When learning to pronounce tones in Chinese, it makes sense to focus on words rather than single syllables. Most words in Chinese are disyllabic and since practising these will also include to tone... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

Learning a foreign language, most people lack proper feedback from native speakers. Even if we have friends and teachers, always having to ask for help isn't very good. Lang-8 is a website that con... Read more.

lang-8.com

This is a good introduction to tones in Chinese. I personally think that tone pairs is the right way to go, mostly because they incorporate all important tone changes in Chinese. Therefore, as soon... Read more.

sinosplice.com

This site by Jun Da contains a lot of very interesting resources for anyone who wants dig deeper into frequency lists. One set of data I haven't found anywhere else is a frequency list of syllables... Read more.

lingua.mtsu.edu

Listen to native speakers, mimic the audio while recording, receive instant feedback on spoken phases. Then submit your recording to be evaluated by real native teachers. Read more.

waichinese.com

This article describes the basics of way to teach tones that is different from the traditional way mainly in that the third tone is no longer described as a falling-rising tone (since that is rarel... Read more.

sinosplice.com

The third tone is an essentially low tone. The only time it's pronounced with a high element is in front of another third tone (when it turns into a second tone) and when in complete isolation (whi... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

When it comes to learning to understand spoken Chinese, there are few shortcuts. The more you listen, the more you will understand. But how can we fit more listening into our lives without cutting ... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

This is the second and final article about using phonetic components to hack Chinese characters and make it considerably easier to handle similarly looking characters. This article describes both t... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

Writing Chinese characters for the first time can be very hard, mostly because it's so different from writing letters. It feels more like drawing a picture than writing! This article is aimed at be... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

A neat list skill-related vocabulary in Chinese by Carl Gene Fordham. From the introduction of the blog post: Lately I’ve noticed that Chinese has many words to describe skills and abilities ... Read more.

carlgene.com

Reading a novel in Chinese is the goal for many learners, but perhaps it's easier to accomplish than you think. This article discusses various methods of making novel reading easier in Chinese, ma... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

This is a basic video demonstration of the stroke order rules for writing Chinese characters. It's short and if you find something lacking, your question may have already been answered in the comme... Read more.

youtube.com

Audacity is a marvellous piece of software that allows you to record audio (yourself, other people or whatever is playing on your computer), mimic native speakers, edit and enhance the audio, as we... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

You don't have to go abroad to learn Chinese. The main difference between staying at home and going abroad is that it requires less effort to learn once you're there (although it still requires qui... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

Many people regard chengyu as the golden key to the Chinese language and believe that learning chengyu will impress native speakers and take their Chinese to the next level. However, learning cheng... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

80% of all Chinese characters are made up of one semantic component (meaning) and one phonetic component (pronunciation). The sheer number of characters formed this way means that these characters ... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

This is Hugh Grigg's site about his East Asia studies (as the title implies). Even though the site is about all East Asia, I think most posts are still about Chinese in some way, including a large ... Read more.

eastasiastudent.net

zombie Brother (尸兄) is a cartoon series about zombie apocalypse. It's quite bizarre at points and contains a fair amount of blood, violence and other elements not suitable for children. Each episod... Read more.

youtube.com

Good pronunciation matters, whether you like it or not. In general, students (and teachers) tend to stop caring about pronunciation much earlier than they should. You don't need to aim for native-l... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

Wuxia can be used as a key to both Chinese language and culture. This article is meant to be a guide to second language learners. If you want to read wuxia in Chinese, where do you start? How do yo... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

Finally, Duolingo added a En->ZH course. As Duolingo is the most popular gamification learning app, the learning experience is relatively streamlined and tested. The monetarization aspect leads to ... Read more.

en.duolingo.com

A bit like Phonemica. This website has recordings of different accents in Chinese language, including both by native speakers and non-native speakers. Read more.

hanyu123.weebly.com

This is the best overview of spaced repetition research I have seen online or offline. It's thorough, well-argued and probably covers more than you were looking for. It's not specifically about Chi... Read more.

gwern.net

Through video, text and audio, this course helps you become a better language learner. It also explains many Chinese-specific learning strategies necessary to avoid wasting lots of time or missing ... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

Outlier Linguistics hosts an excellent blog with a large number of insightful articles into Chinese characters. Some of them are directly useful because they talk about learning characters, others ... Read more.

outlier-linguistics.com

This is an article by David Moser about the incredible changes the digital age has brought to learners of Chinese all over the world. After providing a background for those who started learning Chi... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

This is a popular education channel which presents lectures of different kinds, where experts share their knowledge with ordinary people (which is quite different from lectures at universities held... Read more.

