Thanks for the great new content this year, and for such an awesome site.

Now that I’m all settled into my new residence I am ready to start tackling Challenges again and I look forward to the next one.

I would love to learn some more about how to read that “Chinese cursive”. The PAVC 3 book started exposing me to it, and I would love to better understand it.

For the challenges, I really liked the past ones and will participate in recurrences of those themes, but maybe we could add some others?

One I thought of was “Talk with a native”, would be great for those of us not living in a Chinese speaking country, and for shy people who do live in a Chinese speaking country.

Another I think would be cool is if you picked some sort of 20-30 episode light comedy. Challenge everyone to watch it over 45-60 days, and every so many episodes you write up small blog post. Containing things like a quick summary of current plot. This slang was new to me, this part was interesting to me, what was interesting to you, etc. In this way your kind of leading a group discussion, and giving those who fall behind periodic milestones to help them catch up.

Again, thanks for all the awesomeness you provided last year!

Jeremy

I know that what I’m about to write doesn’t belong to the category “constructive criticism”, but here it goes anyway: HackingChinese is loaded with useful, top-quality information and YOU, my friends, rock.

Thank you for all the effort you have put in. I’m looking forward to reading your articles in 2015! :_)

Jan

I especially appreciate the work you put into creating Hacking Chinese Resources and into running the challenges. I like that I can see the other people undertaking this daunting task and feel like part of a community.

It’s possible you have this covered in your previous content from 2014 or prior, but I noticed in this post (http://www.hackingchinese.com/goals-and-motivation-part-1-introduction/) that you had some examples of “Micro-goals” listed. This made me think, what if you put together a sample curriculum, or multiple sample curricula, for beginners trying to learn Chinese?

For instance, Week 1 – Learn tones, Week 2 – Learn common greetings, Week 3 – Learn how to talk about feelings, Week 4 – Learn basics of communicating during emergencies like sickness, etc.?

I could envision a few different ‘itineraries’ like this, that might help people who are beginners like me be able to navigate the fascinating but dauntingly vast world of Chinese language.

This was just an idea. Hopefully it helps you formulate a plan for how you see Hacking Chinese evolve in 2015!

There’s one area that I’d be really curious to read about: how do people learn Chinese in China (e.g. minorities or people speaking dialects learning Mandarin), how Chinese kids learn characters, and how people learn Chinese in Korea and Japan. This would include their difficulties, the methods used, the software proposed (games, etc). It might sound theoretical, but I think it would be a great way of contrasting and understanding what the specific challenges of learning or progressing as a Western adult can be.

On a completely different front, I’d be really curious to read and learn more about language learning, memorisation, situation, and the body – do we know anything as to whether it’s better to learn sitting or standing, walking or still, closing eyes or looking around? Does the way we hold our bodies influence our capacity to learn better and memorise better, or is it completely idiosyncratic and/or irrelevant and/or completely unknown??

Don’t know if that falls within the scope of Hacking Chinese – if it doesn’t, let’s look for links at least. Looking forward to reading more from you :-). And if EU laws for e-book publishing are too insane, let’s have a chat and see if we could publish it through Australia :-).

Cheers!