Articles in the ‘Intermediate’ category Page 41
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Approaches to reading in Chinese
Reading is one of the best ways of picking up new vocabulary once we reached an intermediate or advanced level, but it’s also necessary to read a lot to be able to write Chinese properly. Reading also enables us to understand word usage and brings us closer to the culture behind the language. This article is focused on reading in Chinese, including reading method, book selection, benchmarking, vocabulary and more.
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Chinese Language Learner Interview Series – Olle Linge
I’m happy to announce that an interview with me have been published over at FluentFlix. To see what other things I’ve written elsewhere on the internet, please see Hacking Chinese elsewhere. In this interview, I talk mainly about learning Chinese (no surprise there), including some personal comments on my own learning and some embarrassing mistakes […]
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Chinese listening strategies: Deliberate practice and i+2
Actively challenging ourselves is the best way to learn, but how can we cope with Chinese which is high above our current level? In this article, I discuss active listening and how to handle audio that is actually harder than we can manage. Gradually, we can remove these aids and handle the language on our own.
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Chinese listening strategies: Improving listening speed
A lack of listening speed is what stops you from understanding spoken Chinese even though you know most of the words and sentence patterns being used. I think the problem is generally overlooked and in this article I explain what listening speed is, why you need it to understand Chinese. I also talk about how to practise listening speed.
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Language is communication, not only an abstract subject to study
I won’t join the group of language bloggers who claim that classroom learning is meaningless, but I do believe there are good reasons to create links to the real world. Not only is this a motivational booster, it’s also an excellent way of identifying problems you might have with your Chinese.
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Chinese listening strategies: Active listening
This is the fifth article in my series about improving listening ability. After having covered background and passive listening, the topic this time is active listening, including a discussion of what it is and why it’s good, along with some exercises you can try.
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Using Lang-8 to improve your Chinese
Learning a foreign language, most people lack proper feedback from native speakers. Even if we have friends and teachers, always having to ask for help isn’t very good. In this article, I explain how Lang-8 solves this problem for you. Useful for any language, not just Chinese!
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Playing computer games in Chinese: Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2
If you like computer games, why don’t you start playing them in Chinese? It’s not a substitute for other types of studying, but it’s an excellent way of increasing your exposure to Chinese while having fun at the same time.
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Chinese listening strategies: Passive listening
After having looked at background listening in previous articles, the time has now come to discuss passive listening in more detail. In this article, I provide some thoughts on how to adjust passive listening to your current situation, making it less or more active.
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Chinese listening strategies: Background listening
Background listening is not a substitute for more active forms of listening practice, but it’s still very useful. Think of it as a way of filling your days with learning opportunities without requiring much extra time.
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