【推荐2】Reading out loud is one of the most useful ways to practice when you are learning a foreign language. If you want to improve your fluency, you should read a lot, and not silently but out loud!

This competition is designed to encourage all the Chinese learners to read Chinese out loud. And we hope to introduce the importance of reading out loud when learning Chinese. Also, we have brilliant prizes for the top three competitors! We look forward to hearing from you reading Chinese stories, poems, tongue twisters, lyrics, etc. We would post the recordings on our official account anonymously (匿名) and ask everyone to vote online for the recordings.

The top six will get the prizes below:

First prize (1 person): 5 hours one-to-one Chinese lesson

Second prize (2 people): 3 hours one-to-one Chinese lesson

Third prize (3 people): one 200 RMB voucher (代金券) for our course

Timeline

Please choose one from the ten materials given to you at the bottom of this web page, from 6 to 10 are lyrics, you can read or sing.

Sign up before 11 p.m., 16th of February.

Record the name: your file with your name and nationality (eg: Mike+US)

Send your recordings to hanlinmandarin@163.com, before 7 p.m., 19th of February.

We will post the anonymous recordings on HLC official account on the 21st of February. Vote online from 21st of February to 25th of February.

The result would be posted on HLC official account on the 26th of February.

If you don’t know Chinese characters, you can copy them and change them into pinyin on the following website https://www.pinyinzi.com/hanzipinyin/.

【推荐3】Esperanto (世界语) was created in the late 1800s by Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, a Polish medical doctor. He alone built the basis for the language and helped introduce it into the world.

Though Zamenhof’s profession was a physician, he was no amateur (外行) in languages. Zamenhol said Russian was his mother tongue — the area of Poland he lived in was then part of the Russian Federation — but he generally spoke Polish everyday. Evidence also shows that he learned Yiddish from his mother and that he studied German, English, Spanlsh, Lithuanian, Italian and French. In addition, Zamenhof learned the classical languages Hebrew, Latin and Aramaic in school. Esperanto was not the first constructed language he’d dealt with. First, he learned a bit of Volapuk (沃拉普克语), which was invented in Germany a decade before Esperanto. Having command of so many languages had a great impact on his creation of Esperanto, which was Zamenhof’s 14th language.

During his life, Zamenhof became extremely interested in the idea of creating a tolerant world, free from the horrors (恐怖) of war. He dreamed of a day when people could come together. To make this world a reality, he decided the best thing he could do was make an international language. It would not be anyone’s mother tongue, but people can quickly learn it as a second language to make conversation easily with people from anywhere in the world.

Why would Zamenhof create Esperanto when English basically already was used as an international language? The problem is that using English gives a huge advantage to people and places that already speak English. Esperanto tries to bypass political and cultural problems by being a neutral (中性的) language. Yet Esperanto is not without flaw. It was strongly influenced by European language, which can put people who speak Asian languages at a distinct disadvantage in learning and speaking Esperanto. Esperanto’s simple rules might make it easier to learn than other languages for an Asian speaker, but it still loses some of its “neutrality”.

【推荐3】“I’m dying of boredom!”complained Yelena, who performed in Chekhov’s 1897 play UncleVanya. “I don’t know what to do!” Of course, if Yelena were around today, she’d pull out her smartphone to find something amusing, like Tik Tok. It’s easy to kill the time. However, is boredom entirely good for nothing? What if it is a meaningful experience—one that leads us to states of deeper thoughtfulness or creativity?

That’s the conclusion of two fascinating recent studies. In one, researchers asked a group of subjects to do something boring, like copying out numbers from a phone book, and then take tests of creative thinking, such as designing uses for a pair of cups. As a result, bored subjects came up with more ideas than a non-bored control group, and their ideas were often more creative. In the second study, subjects who took an “associative thought” word test came up with more answers when they’d been required to watch a dull screensaver (屏保).

Boredom might bring creativity because a restless mind hungers for stimulation. “Boredom becomes a seeking state. What you’re doing now is not satisfying. So you’re seeking and get engaged.” says Sandi Mann, a psychologist at the University of Central Lancashire. Kierkegaard, a philosopher, described jokingly, “The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.” However, what worries Mann is that these days we don’t enjoy these slow moments. Instead, we resist them. “We try to beat every moment of boredom in our lives with mobile devices,” says Mann, who claims she often gets some of her best thinking done when she’s on the bus. “The smartphone might relieve us temporarily, but it shuts down the deeper thinking that can come from staring down the boredom. Noodling on your phone is like eating junk food.” she says.

So here’s an idea: instead of always fleeing boredom, lean into it. Sometimes, shutting down your Internet connection for a while will enforce a higher level of productivity.