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In order for an SRS (Spaced-Repetition System) to really work, you need cues to remind you to study (or at least most of us do). For me, that mean means setting up email cues. Before I explain how I use email cues to study, some background on my situation might help. Why not use some …

Most of us are bad at creating habits. I know I’m not great at it. I struggle to do many of the things I should. Eat right Diet Exercise Clean the kitty litter Blog Even study Chinese Why is getting yourself to study consistenty so hard? Because it’s not s habit. If you’ve made studying …

[Authors Note: I'm not a Benny expert. The following is what I gleaned from only parts of Benny's Mission. If you want to understand his methods more, head to his site (link below)] Benny learned Chinese. If you were in a hole earlier this year (or don’t read language learning blogs), you might have missed …

It’s a problem a lot of people I talk to face: where can one find interesting articles in Chinese to read? Usually I tell them, “try Caixin!” But for some strange reason, not everyone likes reading a magazine with high journalistic standards dedicated to finance and economics. So, I’ve been conscripting my wife into helping …

It’s easy to get stuck doing the wrong things. Sometimes you get in the habit of not studying Chinese. (Or you get into the habit of not blogging every week.) Good study habits are important for learning any language and are even more essential when learning Chinese which has tough-to-master parts like tones and characters. …

If you muster up all your willpower to study Chinese, it won’t be enough. Learning Chinese requires more than willpower. The tides of willpower Willpower is like waves in the ocean. It ebbs, it flows. You have it, and you don’t. To have consistent growth when learning Chinese, you should be doing it everyday (All …

In a lot ways, studying languages is like a lot like eating/living healthy. Both are activities that take a lot of time, and focus. And often times, both seem like they are designed to go against our basic nature. I often find myself thinking “I should really study today”, or “I really should go to …

At the beginning of the year, I set a few longer term goals for improving my Chinese. One of these was to read faster: 70% of my wife’s speed (she is a native Chinese speaker). In order to track my progress, I recorded my reading speed. Today I retested my reading speed.

You don’t always need a dictionary. You can figure out the meaning of words more often than not. If you don’t understand 1 or 2 words in a sentence, don’t look them up, try to figure out what they mean without using a dictionary.

Learning to read Chinese isn’t as simple as learning a bunch of words on a page. If you want better reading skills and you want to improve in an efficient manner, you are going to need to understand and use reading strategies.