Mandarin Chinese is often described as a difficult language, sometimes one of the most difficult ones. This is not hard to understand. There are thousands of characters and strange tones! It must surely be impossible to learn for an adult foreigner!
Tag: e learning chinese
How to take a taxi?(2)
Dominic: These days most taxis in Beijing are equipped with a reliable metre that starts at 10 yuan for the first three kilometres, which works out at approximately 1.5 dollars, and then increases at around 2 yuan per kilometre after that. Nevertheless, it’s still sensible to get a good idea of the price before you start your journey. To do that, you can simply say 大概多少钱？
Dominic to taxi driver: 师傅，大概多少钱？（Shīfu, dàɡài duōshǎo qián?）
Chinese in English 出口的汉语：细数英语中的中文
“露一手(lòu yì shǒu)”means to exhibit one’s unique or rarely shown skills or abilities to others or show off some skills or abilities to others.
Interference when learning Chinese
This is the eleventh article in this series based on Dr Piotr Wozniaks 20 Rules for Formulating Knowledge. The eleventh rule is “combat interference”.
Graphical deletion and audio deletion for learning Chinese
Cloze deletion is a well-known language learning technique, but a lot of learners limit it to deleting words from sentences. As described by Rule #8 in the 20 Rules for Learning, though, there’s more to cloze deletion than just words in sentences.
The minimum information principle
When learning with flashcards, a rookie mistake is to put too much content into individual flashcards. This really hampers your learning efficiency, and the solution is to follow the minimum information principle.
10000 hours of Chinese listening
How much Chinese do you listen to on a daily basis? How much time would you estimate you have spent listening to Chinese in total?
Set Up Lifelong Chinese Character Learning in 10 Minutes
With just ten minutes of work, you can set yourself up with a Chinese character learning system that will keep your hanzi up to scratch for a lifetime. Here’s how.
The 10 best free resources for learning Mandarin Chinese
I’ve gathered here what I consider the best free resources for learning Mandarin and ranked them in order of usefulness. I reckon you could learn Mandarin very effectively, for free, using only these resources.
Improve Your Chinese By: Speaking Slowly
Time for some unusual advice: try to speak Chinese slower, rather than faster. Most advice you see about learning languages encourages you to go for “fluency” and speaking as much as possible. There is some merit to this – it is of course good to get in a lot of speaking practice.
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