Why wait till #FollowFriday to find great Chinese language learning resources? Why limit yourself to 140 English characters? Just think about how much you can say in Chinese with 140 characters. This week is a quick look at using microblogs as a study tool.
Microblogging sites like Twitter and China’s Weibo are nothing new, and the fact that Twitter is currently the 9th most popular site on the web means it isn’t going away anytime soon. Twitter users are always coming up fun and new ways to share their thoughts with the world. Even the 140 character SMS style limit means you can say a heck of a lot when tweeting to friends in a language like Chinese or Japanese. I find microblogs to be a great way to actively use your foreign language. The pressure of writing a lot of information like you would on a blog is reduced to almost nil. People on Twitter don’t want an essay, they want a burst of information, maybe a sentence or two at most, which is something even a language newbie can do on their first day.
Practicing your Chinese on Twitter is awesome, but we can take our “study” experience one step further by following users who are serious about teaching the language as well. So who the heck should we follow? Twitter users who give links to blog posts, or lengthy articles about language learning theory are great, but today I want to focus on five of my favorite users who abide by the theory of “less is more,” using those precious 140 characters to give us something new, and more importantly, lots of Chinese.
Here are five Twitter handles worthy of a follow for your daily Chinese fix.
- @allaboutchinese As they say in the about section, All About Chinese gives you “cool Chinese stuffs” every single day. I like that they provide both Chinese and English on their tweets, and they keep away from giving you Pinyin for everything, which is great to force reading comprehension. Their tweets are short and sweet, with lots of high frequency vocabulary.
- @niuword Looking to learn the latest slang in China, than look no further than Niuword, the Twitter feed for the blog of the same name. New words have Pinyin, but the rest is just a Chinese explanation. Clicking the link they provide will take you to their website where you can find a sample sentence and more related slang.
- @FluentFlix While FluentFlix does a lot of re-posting and linking to language learning resources (along with their own website), they also provide tons great idioms, words, and common expressions. The vocabulary is never too tough, with sentences catered toward the language learning crowd; they also update almost daily.
- @chinesesentence New Chinese sentences every day, proofed by native speakers, with English and Pinyin provided. No links, no re-tweets, just straight up Chinese! It doesn’t get much better than this.
- ichinesetweets Tweets about love (in Chinese). Great vocab, and great reading practice. Perfect for someone who has crossed the 1500+ character mark.
There are tons of other resources on Twitter that focus on Chinese learning, but these are the ones I love to see in my feed every day. They keep things simple and to the point.
Got some favorite twitter users of your own, or wanna pick up a few more followers? Please post those @ mentions below.