, YouTube and many other platforms!四 Chinese character learning for all students
Available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, YouTube and many other platforms!三 24 great resources for improving your Mandarin pronunciation
Available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, YouTube and many other platforms!二 The Hacking Chinese guide to Mandarin tones
Available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, YouTube and many other platforms!一 The best podcasts for learning Chinese in 2024
Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and many other platforms!Best podcast episodes on Hacking Chinese 2024: Popular vote
五 Episode 205: How I used a notebook to learn more Chinese, and why you should too
Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and many other platforms!四 Episodes 211, 215 and 219: Three things I wish I had known as a beginner/intermediate/advanced student of Chinese: The time machine
Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and many other platforms!三 Episode 195: Why is listening in Chinese so hard? Beyond tīng bu dǒng, part 6
Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and many other platforms!二 Episodes 183, 184 and 185: The Hacking Chinese guide to Mandarin tones
Available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, YouTube and many other platforms!一 Episode 190: The best podcasts for learning Chinese in 2024
Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and many other platforms!Popular pages
Thank you and happy new year!
