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In Paper versus Electric Dictionaries, Electric Wins
It was quite a while ago now I ran a little poll asking if people preferred using Paper Dictionaries, Electronic Dictionaries, or both. Well, turns out the results were pretty much unanimously in favor of Electronic Dictionaries! With their convenience, portability, and instantly accessible information, electronic dictionaries are probably the best option for language learners these days.…
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On Tone Colors
While looking for discussions on tone colors, I came across this blog post the other day, “Color temperature of Mandarin tones“. I am by no means a designer, but I found it to be a really interesting analysis of a couple different systems used for tone colors. I highly recommend checking it out. In the…
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Sticktionary – A New Take on a Classic Learning Method
A buddy of mine contacted me not too long ago about a new project he was working on called Sticktionary. It piqued my interest immediately, since one of the methods I used back when I first started learning Chinese was contextual “stickers” placed on objects around my dorm. So, let’s take a look and see…
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ClozeCards: New Stories, Flashcards and Motivation
I just heard from David, the creator of ClozeCards.com (which you may remember from a previous post). He recently shared the information below with me, and I thought it would be really great to let everyone else know about these new features. The site itself has gone through a redesign, so I highly recommend going…
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A Delivery of Tea
It’s Christmas in January for me when a box full of tea comes in the mail! Seriously. Getting tea in the mail is probably the most amazing experience next to picking up books from 博客來 at 7-11. I had heard of these guys before, but a recent article I came across this article 【老外愛台灣】Eco-Cha 用二十年的時間愛台灣茶, from Marie…
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[Guest Post] Learning by Example
I’ve long been a fan of learning new words and new phrases by context, that is, in the greater sentence and paragraph as a whole. Using and learning words in sentences has been a huge benefit to my studies as well, and as I read more advanced works, I relied a lot on the context around…
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“Relationship Calculator” – An App To Help Keep Those Familial Terms Straight
One of the biggest challenges many learners face is in trying to learn the different ways of addressing family members. I remember what pretty much amounted a general look of confusion around the classroom as we went over the multitude of combinations. Of course, we were told “well, just parents, siblings and close relatives matters” to which…
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[Guest Post] Learning Mandarin Chinese: 5 special tips
Below is a guest post from the folks at Learn Mandarin Now. It focuses on 5 special tips for Chinese learners, including a link to an Infographic that I was able to contribute to, which you can see here. This guest post is unique in that it combines interviews and tips from other language learners…
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Spotifying Your Language Learning
Apple Music. Google Music. Spotify. Who really knows what’s going on in the tech-music industry these days, but for me, Spotify just launched a new feature that is a huge plus for language learners out there. It’s called “Musical Map: Cities of the World” and let’s take a look at how it works! One nice…
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Mandarin Poster: The Evolution of a Vital Chinese Learning Tool
I’ve been a huge fan of Mandarin Poster for a while, but I have to say that the recent website redesign and the expanding line of resources in the past year has taken me by surprise. It has quietly exploded from a simple helpful resource into a website with the potential to change the Chinese…