Hacking Chinese

A better way of learning Mandarin

Articles tagged with ‘Comprehensible input’ Page 2

  1. Beginner Chinese listening practice: What to listen to and how

    The best way to learn to understand spoken Mandarin is to listen as much as you can to engaging content you can make sense of without looking things up. In this article, I go through the best types of beginner Chinese listening practice!

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  2. Why you should use more than one Chinese textbook

    A textbook can only provide a sliver of the content and activities you need to learn Chinese, but rather than throwing your textbook away, try using several of them in parallel.

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  3. An introduction to extensive reading for Chinese learners

    Too many students of Chinese spend most of their time reading a small number of difficult texts, whereas they would actually be much better off reading a larger number of easier content. Are you focusing on extensive reading enough?

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  4. Learning Chinese words: When quantity beats quality

    Any teacher, student or researcher will agree that vocabulary is important, but how should you go about it? What’s the goal? This article argues that a common problem for learners of Chinese is that they spend too much time learning too few words, and that they would be better of aiming for quantity over quality in many cases.

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  5. Can too much guidance make you learn less Chinese?

    Guidance and support can make learning Chinese easier, but could too much of it make it harder? This article discusses the downsides of receiving too much help and the benefits of engaging more with the Chinese language on your own, without having everything explained to you.

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  6. Comprehension-based listening vs deep end immersion

    What works best for improving listening ability, graded content targeted at your specific level or deep-end immersion? The answer is that both approaches are necessary, but which you use depends a lot on practical considerations, as well as how much time and energy you have to invest.

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  7. A student’s guide to comprehension-based learning

    In this third and final article, the focus is on how students can make their own learning comprehension-based, with or without a teacher. It draws from the principles and ideas of the previous articles and allows you to apply these to your own learning.

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  8. The benefits of a comprehension-based approach for teaching and learning Chinese

    Diane Neubauer continues her series of guest articles about comprehension-based approaches to teaching and learning Chinese. In this the second part, the focus is on principles and motivations for using a comprehension-based method. There’s also an overview of teaching practices that fall into this category.

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  9. An introduction to comprehension-based Chinese teaching and learning

    This guest article by Diane Neubauer introduces comprehensible input and what it can do for us as language learners and teachers. It’s the first part of a series of three articles, focusing on comprehension-based methods for learning and teaching.

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  10. Learning Chinese through comprehensible input

    Comprehensible input for learning Chinese

    Comprehensible input is a key component to learning Chinese. This article focuses on the importance of understanding when listening and reading Chinese.

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