I needed to double-check everything and be extra careful
I also had to question the dictionary translations of certain terms.
A Korean friend also provided Smith with help.
The strength of the translation and the skill of a literary translation is how well you know the target language, not really how well you know the source language.
The key was really knowing English and how to use it to recreate the Korean novel's style and voice.
she was the one who approached a publisher back in 2013 about doing a translation.
She chose to tackle a project in a language she spoke imperfectly.
1. Slow Down Your Speaking Speed
Nobody will hold it against you if you speak more slowly and clearly.
Selecting your words carefully may also be seen as a sign of respect towards your audience.
2. Give Yourself Time to Think
People often prefer a well-thought-out answer to a rushed one.
Equipping yourself with fixed phrases you can use when thinking.
e.g. repeating the question and adding a few sentences
If you do the same, you’ll sound more fluent.
3. Learn Sentences, Not Only Words
When you learn a new word, try to memorize a couple of sentences that contain it.
4. Learn to Listen
You might be so focused on what you are saying and whether it’s correct or not, that you forget to listen to what others are saying.
Pay attention to what’s being said around you, it’s your most important resource at the time of speaking to someone.
5. Practise Your Interrogatives
Questions like this will keep the conversation going and will show your interest in other people’s opinion.
They will also give you time to relax a little and start enjoying yourself.
Interrogatives can be quite tricky, so make sure you spend enough time learning the correct ways of asking questions.
6. Produce, Produce, Produce
Your aim is to be able to produce correct English; practice is undeniably the best way to learn and improve.
Writing is one way of producing language; it may help you get used to and reflect on the ways English operates, which, in turn, might prove to be useful when speaking.
Find people you can practise with – either on Skype, or on language exchange sites, or here on MyEnglishTeacher.eu with the help of our native teachers – I have a feeling that it will be a great experience.
10 Things You Can Do to Improve Your Chinese Right Now
Doing anything is better than doing nothing, and you’ll often find that getting started is all it takes to get motivated for more.
Do 5 minutes of Chinese flashcards
Getting a few flashcards done is an excellent default option for spending study time, because it’s flexible, customised and can always be a part of your Chinese study habits.
Flashcards are very good for building vocabulary, increasing 语感 (feel for the language) and keeping on top of the things you want to remember.
Read Chinese for 5 minutes
Another important aspect of learning Chinese is stretching yourself and taking on material that you haven’t seen before.
Reading can be one of the best ways to get that unpredictable element, because it’s much harder to zone out and ignore the parts you don’t understand.
Get some listening going
Search around for some Chinese internet radio. Try to identify some favourite stations that you can always go to without having to think about it - one switch and you’ve got Chinese listening practice.
The point is to make it as easy as possible to get listening going so that you don’t have to put any thought into it.
Chat online in Chinese
It is quite difficult to get it right though -
Find chances to chat about topics that interest you other than Chinese (e.g. look for Chinese chat rooms about rock music or anteaters or whatever).
Try to avoid admitting / focusing on the fact that you’re a foreigner, and just drop anyone who wants to practice English with you or do language exchanges.
Draw a clear line between language practice and people who you actually like as friends.
Note that I’m talking about anonymous / semi-anonymous chats with people you haven’t met.
Do 听写 for 5 minutes
A sure-fire way to make sure you’re actually engaging with what you’re hearing is to do 听写 (dictation). As the name suggests, you listen and write.
Writing out what you hear word for word, trying to summarise, or doing pre-designed exercises from a listening course all work.
Learn a Chinese song
You’ve just got to find songs you like, and spend a little bit of time with them.
A really good way to learn a song is to translate the lyrics into your native language (and then post them on your blog!). The goal isn’t to end up with a nice version of the song in another language, but to make sure you get familiar with the lyrics and understand them.
Write 10 Chinese characters from memory
You can set up specific hanzi-writing flashcards in Anki and keep track of your characters that way. Otherwise, always having a bit of paper and a pen is good.
Just make sure you keep a list of characters you need to test, perhaps by making a note of any characters you forget, or new ones that you come across.
Call some Chinese customer service numbers
You can think of some vaguely legitimate reason to phone a large company (e.g. pretend you’re interested in becoming a customer) and just chat with their representative for a few minutes.
Make 5 Chinese character mnemonics
Mnemonics for anything in your Chinese studies.
Which characters have you forgotten recently? What words have you forgotten? Make mnemonics for them!
Describe your surroundings in Chinese (in detail)
The idea is simple and works anywhere - describe your surroundings in as much detail as your level of Chinese allows.
Try to use material you find difficult, and try to use words you find hard to pronounce.
This works best if you can speak out loud, but if you’re not alone, it’s still beneficial to speak dead quietly or just in your head.
