Hacking Chinese Challenges is about building language skills through daily practice and friendly competition. By focusing on one specific area of learning over a limited period of time (usually three weeks), you will be able to learn more!
I regard listening as the most important skill when learning Chinese. It has more positive carry-over to the other skills than anything else, and improving listening ability also makes it much easier to socialise in Chinese. A poll I did earlier also strongly suggested that listening is the hardest part of learning Chinese.
This is your chance to ramp up your Chinese listening practice!
Chinese listening challenge, January 10-31, 2024
The previous record of most listening practice is more than six years old. In March 2015, 87 participants practised Chinese listening for a total of 1,255 hours. Can we beat it this time?
Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to learn more about Hacking Chinese Challenges:
Available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, YouTube and many other platforms!
Join by following these steps:
- Sign-up (free)
- View current and upcoming challenges on the front page
- Find the listening challenge and click “Enroll!”
- Set a reasonable goal (see below)
- Report your progress on your computer or mobile device
- Check the graph to see if you’re on track to reaching your goal
- Check the leaderboard to see how you compare to others
- Share progress, tips and resources with fellow students
Please note: The challenge starts on the 10th, so even if you can join before then, you won’t be able to report progress until the challenge starts!
This month’s Chinese listening challenge: What should you listen to?
Start by looking here: The 10 best free Chinese listening resources for beginner, intermediate and advanced learners
The 10 best free Chinese listening resources for beginner, intermediate and advanced learners
Here’s the index from that article (links go to my introduction of each resource):
If this is not enough, there are currently 136 links tagged with “listening” over at Hacking Chinese Resources!
If you’re a beginner, you might want to check this out as well: Beginner Chinese listening practice: What to listen to and how
Beginner Chinese listening practice: What to listen to and how
How and why you should listen
I’ve written a lot about improving listening ability in Chinese. Most importantly, you should check my series about listening strategies:
I have also written a few articles about listening more, which is a challenge worth taking seriously. It’s perfectly possible to fit a lot of listening into an already fairly busy life, but you have to use the right method and spend some time finding solutions that work:
If you want to dig deep into listening comprehension, check out my series Beyond tīng bu dǒng: A guide to Chinese listening comprehension, currently with four parts:
- Beyond tīng bu dǒng, part 1: A guide to Chinese listening comprehension
- Beyond tīng bu dǒng, part 2: From sound to meaning in Mandarin
- Beyond tīng bu dǒng, part 3: Using what you already know to aid listening comprehension in Chinese
- Beyond tīng bu dǒng, part 4: Learning to process spoken Mandarin quickly and effortlessly
- Beyond tīng bu dǒng, part 5: Becoming a better listener as a student of Chinese
Beyond tīng bu dǒng, part 1: A guide to Chinese listening comprehension
Your challenge: Set a high but reachable goal
It’s hard to know what a reasonable goal is for you, but I think anyone interested in joining should aim for at least 10 hours of listening. That’s about 20 minutes per day.
If this isn’t your first challenge or you spend a significant amount of your time learning Chinese, double or triple that, so twenty or thirty hours. That’s still “only” about an hour per day, which isn’t that much if you spread it out.
How high you want to go is up to you, but an hour per day on average is doable for most people. In previous listening challenges, some participants have clocked over 100 hours in one month! Can you beat that? Post your goal in the comments below and let us know how you plan to achieve it!
My challenge: An unreasonable goal
In the previous listening challenge, I reached 101 hours in three weeks. This is not reasonable unless you already have solid listening habits and know what you’re doing, or study Chinese full-time, which I’m not. My goal for this challenge is to reach at least 100 hours. Wish me luck!
100 hours of Chinese listening in 3 weeks: What I learnt and how to apply it
Winners from the December vocabulary challenge
Skritter sponsored the December vocabulary challenge with six three-month subscriptions to active participants. The following participants have won:
- Tikaf Viper
- Cliff Larsen
- Sana Rachide
- Adiel
- xue_xiii
- LaurenF
Well done! Other participants also did well during the challenge, and hopefully, you learnt much, even if you didn’t win!
Preliminary challenge schedule for 2024
Here is a preliminary list of challenges for 2024, but I’m always open to ideas. Based on user participation, surveys, as well as my own opinion, reading and listening challenges, are particularly helpful for a large number of people, followed by those focusing on vocabulary. These will recur more often throughout the year, with other, more specific challenges in between.
Challenges last for roughly three weeks. They always start on the 10th of each month and last until the end of that month. Three weeks is enough to get a significant amount of studying, but not so long that people lose focus. This also leaves ten days of breathing space between challenges.
- January: Listening
- February: Writing
- March: Reading
- April: Speaking
- May: Listening
- June: Vocabulary
- July: Reading
- August: Translation
- September: Listening
- October: Pronunciation
- November: Reading
- December: Vocabulary
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I’ve been learning and teaching Chinese for more than a decade. My goal is to help you find a way of learning that works for you. Sign up to my newsletter for a 7-day crash course in how to learn, as well as weekly ideas for how to improve your learning!
