Over at Hacking Chinese Challenges, I arrange monthly motivational challenges with the goal of making people learn more through daily practice and friendly competition.
This month, the tocus is on extensive listening ability. Extensive listening means that you should listen as much as possible without caring too much about understanding everything (although you should pick material you can understand, so if you understand very little, you need to find something else to listen to). Read more about the challenge here:
In this article, I have introduced the challenge, as well as provided some suggestions for what to listen to. If you use Skritter a lot, don’t forget that listening is also very important and something you can do anywhere in the world and that can often be combined with other things in life!
Thanks! I have added them all to Hacking Chinese Resources, which will make them easy to find whenever I or someone else wants more listening resources. If you happen to have more resources to share (I have a feeling you have), just let me know.
Those are the ones I am planning to listen to myself. There’s lots of movies and TV shows on youtube, I liked 李献计历险记 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3rYy8kThpY but there’s many more.
I’ve just got the 网易云阅读 ebook reader app on iPhone and quite positive about that. Free instant access to novels, and convenient dictionary look up in a few different dictionaries including C-C and C-E, as well as example sentences. Dictionaries are cloud only unfortunately. Going to work through 三体 as recommended by Nick when I asked about resources for after Skritter a while back on the old forum, I noticed you read that as well.
Just noticed a phrase in that movie with no definition in Skritter: 严丝合缝… goes to show how long it takes to get vocabulary up to a good level.
I’ll definitely check out the e-book reader. I’m currently using a hardware reader (a Kobo) that doesn’t have a dictionary at all (well you can get a character dictionary to work, but that’s not much use). It doesn’t bother me much as long as I’m reading something where I can get 95% comprehinsion without a dictioanry, but a popu-up dictionary is still great for reading more difficult texts.
I have read 三體, yes, and found it much more interesting than the other Chinese science fiction I’ve read (which still isn’t much, I admit). That reminds me that I still have volume two and three in my bookshelf, I just haven’t gotten around to reading them. Perfect for next month’s reading challenge, perhaps?
