Hacking Chinese Characters Challenge

learn Chinese characters

UPDATE: If you buy a Skritter‘s subscription through one of the links on this page and uses the coupon “FURIO3952″ you get a 20% discount for the first six months.

Procrastination is a dangerous animal. And it bites me quite often.

I’ve known about the Chinese Characters Challenge promoted by Olle Linge at Hacking Chinese since January.

However it took me a month to join the challenge. Well, I finally did.

What is the challenge about?

It’s all about learning how to write Chinese characters in an efficient way.

While Chinese people spend a great deal of time learning how to write characters by repetition since the primary school, a person that starts with Mandarin when he’s older shouldn’t follow this tactic.

It’s boring and it takes ages to learn how to write characters this way. Modern technology blessed us with [Read more...]

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A method that you should avoid in order to learn Mandarin fast

Remember the hanzi

Want to know the best method to learn how to write Chinese characters? Click Here!

There aren’t many actual shortcuts. Things that look like shortcuts are actually detours (disguised as less work),” Seth Godin.

Today I want to talk about Remember the Hanzi, an alternative method to remember Chinese characters.

If you never heard about it, I suggest you to read my review of the method before to keep reading this article.

Seven reasons for which you should avoid Remember the Hanzi (if your goal is to speak Mandarin as fast as you can)

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The *secret* to learn Chinese (and any other stuff)

secret to learn Chinese

Want to know the best method to learn how to write Chinese characters? Click Here!

A new year is starting and I’m sure many of you guys are planning to lose some kilos, stop to smoke or, why not, learn Mandarin.

Here my contribution to the cause.

One way ticket

In my last article about Mandarin I wrote that I moved to Shanghai and, since I was burning out with my study and in Shanghai it’s easy to get around with English, I couldn’t bother to speak in Chinese for the whole month of November.

Some people didn’t understand this choice. I won’t report the exact words but the idea was the following: [Read more...]

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Quantum Memory Power: Improve your memory and learn languages

Quantum Memory Power

Want to know the best method to learn how to write Chinese characters? Click Here!

Why should you be interested on memory?

The reason for which people that have a better memory will learn a language better and faster should be obvious. No matters the language you are studying, if you want to achieve fluency you’ll need to remember a ton of words: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and prepositions. Also, you’ll have to learn the grammar and pronunciation rules.

Mandarin takes this challenge to the next level. Not only you will need to learn the tones and a new pronunciation system (pinyin). But you will also need to remember the characters (if you are planning to learn Chinese without taking characters in to account you are only misleading yourself).

What’s Quantum Memory Power?

[Read more...]

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Chinese Courses: a short review of the most popular learning tools

Want to know the best method to learn how to write Chinese characters? Click Here!

A couple of months ago I wrote a post called 27 excellent free resources to learn Chinese online. Nowadays there is no shortage of free resources for learning a language: websites, apps, forums, videos, podcasts, you name it.

However there are still people that are looking for a more professional Mandarin course, the kind of course you generally have to pay for. Personally, during the past ten months I bought three of them. Why?

There are two main reasons for that:

  • Often you must pay if you want the best resources. Think of Chinesepod or Skritter. Who would take the time to develop such a wonderful learning tools for free?
  • The ultimate goal is to learn the language. And achieving this objective requires a long-time commitment. Personally I’m more likely to stick to my goals when I’m paying some money for it. No matter if it’s a good gym, a reliable server for my website or a language course.

The problem is that there are so many different Chinese courses and find the right one may be painful.

Given my experience with foreign languages – Mandarin is my sixth language – I thought I could help these people by listing the main Chinese courses in the market and highlight the difference among them. [Read more...]

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Chinese characters: Remember the Hanzi, a controversial method

remember the hanzi

Want to know the best way to learn how to write Chinese characters? Click Here!

This post is a review of the method invented by James Heisig, the master of Kanji (the alphabet that Japanese people borrowed from China) and Hanzi, that is the Chinese characters.

The introduction of Remember Simplified Hanzi by J. Heisig and T. Richardson starts with the following sentence:

The aim of this course is to help you teach yourself, as quickly and efficiently as possible, the meaning and writing of the 3,000 most commonly used Chinese characters.

[Read more...]

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The advantage of memorizing Chinese characters in a context

memorize Chinese characters

Want to know the best way to learn how to write Chinese characters? Click Here!

I’ve already discussed in my plan to learn Chinese how I prefer to rely in the “context” while learning a language.

This post tells how, when I started to study Mandarin again some months ago, I was able to fix forever on my mind (well let’s say till next year) four Chinese words by placing them in a well defined context, instead of [Read more...]

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Learn Chinese online: 36 excellent free resources

Want to know the best way to learn how to write Chinese characters? Click Here!

This article features a list of free resources to learn Chinese online. It covers dictionaries, grammar, videos, podcasts, blogs, flashcards and forums.

I provide a short review and a link to the website of each resource in the list.

[Last Update: 3 April 2013].

Dictionaries

[Read more...]

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