Articles tagged with ‘Reading aloud’
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Student Q&A, March 2024: Reading aloud, finding word boundaries, and working actively with reading materials
How can you improve your ability to read aloud in Chinese? How can you learn to see where a word starts and ends in a text? And how can you make sure you get the most out of your reading practice?
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Focusing on Chinese tones without being distracted by Pinyin
When Chinese characters appear next to Pinyin, the familiar letters distract us from the characters. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could keep information about the tones, but throw Pinyin away?
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Learning to read aloud in Chinese
Reading aloud in Chinese is hard, but it’s not impossible. It requires a lot of different skills, but it also seems like reading aloud is a skill in itself that needs to be practised specifically if we want to improve our reading ability. In this article, I discuss an experiment I did to see if I could increase my own ability to read aloud in Chinese.
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Reading aloud in Chinese is really hard
Reading unfamiliar Chinese text aloud is very hard. This article sheds some light on why this is the case and what consequences it has for people who learn Chinese as a second language. In general, as a student, don’t feel down if you can’t read aloud well, because it really is very hard, and as a (native speaking) teacher, please understand that reading aloud in Chinese is much harder than you think.
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Phonetic components, part 2: Hacking Chinese characters
This is the second and final article about using phonetic components to hack Chinese characters and make it considerably easier to handle similarly looking characters. This article describes both the principles and gives plenty of examples that might resolve some of your current problems for you.
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Phonetic components, part 1: The key to 80% of all Chinese characters
At least 80% of all Chinese characters are made up of one semantic component (meaning) and one phonetic component (pronunciation). The sheer number of characters formed this way means that these characters ought to be taught properly, yet I think this topic is largely glossed over. This is the first article of two dealing with phonetic components and how they can help you learn Chinese better.
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