Today I want to show you how taking the time to learn the 256 Chinese radicals (that is the basic components of any Chinese character) will allow you to learn Chinese characters much faster. I will do it through a real life experience (no worries, you won’t hear any overly complicated or abstract theories here!)

Just to recap my situation, on February 2013 I’ve started to learn how to write Chinese characters using Skritter, an interactive software that allows you to learn characters faster by reviewing flashcards with a clever scheduling (click on the link if you want to understand how it works).

My goals were to:

• Add new flashcards and review old flashcards for a total of ten minutes per day.

• Using mnemonics to actively study the characters that I can’t remember (instead of trying to remember them by reviewing them over and over again).

• Study all the characters and words of the HSK lists from HSK1 to HSK4, that is 1076 characters and about 700 words composed by the same characters.

[Read more…]

Chinese character dictionary by Ian Lamont

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). [Read more…]

Anki’s screenshot: The number of flashcards I reviewed every day in the past six months.

It’d been six months that I’m studying Chinese in a regular fashion. The idea was not to master the language as fast as I could. This is not a race.

It was more about using unconventional methods to improve my Mandarin in a significant way even if I can only study about an hour per day.

In these six months there were choices that I got right from the beginning and things that I could have done better. Much better.

“Errare humanum est, perseverare autem diabolicum.”

The main goal of this post is to highlight all the things I did right and, most important, all my mistakes so that I (and maybe you too) can avoid them in the future.

The choices I would do again

• I took the time to learn how to use Anki, a Space Repetition Software (SRS) that helps me to review the new words that I’m studying in a clever way. If you don’t know what it is, I suggest you to read Anki: a shortcut for learning Chinese.

• I spent about 150 USD for two Chinese courses (Rocket Chinese and Chinesepod). In the next months I may write a review of the courses, but I think this is secondary. What’s important is that [Read more…]

Two months ago I started to study Chinese (here my plan: How to learn Chinese fast: my (lazy) way) and decided to share my progresses on this blog as an extreme attempt to keep motivated. However, a post only talking about me and my studies would be so boring for you to read!

How much of a Chinese newspaper can you understand?

Thus I decided that every month I will share a useful resource to learn Chinese and only at the end of the post I will detail my progresses. Today I want to talk about Chinese Level, a website that promise to estimate how much of a Chinese newspaper you can read and then suggest you some stories in Chinese language that fit your current level so that you will not get bored reading a bunch of stuff you do not understand (the website is quite new and if I understood well this features is not ready yet). [Read more…]

Disclaimer: Even if this post mainly target Chinese learners, the ideas I share are quite general and I believe they hold true for any language.

Why should you use flashcards to study Chinese?

The use of flashcards involves active recall testing, that is being asked a question and trying to remember the answer. There are two main reasons why active recall is better than passive study:

a) Recalling something increases the chance you will remember it because strengthens your memory.

b) If you don’t remember the answer to a question, you know you need to review that specific material.

What’s a spaced repetition software (SRS)?

Many people use flashcards without a precise scheduling, reviewing them “when they feel it.” I was one of them, and of course I quickly ended up not revising my flashcards at all because it was a lot of work for a quite poor result. Not cool…

So, how to use these holy flashcards?

We all know our brain acts as a filter and only remembers [Read more…]