I tried several times to learn Chinese. I noticed a lot of courses are in pinyin and simplified Chinese, while I wanted to learn traditional Chinese and also every book starts with the same basics… introducing yourself, saying hello, counting… while I can understand that you need learn those things I also feel it is easier to learn when you are having fun. Therefore I got the idea, besides learning from a course book, to also study words regarding topics I feel interesting to learn. Therefore I decided to set myself the goal to learn 300 Chinese characters in one year. No grammatic, just the words I want to learn. I can choose freely. In the end it comes down to 2 things:
1) practice practice practice and….
2) …have fun doing so!
Then I thought by myself…why keep the material for myself…maybe others also want to join learn with me. Learning together is much more fun. I call it the 300-word-plan and the goal of this plan is basically learn 300 traditional Chinese words in one year. Of course you can learn at your own pace and go slower or quicker as you like.
So how does studying Chinese work according the 300 word plan work? Every week I shall post a web story online. Which acts as a flashcard to help you learn words about a certain topic. After 3 weeks of learning, in the fourth week you have learned about 45 words and we will do a review or a test. I don’t want to put too much pressure on ourselves so we might give up so in week 5 we take a one week break. This gives you time to take a rest, review or catch up (and me some time to prepare the next lessons 😉 ). The most important is that we keep learning as much funs as possible so we don’t give up early! After five weeks we change topic and learn some new words!
| week 1 | 15 new words + the 15 words of week 1 in random order |
| week 2 | 15 new words + the 30 words of week 1 and 2 in random order |
| week 3 | 15 new words + the 45 words of week 1 and 2 and 3 in random order |
| week 4 | review of 45 words + maybe a test of some sort. |
| week 5 | rest, review or catch up week |
For now the goal is to learn 300 words, no grammatic, sentences and such. So you should see this plan as a supplement to a course or study-book or so.
In the home screen under study-with-me you can find the flashcards for each week.
A flashcard will look like the picture below. In the middle is the Chinese symbol, in the top right the Pinyin and the next page shows the translation in English. As you can see the answer is already showing on the right side in dark. This is due to the desktop version. I would recommend watching the flashcards on you mobile phone. Than you can tap on the right side of the screen to go forward and see the answer or tap on the left side to go back.
You are probably very busy and have a lot of things going on but try to have a look at the flashcards as much as you can. Every week you only have to learn 15 new words so it only takes you 5 minutes every time. When you wake up, during coffee break, lunchtime…before you go to bed try and go to this website and click on the flashcards to study for short!
The first week we start easy with numbers! The flashcard I posted online just now! If you read this at a later time… it is ok! just join at your own pace!
Good luck and have fun learning!
If you have any questions or comments or maybe topics for characters? please let me know in the comments below. I’ll try to help out if I can.
-Mr. A.-