Quarantine and isolation at home can be boring. However, it can also be a great chance to brush up on your Chinese language skills. You may find you now have the time to attempt new ways of learning the language that you never had before.
We all know that watching movies and listening to music are highly recommended activities for learning a language as they can help improve listening and sometimes even speaking skills. But do you find yourself sometimes struggling to keep up with what is being said or sung?
I have heard lots of students say that the fast-moving images and plots of TV series and films can very often distract them from focusing on listening. Music is often also not such a great Chinese language teacher as the Chinese language has tones, which may not be decipherable from listening to the lyrics.
That’s why I find this little thing—喜马拉雅 (Xī Mǎ Lā yǎ)— quite a useful tool for learning Chinese at home.
喜马拉雅, meaning Himalaya, is an app. that has a huge variety of audio content, including classic literature, modern novels, news and even various podcasts and content recorded by strangers from all over the world.
If your Chinese level is elementary or intermediate, you can choose something easy to understand. It is also possible to slow down the play speed to make sure you can carefully tune-in and understand what is being said more easily.
If you are an advanced Chinese learner and like a challenge, you can choose to listen to works with vocabulary from certain dialects, such as Beijing dialect, Northeast dialect, Sichuan dialect, etc. to further enrich your knowledge of the Chinese language in its cultural context.
In addition, you can also record your own work and save it on 喜马拉雅, and compare it with other people’s work in order to gain feedback on how you can improve all whilst practising your speaking at the same time.
Even as a native speaker, I myself enjoy playing and listening to news or novels on this app. when cooking in order to relax and help further improve my own language level!
Learning can be without limits in any form, I’m sure you can also find many more innovative and intriguing ways to learn Chinese either online or offline, and when you do, don’t forget to share them with us!
After graduating from Yunnan Minzu University with an MA, Hao Lan worked as a lecturer in Chinese at Zhejiang University of Finance & Economics for several years where he gained a wealth of teaching experience. He has overseen a range of courses, including elementary, intermediate, advanced and HSK training courses. Lan Hao specialises in second language acquisition and teaching Chinese as a foreign language and oversees Mandarin language teaching on our BA Chinese language programmes as well as Credit Courses and Short Courses in Mandarin Chinese here in the department.
