Monday, February 7, 2011

Fun ways to learn

I know a lot of you out there think, "If I'm not learning from a textbook, or studying with flashcards, then I'm not learning." Well I've got news for you, you don't HAVE to learn that way!

You are not learning a foreign language to be able to take a test well, you are learning it to be able to communicate with others. Have fun with it! Don't just sit there mindlessly memorizing vocabulary, taking tests, and killing yourself when you forget something. Go out and do something IN the language. You'll be surprised, you can learn a lot from doing that.

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I learned 2 new 成語 today from 海綿寶寶.




I've already beaten this game, but playing video games is a great way to learn.


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I don't often play MMOs, but you can learn a LOT of characters from them. What's more, you can speak with native speakers in a fun environment.


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Put your Facebook in Chinese. With the help of a Chinese Reader, you can learn a lot of very useful vocabulary, as well as sentence structures. But why stop there? Put your Skype in Chinese, put your MSN in Chinese. Put your entire computer in Chinese!! If you're on Mac or Linux, it's very easy to do :) If you're on Windows, you can make it happen with a little money or a bit of unlawful activity.

Do everything that you love to do normally, but in Chinese. If you're learning another language, do it in that language then. This is a great method of learning for any language!

6 comments:

  1. I have to find more games in
    chinese, maybe an online multiplayer game. I found a chinese online multiplayer game, it's a racing game though

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  2. Yes, all of them are very useful! and most of all is chatting with your lovely Taiwanese friend, right :)

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  3. Yeah, I've played 跑跑卡丁車 before, but there's not a whole lot of vocab you can learn from it.

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  4. Is there somewhere you are getting these Chinese video games? I'd be really interested and appreciative. Drop me a line on my website if you have time. Thanks.

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  5. I'm currently tryig to immerse my home in chinese, someone reminded me of that Whoopie Goldberg film 'The Color Purple' where the sister teaches her older sister to read by sticking the names of things on everything, so that's what i'm doing to my house hehe (granted it will only work for objects around the house but every lil helps). So everytime I walk past something I can just look at it, in time I will remember, no stress!!

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