“The rabbit hole effect” is another aspect of complementary memory and defeat in detail. There is a lot of overlap between these three concepts, but each offers its own insight into effective l

“Defeat in detail” may sound like a military strategy, and that’s because it is. The concept can also be applied to learning languages, though.

If you’ve read the 20 rules for learning (and the write-up here), then you’ll know about interference.

How much Chinese do you listen to on a daily basis? How much time would you estimate you have spent listening to Chinese in total?

You may already be aware of the technique of sentence mining and incorporating it into your daily studies.

This isn’t me turning against flashcards. It’s advice about how to learn most effectively with when you’re using an SRS system.

If I could only recommend one technique for learning Chinese more effectively, it would be sentence mining.

Here’s some advice about learning that sounds like it doesn’t make sense: understand before you learn.

The point I’m making here is that whilst it is good to sharpen the saw, the best thing you can do is still to find every opportunity to get real input and use Chinese in real situations.

Anyone can learn to write Chinese if they have the right knowledge and the right approach.

I recently came across this article by Randy Hunt arguing that flashcards aren’t just a waste of time when learning languages, but are actively bad for you.

How do you know if your Chinese study methods are good ones? It’s a simple question, and there are some intuitive answers.

The final article in this series on how to learn to write Chinese covers the actual method I would recommend for learning to write Chinese characters. If you haven’t already, read the other two

Once you’ve read the introduction on how to learn to write Chinese, it’s time to get on with learning the essential concepts.

With just ten minutes of work, you can set yourself up with a Chinese character learning system that will keep your hanzi up to scratch for a lifetime.

I’ve gathered here what I consider the best free resources for learning Mandarin and ranked them in order of usefulness. I reckon you could learn Mandarin very effectively, for free, using only

Do you listen to any of these podcasts? Which Chinese podcasts would you add to the list?

Do you do any of these to fill up spare chunks of time? What other good ways are there to learn Chinese at any given moment?

Over to you! Do you think it’s true that these misconceptions are often promoted in Mandarin learning? Do you think I’m totally wrong?

Numbers are always a stopping point when learning foreign languages.