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How to practice Chinese outside your classroom 

Learning Chinese is a long process, and the rate in which you improve at, not only depends on the effort you put in your Chinese class, it  also depends on how much practice you get outside your classroom, that’s why you need to immerse yourself in the language.

First let's talk about language immersion, by this I mean getting constant exposure to Chinese language, there are different types of immersion but this time I'm going to focus on intensive immersion and free flow immersion, the first one is Intensive immersion in this one you analyze what it is being said and research the things that you don't know, meanwhile in free flow immersion you continue getting the exposure of your target language even though you don't understand everything. 

If you want to learn more about language immersion, I recommend checking refold.la 


Reading Resources 

Learning to read characters can be challenging, but you need to be constantly exposed to them so that you can easily recognize them, and for this I recommended the following:
Flash Cards: Use an App like AnkiApp so that you can review the vocabulary. 
Graded Level Books: I recommend Mandarin Companion Books, they have a broad selection of interesting books for each level. 
Apps:Du Chinese, this app has a lot of graded level stories, and it has translations in case you don't understand something, M Mandarin this App has graded level comics of a lot of compelling topics, finally I recommend Easy Chinese News in this app you can read real life news and translate them, you can even take some HSK practice tests in here.

Listening resources

Listening can be quite hard because a lot of words sound similar, and it is hard to differentiate the tones, this is why we need to be constantly practicing.

Podcasts: Listening to Podcasts is a great way to improve your listening skills, I recommend listening to a Podcast with a Patreon, so that you can download the vocabulary they used in the episode you're listening to, the following are some of my favorite podcasts in Spotify: Talk to me in Chinese by Candice X, Chillchat by Chilling Chinese, Mandarin with Nana by Nana Nie, and Smart Mandarin Podcast by Katrina Lee.

Watching Shows: You will probably not be able to fully understand everything, and you will need to add subtitles, but I recommend adding them in Chinese so that you can also practice reading. I usually use this as free flow immersion, I recommend the following:

Netflix: Accidentally in love, The rational life, Wish Dragon, Well-intended Love, Sexy Central, Find Yourself, Triad Princess.

We TV: This is a Chinese platform with a lot of free shows, and cartoons. 


Resources for Speaking and Writing

For speaking, I recommend shadowing a native speaker. By this, I mean listening to native speakers and then trying to emulate their pronunciation.
For writing, I recommend practicing constantly and following the correct strokes, there is no cheat sheet for writing, it's all about practice.

I hope you found this helpful and for more resources check out my Instagram.

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