You may already be aware of the technique of sentence mining and incorporating it into your daily studies. Sentence mining is great and should be a major part of most people’s Chinese learning. Sentence branching is a complementary technique to make it even better.
Tag: Vocabulary
Sentence mining
If I could only recommend one technique for learning Chinese more effectively, it would be sentence mining.
Understand before you learn
Here’s some advice about learning that sounds like it doesn’t make sense: understand before you learn.
Sharpening the saw and learning Chinese
You’ve probably heard the parable about sharpening the saw. There are two people who want to cut down trees. The first one sets to immediately with a blunt saw and no skills. The second person first spends time sharpening their saw and improving their knowledge. In the beginning, the first person gets ahead whilst the other one spends time improving their ability. But once the second person gets going, they quickly gain the lead with the improvements they have made.
Why Randy Hunt is wrong about flashcards
I recently came across this article by Randy Hunt arguing that flashcards aren’t just a waste of time when learning languages, but are actively bad for you.
A simple test for your Chinese study methods
How do you know if your Chinese study methods are good ones? It’s a simple question, and there are some intuitive answers. You might ask any of the following to gauge how effective your learning methods are:
Five free Chinese podcasts you should be listening to
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I really like Chinese podcasts as a source of listening material.
10 Things You Can Do to Improve Your Chinese Right Now
One of the most important aspects of learning Chinese is making the best use of your time. It can be easy to waste all of the little five-minute chunks of time that appear throughout your day, but if you can put them to use, the benefits add up fast.
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.
Asking Yes / No Questions in Mandarin Chinese
There are two ways to ask yes / no questions in Mandarin: with the “ma” particle, or by using a positive / negative sentence structure.
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