You don’t actually have to describe your surroundings - that’s just a nice prompt to fall back on. Talk about anything - your day, your plans, your feelings.
How to Improve Your Chinese Daily: The 4 Essential Elements
When it comes to speaking and writing, it is also useful to take your work offline. It is just as crucial to have face-to-face interaction with Chinese speakers. As for writing, the only way to master the strokes is to repeat and practice daily.
1. Your Current Level
Do not try and go beyond your level as it will only discourage your learning process. What you should do is slowly build upon where you are now.
2. Your Interests
Choose topics you are interested in learning about. The worst thing in language learning is becoming bored with the topic and have this deter you from your goal of mastering the language.
3. Your Realistic Goals
In an ideal language-learning world, it would be great to have intense four hour sessions daily.
Take the time that you do have and divide it into four segments. You can break up this time to improve your speaking, listening, reading and writing skills.
During your practice, keep an ongoing list of new words you encounter. At the end of each session, make flashcards with these words until they are in your memory.
Flashcards are great to pull out during any downtime you may have on the way to work, a lunch break, during exercise, etc.
Speak
You should speak for half an hour to an hour every day.
A good practice is to just force yourself to translate everything you are currently thinking into Chinese.
Find a language exchange partner as soon as you can. Some websites to check out include italki.com (For the daily purposes of practicing your tones and vocabulary, the most basic casual language partners work just fine. The casual language partner option does mean you will have to exchange some of your time to practice your fluent language) and mylanguageexchange.com (you can send a free “Hi!” which alerts the other user that you would like to get in touch, and you can respond to gold member messages).
Listen
Look for movie and TV shows in genres you already enjoy watching. Read about some recommendations for Chinese based films or go on the Chinese version of Youtube at Youku.
Play Chinese music or have something Chinese going on in the background. The more you hear phrases and words, it will seem more natural when you speak yourself.
Sign up for FluentU. FluentU lets you learn real Chinese from music videos, commercials, news and inspiring talks. It naturally eases you into learning Chinese language
Read
Make sure to read a little Chinese every day.
If you have mastered conversational vocabulary and are ready to move onto a higher level, read a Chinese newspaper article daily.
This article breaks down the varying options of what you have and where you can find Chinese newspapers available to you.
Write
The Chinese strokes can only be engraved into memory through repetition.
The easiest way for beginners to learn written Chinese is to have a daily writing session. Write out ten to twenty words ten times each, every day.
Check out these resources to get you started.
When you arrive at a more advanced level, you can begin to start forming sentences in writing. Try writing a short journal entry daily about your day, new words you learned, or make up a short story.
Setting some time each day to informal activities will allow you to learn the language through immersion.
The Simple Secret to Foreign Language Fluency
The traditional way is a test of your discipline and organizational skills.
Tips on How to Improve Chinese Vocabulary
Draw a Chinese vocabulary tree. Add branches from the main topic and use related phrases or words as the titles.
Use Chinese vocabulary flashcards. By making your own flashcards, you will be able to remember details better, such as the correct stroke order of the characters.
Actively processing what we try to learn and making it meaningful. Repetition alone is not sufficient; you must use what you have learned or you will forget it.
Reading Chinese vocabulary out loud will help you learn better. Not only will you be visually processing the information, but you will also be practicing speaking and will have the auditory memory to help you as well.
Improve Chinese vocabulary by watching Chinese movies. The advantage to watching these movies is that you can even see how the native speakers move their mouth when speaking—which is impossible to do when merely listening to audio clips in Chinese.
Labelling. Make labels in Chinese for everything in your house. For example, you can check your dictionary to find out the word for “mirror” and then write that on a note that you tape to your mirror.
Children’s books. You can read some little idiom stories, which help you understand Chinese culture and simultaneously improve your Chinese essay-writing ability.
Take advantage of every opportunity. For example, when you go to Chinese restaurants, try to read the dishes’ names on the menu; talk to the people in Chinese.
How to Speak Chinese Fluently: 4 Simple (Not Easy) Steps
It requires a ton of discipline because it’s uncomfortable.
1) Immerse Yourself – Totally
I didn’t even give in when our class went to karaoke and everyone started singing Backstreet Boys songs.
2) Always Be Speaking Chinese (Making Mistakes)
Speaking a lot helps you strengthen your grasp of tricky words.
Speaking helps you make mistakes that expose your weaknesses.
Go out of your way to talk using Chinese words that you don’t know, which you don’t feel comfortable about.
3) Target Your Mistakes
You need someone to provide critical (immediate, if possible) feedback about your mistakes.
Simple recall error: Sometimes you just have trouble recalling a word. In this case, I think most flashcard programs are sufficient.
Grammar, Diction, and Word Choice: Ss you start aiming for deeper fluency (probably around the time where the novelty of impressing people with random nouns and phrases wears off), I’d recommend FluentU, designed to help you learn Chinese through videos.
