This time I have another great collection of resources, with study tips, vocab lists, an interesting movie and more. Sounds exciting right? Make sure to scroll down to the movie preview – it’s well worth it: Continue Reading

Amongst all of my techniques for studying Chinese, watching movies is one of the more enjoyable methods. It can help with listening – obviously, by just hearing the dialogue, reading – by looking at the subtitles, since more Chinese movies also tend to have Chinese subtitles, and speaking – since you can emulate the people in the movie, and get a better idea of what natural Chinese might sound like.

Of course, watching movies can be pretty hit and miss, and with such a huge range out there, and especially if you don’t have the same taste as your Chinese friends, or people to recommend movies to you, it’s hard to find movies that really suit your taste. Certainly, I’ve spent a long time searching for good content to help me in my learning process

Now that I’ve been learning for a while, and spent a reasonable amount of time watching all this content, I figured why not share my thoughts on some of the movies I’ve watched, what they were like, and if they are any good from a Chinese learning perspective

And so, for my first movie review:

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Are you always on the search for useful Chinese study resources? Want some motivation on how to get started? Or a community to help join you on your adventure? Boy, have I got the site for you! Continue Reading

I always enjoy listening to good music, and ever since I became interested in China I’ve been searching for some music that could really get me going. However, and as I’m sure you are aware, while there is a great abundance of pop music in China (I love you, you love me, why don’t you love me, that kind of thing), I always found it really hard to find anything with my kind of style, anything with a bit more character, or anything without that suggary sachrine style which seems to define a lot of Chinese music.

When it comes to English music I listen to quite a variety, from Elliot Smith to Jack Johnson, RJD2, Gorillaz, The Rolling Stones and more (I’m also a big bluegrass fan). If you are interested you can check out my profile on last.fm to see what kind of stuff I listen to. Finding the Chinese equivilent of these kind of music isn’t always that easy, and in fact I guess I had to learn to appreciate Chinese music in different ways before I could find some more enjoyable music.

I’ve now stumbled across a few good songs which have managed to make it into my regular listening cycle. I’ve come across these songs in a number of different ways – going to karaoke with friends is certainly a big one (and hence I can actually sing some of these songs in Chinese), my friends ringtones/dialtones (it plays songs when you call their phones), the occasional recomendation (although this hasn’t been very successful to the different tastes I have from most of my friends), and through assorted things that I listen to across the Chinese internet.

And so, here is a selection of a few songs that I’ve really got into (sorry about some of the videos – quality isn’t too great) with videos and MP3′s (via Baidu – not me!) – hope you like them!:
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Lately I’ve seen a bunch of useful posts with great vocab in Chinese such as this on here on buying computers and this one here on social media. Both of these topics are really interesting to me, and very helpful to my learning, and so I thought I might share some vocab on another topic I’m particularly interested in, but often at loss for useful words for in Chinese: Politics.

These words aren’t targeted at any specific political situation, merely to give you some useful words if and when a debate pops up. Please note, the words are in English alphabetical order for no better reason than it was the simplest way I could think to categorise them. This list is also available in .PDF (88KB), PlecoDict Flashcards (16KB) and as a Google Doc. Without further ado:
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In my recent travels across the internet I came across this article on ConfusedLaowai.com. Neil raises some really interesting points, firstly about motivation (which I’ve addressed here) and also about study habits and methods which I’d like to talk about now.

Of course, everyone goes about study in their own manner; some people can study for hours and days on end (NOT me), and some people struggle to put 5 minutes of solid study together. Some people seem to like noisy classrooms, and some seem to like solitude while studying. The point is, everyone is different and there is no wrong way to go about it (well, other than not studying), but it’s often useful to have an insight into what other people are doing, and so I thought I’d share a few of the methods that have worked for me and others that I’ve known – maybe you’ll be able to find a useful tip too. Continue Reading

This week I have some really great resources to share with you. There are a lot of really helpful sites which well help you improve you Chinese vocabulary, and especially helpful to the more technically oriented among you. Great podcasts and TV shows for you to choose from too: Continue Reading

A pretty useful link to share with you today: ChineseHacks.com – this site is full of really useful information on studying Chinese, language learning resources, news, translations and more. Continue Reading

“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.” Zig Ziglar

No matter what we do in life, there is always one thing we have to overcome, and that is motivation. I guess there are some people who stroll through life, and never have any issues motivating themselves, but I’m definitely not one of them. It feels like each day and each task is a new struggle for me. Not a huge struggle most of the time, and I guess things mostly get done, but it’s always hard working up that head of steam to get started, and get down to business.

