Intermediate Chinese: all those wonderful tools!
Send a text In this episode I explore how I honed my different Chinese language skills: understanding, speaking, reading and writing. I look at all those wonderful tools, most of which are free, that ...
28 Sep 202438min
HSK: to test or not?
Send a text In this episode I'm looking at language tests and certificates. Would that be a goal for me, and which test should I aim for? Would preparing for a test really motivate me? I try to find w...
26 Sep 202423min
How do you write a text message in Chinese?
Send a text How do you even write Chinese text messages when you don't have a keyboard with 5000 or more characters? In this episode I look at ways in which Chinese is used today, and at some of the c...
24 Sep 202421min
The Chinese writing system
Send a text In this episode I'm looking at the history of the Chinese writing system and why it is so successful that it is still used today. In my own learning, once I knew enough characters and had ...
22 Sep 202414min
Making sense of the chaos
Send a text Chinese has many homophones: words that sound the same. And when you are only just entering the intermediate stage and are still not very confident when it comes to the different 'tones', ...
20 Sep 202421min
Chinese, my escape from reality
Send a text In this episode I describe how learning Chinese became my treasured escape from reality. I wanted to tell everyone about my new language and also start speaking Chinese with real people, b...
18 Sep 202416min
Learning to write Chinese characters
Send a text When I realised that learning to read and write Chinese characters would help me in my learning, I started to add a writing app to my repertoire of learning methods. Suddenly the character...
16 Sep 202414min
Making learning Chinese fun
Send a text Do people really have different learning preferences, and how do you go about finding yours? In this episode I reflect on my language learning back at school, which, mildly put, was a disa...
14 Sep 202429min