Pronunciation: You will need to ask people over and over again: “What am I saying wrong?” Each time, you’ll have to ask them five times. Because the first four times, they’ll say there’s nothing wrong with your pronunciation. On the fifth time, they’ll say… “OK, well if you really want to know…”
A spaced repetition learning system like Anki is probably a good way to schedule review at the right time.
4) Change Your Mindset
First, change the way you measure progress. See mistakes as progress. If you stop making mistakes, then you’re no longer improving.
Second, understand the fact that it’s natural for you to be making mistakes while speaking Chinese. It’s just an arbitrary collection of sounds and images to you. That’s the same way it is for everyone.
Third, know that becoming fluent at speaking Chinese is just a matter of time. Once you identify all the rough edges and smooth them out, the inevitable result will be fluency in speaking Chinese.
10 Things You Can Do to Improve Your Chinese Right Now
Doing anything is better than doing nothing, and you’ll often find that getting started is all it takes to get motivated for more.
Do 5 minutes of Chinese flashcards
Getting a few flashcards done is an excellent default option for spending study time, because it’s flexible, customised and can always be a part of your Chinese study habits.
Flashcards are very good for building vocabulary, increasing 语感 (feel for the language) and keeping on top of the things you want to remember.
Read Chinese for 5 minutes
Another important aspect of learning Chinese is stretching yourself and taking on material that you haven’t seen before.
Reading can be one of the best ways to get that unpredictable element, because it’s much harder to zone out and ignore the parts you don’t understand.
Get some listening going
Search around for some Chinese internet radio. Try to identify some favourite stations that you can always go to without having to think about it - one switch and you’ve got Chinese listening practice.
The point is to make it as easy as possible to get listening going so that you don’t have to put any thought into it.
Chat online in Chinese
It is quite difficult to get it right though -
Find chances to chat about topics that interest you other than Chinese (e.g. look for Chinese chat rooms about rock music or anteaters or whatever).
Try to avoid admitting / focusing on the fact that you’re a foreigner, and just drop anyone who wants to practice English with you or do language exchanges.
Draw a clear line between language practice and people who you actually like as friends.
Note that I’m talking about anonymous / semi-anonymous chats with people you haven’t met.
Do 听写 for 5 minutes
A sure-fire way to make sure you’re actually engaging with what you’re hearing is to do 听写 (dictation). As the name suggests, you listen and write.
Writing out what you hear word for word, trying to summarise, or doing pre-designed exercises from a listening course all work.
Learn a Chinese song
You’ve just got to find songs you like, and spend a little bit of time with them.
A really good way to learn a song is to translate the lyrics into your native language (and then post them on your blog!). The goal isn’t to end up with a nice version of the song in another language, but to make sure you get familiar with the lyrics and understand them.
Write 10 Chinese characters from memory
You can set up specific hanzi-writing flashcards in Anki and keep track of your characters that way. Otherwise, always having a bit of paper and a pen is good.
Just make sure you keep a list of characters you need to test, perhaps by making a note of any characters you forget, or new ones that you come across.
Call some Chinese customer service numbers
You can think of some vaguely legitimate reason to phone a large company (e.g. pretend you’re interested in becoming a customer) and just chat with their representative for a few minutes.
Make 5 Chinese character mnemonics
Mnemonics for anything in your Chinese studies.
Which characters have you forgotten recently? What words have you forgotten? Make mnemonics for them!
Describe your surroundings in Chinese (in detail)
The idea is simple and works anywhere - describe your surroundings in as much detail as your level of Chinese allows.
Try to use material you find difficult, and try to use words you find hard to pronounce.
This works best if you can speak out loud, but if you’re not alone, it’s still beneficial to speak dead quietly or just in your head.
You don’t actually have to describe your surroundings - that’s just a nice prompt to fall back on. Talk about anything - your day, your plans, your feelings.
How to Improve Your Chinese Daily: The 4 Essential Elements
When it comes to speaking and writing, it is also useful to take your work offline. It is just as crucial to have face-to-face interaction with Chinese speakers. As for writing, the only way to master the strokes is to repeat and practice daily.
1. Your Current Level
Do not try and go beyond your level as it will only discourage your learning process. What you should do is slowly build upon where you are now.
2. Your Interests
Choose topics you are interested in learning about. The worst thing in language learning is becoming bored with the topic and have this deter you from your goal of mastering the language.
3. Your Realistic Goals
In an ideal language-learning world, it would be great to have intense four hour sessions daily.
Take the time that you do have and divide it into four segments. You can break up this time to improve your speaking, listening, reading and writing skills.
During your practice, keep an ongoing list of new words you encounter. At the end of each session, make flashcards with these words until they are in your memory.
