chinese serotonin

My language journey in 2021  2021 was filled with a lot of different experiences. This year I was able to immerse myself in the Chinese language in the comfort of my own home, I also discovered the importance of getting free flow immersion, and this led me to find a lot of amazing shows, podcasts and music. The best things I found for free flow immersion this year:   Artists: Gong, Shi Shi, Piggy, Waa Wei, Rainie Yang, WayV, Kun, Deca Joins, Good Band, Karencici and more. Shows: Find Yourself, Well intended love, Variations of Moonlight, Big Fish and Begonia, and the one that taught me the most: Chuang 2021 Podcasts: Chillchat Chinese, 沒在客氣, 台女又怎樣, talk to me in Chinese, and Shameless Sisters. Another thing I started to do this year, was to self-study and let's just say it was not easy, but I really enjoyed it. I self-studied for my HSK3 certificate, and it was a great experience, at the same time I started to self-study simplified Chinese and I hope to continue this in 2...

The pressure when learning a new language Learning a new language is a big commitment and something that takes times, but sometimes we can get carried away with putting certain goals to ourselves like: “I'll reach intermediate level in a year” “I'll be fluent in two years” and when you have such big goals in such a short amount of time you will constantly feel like you are not making enough progress. Short term and long term goals  There are two types of goals, short-term and long term goals; first let's talk about short term goals in my case I consider that short term goals should happen between 1 and 4 months; for this type of goal I think it's better to be something small, like completing a book or analyzing the vocabulary of a movie or even studying for a certification. As for long term goals, I like to be more flexible with the deadlines, because it's difficult to guess when you will reach it; long term goals can range from reaching fluency in a language, being...

How to choose the perfect novel or comic to learn chinese  Where to buy Chinese books  To find books written in Chinese can be a bit complicated, there are a lot of websites that are usually recommended, for example: books.Taiwan, book depository, purple culture, cypress books and more;   In my case, I opted for another option because I tried buying from books.Taiwan but for a strange reason the order never went through, I think the problem was that all of the cards I tried to pay with were from Mexican banks, so I decided to buy them from Amazon, but as you can imagine there's not a lot of variety, additionally Chinese novels, comics, etc. are hard to find in that platform, because a lot of them don't appear if you look up their title in Chinese, in my experience the way I found the most books, was by searching: the title of the book (Chinese edition), and also by searching for the author instead of the book, another thing that's important to mention is that I used the U...

I studied for only one month for the HSK3 What is the HSK Exam ?  The Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi, mostly known as HSK, is a Chinese proficiency exam; currently there are 6 levels, but next year there will be up to 9 levels. How long do you have to study for the exam?  I would recommend you to study  for several months, if you usually don't have a lot of time, because it can be quite time-consuming, but if you are up to the challenge, or you are in an emergency It's possible to do it in a little over a month. As I mentioned before, it's possible to only study for a short time and have good results, but in my opinion you will need to have some previous knowledge, because learning the basics of a language takes time and practice, in my case I had already been studying Traditional Chinese for 2 years, but the curriculum I had been using was quite different to the HSK, but I already knew a lot of the grammar and some vocabulary. Resources: First, I looked up some PDFs for the HSK 3...

Learn all about 小红书 so you can use it for language immersion As I mentioned in my previous blog, immersion is a big part of learning a language, and there are a lot of different ways to be immersed in Chinese language, but my favorite one is using  小红书 also known as  RED. What is 小红书 ?  Red/ 小红书  is a social media platform filled with interesting content and amazing creators, the topics range from book recommendations to celebrities, in 小红书 you can find everything you can imagine, in my opinion it is like a mix between Instagram and Pinterest and the best part is that everything is in Chinese.  Why I use this App for language immersion I like this App, because it's all in Chinese and the content is so diverse that it helps you learn new vocabulary and even some slang, you will be able to practice your reading and listening, because there are a lot of videos and most pictures have long captions. Something that is important to know, is that you are not going ...

Learning a new language  Learning a new language is amazing, it will give you a lot of new opportunities, a new perspective and a new hobby, the best part is that there are so many languages that you can choose from, and you can learn as many languages as you want to, but as in every beautiful story you will encounter some problems, but this post is here to help you move past them. A little background on my language journey  My mother tongue is Spanish, but ever since I was little I was taught English and to be honest I never realized how much I was improving as time passed, then a little more than two years ago I started to learn Chinese, it was difficult for a while, but I overcame all of my difficulties and that was the first language in which I saw my progress, but when I got to a point where I was comfortable with my Chinese I decided to learn a new language: Korean and this is where I really started to struggle.  But why did this happened ? When I started to learn K...

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 con...