Learn Mandarin Chinese and about Chinese Culture
At least initially, for learning new Chinese Characters, it is important to frequently practice writing and reviewing them. While of course using mnemonics may be a very effective way to learn, probably better than solely using rote memorization, if done actively, I still believe that it is necessary to instill into your brain the character …
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This article has the 214 Chinese Radicals list used for categorizing all Chinese characters. Though there are thousands of Chinese characters, if you learn these 214 Chinese radicals, learning additional Chinese characters will be much easier. Before modern times, Chinese dictionaries were sorted by radicals, not by some kind of Romanization system like Pinyin, so …
I am a huge fan of edx.org, a site that offers hundreds of courses from some of the best universities in the world. I recently discovered that there is a Chinese Intermediate Course there. The course is free to audit, but if you want to get a certificate as proof of completing the course, you can …
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[lastupdated] One fantastic and free Chinese video series to watch to get started learning Mandarin is called Growing Up With Chinese (成长汉语). It is a series officially made by CCTV (China Central Television) and is quite professionally made. It starts out at the very beginning level, assuming no prior knowledge of Mandarin, and builds up …
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I recently started watching a new Chinese drama called 親愛的翻譯官Les Interprète. It is a drama about French language interpreters. It stars 楊冪 (Yang Mi) and 黃軒 (Huang xuan).
[lastupdated] I recently came across some great smartphone apps that can evaluate your Chinese pronunciation quality. Pronunciation is absolutely crucial in Mandarin, especially because it is a tonal language. But without a teacher or native Mandarin Chinese speaker, it is hard to know if you are pronouncing words correctly. This article talks about the best …
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[lastupdated] While these days, there are many great smartphone apps and websites with online Chinese dictionaries, paper Chinese dictionaries are still around and still very useful. In fact, sometimes, paper dictionaries can be better than digital dictionaries because you can be more focused using them, and you don’t have the distractions of your computer or …
[lastupdated] Using Spotify can help improve your Chinese listening ability. Spotify is a fantastic and free online music streaming site. Spotify has many songs from Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan, and you can create your own Chinese language radio stations with Spotify. You can even search individual artists, and listen to a few of their songs …
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[lastupdated] There are some incredibly good sources on the web to help you master your Chinese reading ability for free. This article is about the two best Chinese encyclopedias on the web. Furthermore, this article will talk about how using Wikipedia and Baidu’s Encyclopedia can improve your Chinese reading ability.
[lastupdated] Chinese writing is a difficult skill to get good at just like any other skill. If you intend to become truly fluent in Chinese and be able to convey complicated ideas, you will need to know how to write in Chinese. Speaking alone will only get you so far. Chinese writing, like writing in …
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