Flashcards are great to pull out during any downtime you may have on the way to work, a lunch break, during exercise, etc.
Speak
You should speak for half an hour to an hour every day.
A good practice is to just force yourself to translate everything you are currently thinking into Chinese.
Find a language exchange partner as soon as you can. Some websites to check out include italki.com (For the daily purposes of practicing your tones and vocabulary, the most basic casual language partners work just fine. The casual language partner option does mean you will have to exchange some of your time to practice your fluent language) and mylanguageexchange.com (you can send a free “Hi!” which alerts the other user that you would like to get in touch, and you can respond to gold member messages).
Listen
Look for movie and TV shows in genres you already enjoy watching. Read about some recommendations for Chinese based films or go on the Chinese version of Youtube at Youku.
Play Chinese music or have something Chinese going on in the background. The more you hear phrases and words, it will seem more natural when you speak yourself.
Sign up for FluentU. FluentU lets you learn real Chinese from music videos, commercials, news and inspiring talks. It naturally eases you into learning Chinese language
Read
Make sure to read a little Chinese every day.
If you have mastered conversational vocabulary and are ready to move onto a higher level, read a Chinese newspaper article daily.
This article breaks down the varying options of what you have and where you can find Chinese newspapers available to you.
Write
The Chinese strokes can only be engraved into memory through repetition.
The easiest way for beginners to learn written Chinese is to have a daily writing session. Write out ten to twenty words ten times each, every day.
Check out these resources to get you started.
When you arrive at a more advanced level, you can begin to start forming sentences in writing. Try writing a short journal entry daily about your day, new words you learned, or make up a short story.
Setting some time each day to informal activities will allow you to learn the language through immersion.
The Simple Secret to Foreign Language Fluency
The traditional way is a test of your discipline and organizational skills.
Tips on How to Improve Chinese Vocabulary
Draw a Chinese vocabulary tree. Add branches from the main topic and use related phrases or words as the titles.
Use Chinese vocabulary flashcards. By making your own flashcards, you will be able to remember details better, such as the correct stroke order of the characters.
Actively processing what we try to learn and making it meaningful. Repetition alone is not sufficient; you must use what you have learned or you will forget it.
Reading Chinese vocabulary out loud will help you learn better. Not only will you be visually processing the information, but you will also be practicing speaking and will have the auditory memory to help you as well.
Improve Chinese vocabulary by watching Chinese movies. The advantage to watching these movies is that you can even see how the native speakers move their mouth when speaking—which is impossible to do when merely listening to audio clips in Chinese.
Labelling. Make labels in Chinese for everything in your house. For example, you can check your dictionary to find out the word for “mirror” and then write that on a note that you tape to your mirror.
Children’s books. You can read some little idiom stories, which help you understand Chinese culture and simultaneously improve your Chinese essay-writing ability.
Take advantage of every opportunity. For example, when you go to Chinese restaurants, try to read the dishes’ names on the menu; talk to the people in Chinese.
How to Speak Chinese Fluently: 4 Simple (Not Easy) Steps
It requires a ton of discipline because it’s uncomfortable.
1) Immerse Yourself – Totally
I didn’t even give in when our class went to karaoke and everyone started singing Backstreet Boys songs.
2) Always Be Speaking Chinese (Making Mistakes)
Speaking a lot helps you strengthen your grasp of tricky words.
Speaking helps you make mistakes that expose your weaknesses.
Go out of your way to talk using Chinese words that you don’t know, which you don’t feel comfortable about.
3) Target Your Mistakes
You need someone to provide critical (immediate, if possible) feedback about your mistakes.
Simple recall error: Sometimes you just have trouble recalling a word. In this case, I think most flashcard programs are sufficient.
Grammar, Diction, and Word Choice: Ss you start aiming for deeper fluency (probably around the time where the novelty of impressing people with random nouns and phrases wears off), I’d recommend FluentU, designed to help you learn Chinese through videos.
Pronunciation: You will need to ask people over and over again: “What am I saying wrong?” Each time, you’ll have to ask them five times. Because the first four times, they’ll say there’s nothing wrong with your pronunciation. On the fifth time, they’ll say… “OK, well if you really want to know…”
A spaced repetition learning system like Anki is probably a good way to schedule review at the right time.
4) Change Your Mindset
First, change the way you measure progress. See mistakes as progress. If you stop making mistakes, then you’re no longer improving.
Second, understand the fact that it’s natural for you to be making mistakes while speaking Chinese. It’s just an arbitrary collection of sounds and images to you. That’s the same way it is for everyone.
Third, know that becoming fluent at speaking Chinese is just a matter of time. Once you identify all the rough edges and smooth them out, the inevitable result will be fluency in speaking Chinese.
