Articles in the ‘Listening’ category Page 13
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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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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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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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Chinese listening strategies: Problem analysis
Do you know why you don’t understand as much Chinese as you should/want/ought to? When solving a problem, the first step should always be to figure out what the problem is. Simply knowing that we don’t understand spoken Chinese at a certain level isn’t good enough, we need to know more than that if we want to improve. In this article, I discuss various ways of identifying and analysing problems with listening ability.
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Chinese listening strategies: An introduction
Listening ability is one of the cornerstones of language learning. Not only is it essential if we want to communicate with other people, it’s also necessary if we’re going to expose ourselves to natively produced language and learn from that. This is the introduction to a series of articles discussing listening ability.
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The 10,000 hour rule – Blood, sweat and tears
The 10,000 hour rule is quite simple. It states that it takes roughly 10,000 hours of practice to become really good at something. The most important lesson here is that talent is far less important that people think. Even towering geniuses work very hard. Blood, sweat and tears are what counts in the end, not talent.
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Can you become fluent in Chinese in three months?
Can you (or Benny Lewis) become fluent in Chinese in three months? I think the answer is no, but instead of just being negative, I’ve tried to describe some problems and offer some help on how to solve them.
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Triggering quantum leaps in Chinese listening ability
Listening ability is mostly a matter of practise, but the level of difficulty of the input also matters. My theory is that most people listen to Chinese that is too easy for them and would benefit from challenging themselves more, even if they spend the same amount of time practising listening ability.
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