Happy Halloween 2016!
The scary holiday is upon us. Learn how it is celebrated in China and arm your self with the right vocabulary to escape spooky encounters with ghosts and ghouls.
The scary holiday is upon us. Learn how it is celebrated in China and arm your self with the right vocabulary to escape spooky encounters with ghosts and ghouls.
This is a guest post from friend of the site, Peter Askelof of Du Chinese. Visit their site to learn all about their fantastic new Chinese Language App.
Is it possible to practice Mandarin by yourself, without taking classes or living in China? It could very well be, at least if you are to believe the advocates of input based language learning. Input based language learning consists of listening and reading, with study activities such as watching TV, reading books, listening to podcasts and studying texts. Many experienced language learners swear by an input focused learning style where the bulk of your time is spent on listening and reading material.
Through input based activities you are fed a stream of correct language which helps you develop a natural intuition for the language’s grammar and a large passive vocabulary. A possible drawback to focusing mainly on input is that it might take a bit longer before you feel comfortable speaking yourself, but if you keep practicing input based activities you will soon reap the rewards of a rich vocabulary and a much better intuition for the language. To make the learning the most effective, the language you input should be just slightly above your comprehension level, so that you can understand most of the material but it still contains some new words and grammar. You should get as much input as possible, so it helps if you also find the material interesting. So where can you find fun, interesting listening and reading material suited for your skill level? Here we recommend two apps that aim to provide you with entertaining content suited to your language level: ChinesePod for listening, and Du Chinese for reading.
For those who don’t know — a Reddit AMA is an open “Question and Answer” session that takes place on Reddit (AMA=Ask Me Anything). Two weeks ago, we opened up our laptops and held our own AMA on the Chinese Language subreddit. The questions ranged from “How does one improve listening skills?” to “How do you pronounce Gwilym?” It was a great opportunity for us to directly communicate with the Chinese language learning community and we plan to continue these AMA sessions monthly… subscribe to our Facebook Events to get notifications on when a session is coming up!
In the meantime, read more for our six favorite questions from the session with extended answers for this blog! Also, don’t miss the exclusive Promo Code for a free month of our Annual Premium Subscription on ChinesePod at the end of the post. Read More