Practice Chinese through recipes

Different methods to study Chinese 

There are a lot of different ways to practice a language; it can be through books, music, Apps and even through TV shows, but there are always new methods to keep improving your language skills. In this case, I'm going to be sharing one of my favorite methods, which is: practicing my language skill with recipes. This method is both efficient and delicious. 

This is a great method, because you can practice your reading and listening skills, and you will learn a lot of common vocabulary. There is a variety of recipes, and the speed in which they talk is usually a lot slower than vlogs or other types of content, so it's easier to understand. 

How to use recipes to practice Chinese 

The first thing you need to do is find the right recipe for you, it depends on what you are looking for, if you want a challenge and complex vocabulary the best option is to choose one that is made by a chef or in a cooking show, but if you are looking for something more mainstream and in which you will be able understand more vocabulary choose one that is made by a YouTuber or in an App like: 小紅书

Also, you need to take into consideration which format is the right one for you. In my case I like video recipes but with subtitles and that have the recipe written in the description of the video, but you can also see the videos without subtitles which will be much harder, but you'll grab the context because they are doing the recipe while they explain it, but you can also look for written recipes in which you will mainly practice your reading and comprehension, there's a website/App that's called: 爱料理 in which you'll find a lot different written recipes and some even have pictures to explain the process.

After you have chosen your recipe, create a table in google docs, and use the first row for the character, the second row for its pronunciation, and in the third row put the translation; this can be quite time-consuming, but if in the future you want to make the recipe again, or you want to reread it, you'll already have all the vocabulary and this would be a lot easier. 

My recommendations 

I don't have a lot of recommendations, because I recently started to use this method. This is because the topic of my current lesson is safety in the kitchen and food vocabulary, so my teacher is now sending me cooking videos for language immersion, but from those I can recommend the following: 

Rosalina's Kitchen: I like her YouTube videos because she usually speaks slowly and most of her videos have subtitles, and some videos even have subtitles in simplified and traditional Chinese. Also, I have actually made one of her recipe's which was the: 蛋花湯, and I think it was quite delicious and easy to make. 

Garden Time Homemade Cuisine: I like her videos because she also speaks quite slowly, and I'm able to understand a lot of what she is saying even though my level is kind of in between upper beginner and intermediate, some of her videos don't have subtitles, but most of the recent ones do have subtitles in simplified Chinese. Also in the descriptions, you can frequently find the written recipe.

小高姐的 Magic ingredients: Her videos are on the shorter side, but you'll still be able to understand the recipe, most of her videos have subtitles in a lot of different languages like: English, Spanish; Portuguese, etc. but I like to put my subtitles in either traditional or simplified Chinese.

Finally, remember to look for recipes on 爱料理 and 小紅书, in there you'll find a lot more variety.