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Interview with John Pasden, the founder of Sinosplice and AllSet Learning

May 13, 2013 by 4 Comments

John Pasden

While I was editing the interview that I did with Julien, the founder of Marco Polo Project, I was fascinated by the problems one needs to solve in order to grow an online project to the point of having enough human and economic resources for investing even more on software and content development and create a great product.

Hence I asked to myself:

“Who else was able to realize something amazing on the field of online Chinese learning?”

And I thought about John Pasden. A couple of days after I contacted him. John was kind enough to accept to answer to a few questions. This is the result of our conversation! [Read more...]

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What’s Marco Polo Project? Interview with the founder Julien Leyre

April 8, 2013 by 2 Comments

Marco Polo Project

World is small. And the internet is even smaller.

In early February I joined the Hacking Chinese Characters Challenge.

One of the rules decided by the guy that proposed the challenge, Olle Linge from Hacking Chinese (check it, it’s one of the best resources out there to learn Chinese), was that we had to connect via email with the two people that joined the challenge before and after us.

This is how I got in touch with Julien Leyre who, after we introduced ourselves and our goals with Chinese language, followed up with this email: [Read more...]

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Skritter Review: Learn how to write Chinese characters

March 25, 2013 by 16 Comments

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.

What is Skritter?

Skritter is, in my opinion, the best way to learn how to write Chinese characters.

Since I started to use it ten minutes per day (about two months ago) I’ve learned how to write 492 characters and 169 words (composed by two or three characters). I’m also learning the meaning and pronunciation of those characters.

Why do you need a software to write characters?

If you watched the video at the beginning of this post you already know that the software is pretty cool.

But the real reason for using Skritter is the algorithm behind the software, which allows you to remember more than the 90% of the characters that you are studying (in the photo below you can see that in the last 30 days I was able to remember the 92.9% of the characters that I studied, [Read more...]

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Hacking Chinese Characters Challenge

March 4, 2013 by 10 Comments

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

February 4, 2013 by 5 Comments

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)

December 31, 2012 by 8 Comments

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

December 4, 2012 by 7 Comments

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

November 22, 2012 by 20 Comments

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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ChinesePod Review – An alternative way to learn Chinese

November 1, 2012 by 11 Comments

ChinesePod Review

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

This is my review of ChinesePod, the Chinese podcast that I’m using since July 2012.

I will explain how a podcast is different from a traditional Chinese course, introduce the main features of the software and the prices of the different kind of subscriptions. Also, I will point out the most common mistakes that people make when they start using a podcast to learn a language.

Can a podcast as ChinesePod improve your learning process?

Last March I came up with a daily routine to learn Chinese as fast as possible.

I put a lot of emphasis on motivation, flashcards review, the use of a “traditional” Chinese course and the importance of listening to Chinese music and movies in a regular basis. I also stressed out the fact that [Read more...]

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How to get the most out of your Chinese course

October 1, 2012 by 4 Comments

Chinese course

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

Which Chinese course should you choose?

There are many Chinese courses out there. For the records, I started with Rocket Chinese and I’m currently using Chinese Pod.

I prefer to spend some $$$ in language courses so that I feel guilty when I don’t study but nowadays you can find everything you need to learn a language for free. I enumerated the best free resources in this article: Learn Chinese online: 27 excellent free resources.

Let’s suppose I got this bunch of Chinese courses. How the hell I’m going to use them? [Read more...]

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