Crazy English! Where are the unorthodox Mandarin techniques?
A friend recently shared this video to me. I’m sure some of you have heard of it, but it’s a very popular method to “learn” English in China, called Crazy English. The main gist of it: shout out everything. Check this video of a guy using this method. Crazy English from Seth Coleman on Vimeo. The absurdity and audacity of Crazy English is amazing. Who would’ve thought? I remember on my summer school in Beijing, [...]
Introducing Leiden Weibo Corpus
My inner linguistic nerd is going crazy right now. This post released today from a member of Sinoglot, Daan, reveals that he has created a large Weibo corpus. For those not familiar with term, a corpus is a large body/collectinos of text, often used in linguistic research to study trends, frequency, discoure analysis and other interesting data. The LWC is an annotated linguistic 100-million word corpus containing 5.1 million messages from Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter-like [...]
Giving ChinesePod the deserved listen
Some kinds of media just don’t gel with certain language learners. Back in 2010, when I was still studying Chinese in undergrad classes, I gave ChinesePod a try. It just wasn’t for me. It was slow, not interesting and I just didn’t learn anything. But it wasn’t ChinesePod’s fault, it was mine. I took a terrible approach. Here’s why. I wanted to listen to everything, from the start. Looking back now, what a dumbass mistake. [...]
Introducing Hanzi – A Character Decomposition Tool
I’ve been a bit busy lately. Doing lots of coding. One of my personal projects this weekend (which will eventually be used in my research) was to create a Chinese character decomposition tool. I’ve always had this problem. I was never sure how to decompose Chinese characters into their radical components. I set out to solve this problem. Say 你好 to Hanzi. To avoid being overly technical: Hanzi is a Chinese character dictionary lookup (still [...]
Introducing 3000Hanzi
I’m just loving how more and more awesome sites are popping up in the digital Chinese learning space lately. 3000Hanzi is the next resource that’s helping learners with reading Chinese. It not only has a great online reading system, where you can add links or text, but also has annotation, word frequency and more. It was created by Steven Daniels, who is no stranger to the online Mandarin learning community, as he is behind Lingomi too. [...]
Introducing ChineseLevel – Test your Chinese Reading
Ah, the digital age is upon us. I think Chinese learning, and language learning in general is getting very exciting lately. It became even more exciting, when I received a tweet, this weekend, from an acquaintance studying in Taiwan at the moment. His wife went with me on my trip to Beijing in 2009. Without further ado, I introduce ChineseLevel. It offers a quick test, that tracks how many words you know. Apparently I can read 80% of [...]
Chinese Rage Comics
If you spend as much time on the Internet as I do, you might have come across Rage Comics. It started on 4chan, became hugely popular on reddit and is now hitting mainstream via sites like 9gag. It features a homogenous group of “characters” and people create their own stories or “rages” using an online editor. Suffice to say it might just be the first continuous user-generated comic strip. The comics are usually humorous views and over-exaggerated [...]
Pinyin Sudoku
I found this blog somehow through a blogroll grapevine, which very cleverly combines Chinese and Math Puzzles: Pinyin Sudoku. The author posts Sudoku puzzles made up of similar sounding characters. So not only do you get to learn the differences in homophones, but you also bust your brain doing Sudoku puzzles. Check out this out this LUN one for example: In this case it not only provides homophones, but you have to make sure you [...]
Doing SRS the fun way
Ok, so after my post detailing my failures in using SRS, I’ve got some excellent feedback! Makes me just realize how great the online Mandarin learning community is. So, here’s the dealio: I was doing it wrong. Well that’s at least my view of it. I’m going to test this now. Jacob, Peckish Laowai and Greg all gave excellent advice on how they use SRS services. Here’s the summary: – Use it to review, not [...]
Revisiting SRS and Flashcards
I’ve always found SRS systems (like Anki and Skritter) and flashcards an interesting addition to language learning. Many people seem use to it to great success, but somewhere along this language learning continuum, SRS and Flashcards just fail with me. Don’t get me wrong. I did the research. It can work, if you allow it to. The myth of it being detrimental and slow is nonsense. Like I said, many others use it to great [...]