youtube.com

Tones are more important than most people think. Just because native speakers reduce tones and speak quickly, it doesn't mean that you can do the same and get away with it. Don't be fooled by peopl... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

My article about various common problems students have with Pinyin. These problems mostly exist because people read Pinyin as if it were a phonetic alphabet instead of a transcription system. Read more.

hackingchinese.com

This clip introduces all the initials and finals in Pinyin (using the first tone). It adds value to the rest of the resources here because the camera is pointed to the speaker’s mouth, showing clea... Read more.

youtube.com

This is an excellent list of useful terms for writing academic texts in Chinese, compiled by Carl Gene Fordham. Best of all, it comes with examples, which is essential for using these words correct... Read more.

carlgene.com

This article is a guide to reading comics in Chinese, suitable for beginners as well as those who already have some experience. Reading comics is an excellent way of attacking the Great Wall of Chi... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

Chinese Hacks is run by Dave Flynn and might look similar to Hacking Chinese at first glance, but actually isn't. Most of the articles on Chinese Hacks are about software, apps or other tools for l... Read more.

chinesehacks.com

Ideally, we would study Chinese just because we want to and in any manner we see fit, but this isn't how it works for most students. Instead, we need to care about tests and grades, an extra layer ... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

Many students of Chinese think that it's hard to bridge the gap from textbook Chinese to the Chinese used by native speakers in the real world. This article contains useful insights and hands-on ad... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

This is a simple and straightforward explanation of Chinese phonetics. I recommend it because it's not very complicated and (mostly) correct. I will try to write something myself later, but in the ... Read more.

zein.se

Language Log is an excellent blog where ~20 authors share their thoughts about languages and related topics. While the other authors also post interesting articles, I have chosen to link directly t... Read more.

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu

iTalki isn't specifically designed for learning Chinese, but it's still one of the most convenient and probably also one of the cheapest way to find people to practice Chinese with. Sure, you can f... Read more.

italki.com

Evaluating pronunciation needn't be hard, but many methods commonly used by teachers are deeply flawed, resulting in inaccurate error analysis. If we want to improve, we need to be clear about what... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

This is a VERY comprehensive list of computer related terms in Chinese which works well for translation or detailed look-ups rather than studying. The list is mainly in traditional characters (the ... Read more.

iicm.org.tw

This course is designed to give a practical command of spoken Standard Chinese. Nine situational modules form the core of the course. Each core module consists of tapes, a student textbook, and a w... Read more.

fsi-language-courses.org

John Pasden has over ten years of experience teaching Chinese language, and a particular awareness of phonetic difficulties. This page gathers a number of posts on his website sinosplice about pron... Read more.

sinosplice.com

Laowai Chinese doesn't update often, but when it does, it's usually worth reading. The blog is about anything related to Chinese and China, but I find posts about vocabulary, grammar and culture th... Read more.

laowaichinese.net

This is a basic but fairly comprehensive overview of the phonology of Standard Chinese (or Mandarin, as it might be better known as). This site covers consonants, vowels, syllables, tones, word str... Read more.

en.wikipedia.org

A 50-minute long animated version of the Legend of the White Snake. This is an excellent way of learning about famous Chinese stories without spending too much effort reading about them. There are ... Read more.

youtube.com

This article talks about what it is like to live abroad. Having done just that for about four years, I think this is text truly captures some really important and interesting ideas about life abroa... Read more.

economist.com

This song is raw emotion. I seldom like emotional music, but I can think of few voices that could convey this lyrics better than his. The lyrics is relatively simple and the pronunciation is clear.... Read more.

youtube.com

My goal for 2013 was to read 25 books in Chinese. This article is about the 25 books I read and is meant to serve as encouragement and inspiration. You might also find a book or two you want to rea... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

Langademy is a language learning social network that connects students with natives from all over the world. Students can practice Chinese, English, French or any other language at Langademy by mak... Read more.

langademy.com

This is a blog about Chinese language and culture run by Lewis Tatt. It's been online for several years, but I only noticed it recently. It hosts a large number of interesting articles, often focus... Read more.

themandarincornerblog.com

This is a Q&A page where teachers answer questions about Mandarin, mainly vocabulary use and grammar, but sometimes other questions as well. It's mostly useful because of the wealth of information ... Read more.

hwjyw.com

This is a very large list of traditional characters with multiple pronunciations in the form of an Excel file (the other two files are announcements about the list in Chinese). The first sheet just... Read more.

word.hlc.edu.tw

This is blog post listing easily confused characters. It's very helpful to see these next to each other since they are hard to keep separate if you only see them one by one. The selection is based ... Read more.

fluentinmandarin.com