When you are learning a language like Chinese, a pretty daunting undertaking, motivation can be even harder to come by. What kind of fool would start learning a language where you need to be able to read several thousand distinct characters just to be able to read a newspaper? Of course,  just a few thousand characters isn’t enough by itself, you also need to know all the possible word combinations that those characters can form, and add to that the fact that many of the characters can have multiple pronunciations. Looking fun now? This isn’t really what I signed up for!

Luckily I sometimes don’t look that far ahead, and hence I missed out that big picture of a huge daunting language to study, and just started breaking it off in bite size pieces, which is a pretty useful motivation technique itself I guess. There are a few other useful techniques which I’ve learnt down the line, and so I thought I’d share them with you here.

1. Just start: Sounds easy and straight forward, but often the biggest stumbling block is just getting started. If you say, I’ll just begin working for a couple of minutes, it seems really easy to achieve, and you can probably convince your lazy self to get going. Before you know it, you’re actually getting work done and getting somewhere.
2. Misery loves company: You’re probably not the only one who is trying to achieve the impossible, and I’m sure somewhere around the place there are other people trying to achieve the same goal as you, or just trying to study in general. Find them, study with them, and motivate each other. For Chinese learners, there are a lot of forums around, get on them and share your experiences, the highs and lows, and learn from each other.
3. Remember why: I’m sure somewhere in the back of your head, there is a reason why you want to take on a language, why you want to try something new. For me, learning Chinese just started off as a way to further my career while experiencing a new culture at the same time. Now I have a lot of good Chinese friends, and friends of friends. Speaking Chinese means I can actually talk with them without other people to translate for me. It’s pretty satisfying.
4. Bite size pieces: OK, I already suggested this one, but I think it’s a really useful way to approach things. Learning a language is a huge task, and can be really daunting. I remember when I first started learning Chinese, and I’d forget the words and characters I’d just learnt in seconds – no exaggeration. When I started to break the task down in to smaller parts, for example, just being able to ask the price of something, being able to read a short passage, talking with my friends parents, friends or whatever, things felt a lot more achievable, and I actually got somewhere.
5. Remember the successes/credit where credit is due: Learning is hard, even for smart people (hey, I should know!) – when you make progress, be proud of yourself. I remember the first time I was able to travel around in Wuhan without needing a piece to show a taxi driver the address to my place again, because I’d actually learnt to say it. It sounds simple, but I was really happy with the achievement. I remember making my first halfway decent joke in Chinese when we were learning sentences with the 越来越 structure – everyone else was deadly serious, and I said since I found a girlfriend, 我的钱包越来越空. I know it’s not that funny, but I was still pretty happy.
6. Set Goals: Yeah, I know, everyone says this, but that probably just means it’s good advice. My kind of crazy goal at this stage is to buy a van and drive all around China, and then make a book (and maybe a video) about it. I probably need pretty good Chinese to achieve that. Actually, at the moment, I’m sure I could manage it, but I want to have real in depth conversations with the people I meet. And I’m also planning to apply for a scholarship from the Confucius Institute to study for another year at university in China.

That’s what’s driving me. What’s driving you? Any great motivation ideas? I’d love to hear them.

I spend an inordinate amount of time on the internet, and not nearly enough studying Chinese. Occasionally however, these two worlds come together, and I find a great way to study at the same time as enjoying the internet. chinaSMACK is one of the places where I can go to learn and enjoy at the same time.

Now, there are several different methods to this; through their amazing technical wizardry, they have made it so when you hover over translated text, you can see the Chinese version too. For short passages, I find this is a really great way to study. For longer passages however, it can get a bit troublesome, and it also means you can’t use handy browser plugins like Zhongwen for Chrome or Chinese Perakun for Firefox. In this case, you can always follow the links which they kindly provide in their articles/translations to the places where they originally came from. There are a variety of Chinese BBS which they frequently mention, and they are full of real Chinese which is a great place to start learning.

However, in the assorted BBS you will inevitably encounter a lot of different words that even the smartest dictionaries won’t translate, and that is where the chinaSMACK glossary comes in handy. Now next time someone calls you a 脑残, you’ll know exactly what they are talking about, and if you’ve studied hard, you might even have a few choice remarks to throw back at them. Wonderful.