#hacking chinese challenges

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Chinese listening challenge, June 10th to June 30th

Chinese listening challenge, June 10th to June 30th

One of the goals with Hacking Chinese Challenges is to provide a motivational boost and a sense of direction to students, including myself, This means that I try to  arrange the challenges in such a way that if you participated in all of them, you will get a good mix of different kinds of practice. Based on experience, I know that most students don’t spend enough time just reading or just…

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Chinese writing challenge, May 10th to May 31st

Chinese writing challenge, May 10th to May 31st

After having spent two challenges on input (listening in March, reading in April) it’s time to become more active this month and improve our writing ability. I started preparing a bit earlier this week by writing an article about one of the best methods I know for improving writing ability (Hone your Chinese writing ability by writing summaries), but that’s of course just one thing you can do…

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Chinese reading challenge, April 10th to April 30th

Chinese reading challenge, April 10th to April 30th

When I launched Hacking Chinese Challenges last year, I promised that I would make sure that if you participated in all challenges, you’d get a healthy mix of practice. Last month, we focused on listening, which I think is the most important skill when learning Chinese. We (87 participants) collectively spent 1255 hours improving our listening ability last month, that’s awesome!

The other input…

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Chinese listening challenge, March 10th to March 31st

Chinese listening challenge, March 10th to March 31st

When I launched Hacking Chinese Challengeslast year, I promised that I would arrange the challenges in such a way that if you participated in all of them, you would get a healthy mix of different kinds of practice. Based on experience, I know that most students don’t spend enough time just reading or just listening. I don’t mean struggling through Chinese above your level, I mean sheer volume.…

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Reading challenge, March 10th to March 31st

Reading challenge, March 10th to March 31st

When I launched Hacking Chinese Challengeslast year, I promised that I would arrange the challenges in such a way that if you participated in all of them, you would get a healthy mix of different kinds of practice. Based on experience, I know that most students don’t spend enough time just reading or just listening. I don’t mean struggling through Chinese above your level, I mean sheer volume.…

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Extensive reading challenge, November 2014: Progress report

Extensive reading challenge, November 2014: Progress report

This month’s reading challenge has run for more than two weeks now and my progress report is late. I have moved house and spent most of my time carting boxes around and sort through the mess. This is not an ideal environment either for reading Chinese or writing articles on Hacking Chinese.

Still, I want to write a bit about my reading challenge so far and I’m also curious to hear how you’ve…

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How to find the time and motivation to read more in Chinese

How to find the time and motivation to read more in Chinese

This month’s challenge is about reading Chinese, and that seems to be as good a reason as any to publish an article about habit formation and reading practice.

As is the case for listening, learning to read Chinese takes a lot of time and you need to form habits that allows you to read enough text. I have already written an article called Habit Hacking for Language Learners, but in this article,…

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Extensive reading challenge, November 10th to 30th

Extensive reading challenge, November 10th to 30th

Last month, 139 learners spent a total of 924 hours improving their listening ability in the October extensive listening challenge. The reason I launched Hacking Chinese Challenges roughly a month ago was of course that challenges help me get more things done, and it’s great to see that many of you seem to agree!

As I said in the launch post, I’m going to run one challenge every month, starting…

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