Have you ever found yourself in this situation: You hear a song you used to sing when you were a child — a bit of nostalgia (怀旧) But it is not a distant childhood memory. This words come back to you as clearly as when you sang them all those years ago.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh studied the relationship between music and remembering a foreign language. They found that remembering words in a song was the best way to remember even one of the most difficult languages.

Here is what they did. Researchers took 60 adults and randomly divided them into three groups of 20. Then they gave the groups three different types of “listen-and-repeat” learning conditions. Researchers had one group simply speak the words. They had the second group speak the words to a rhythm, or beat. And they asked the third group to sing the words.

All three groups studied words from the Hungarian language for 15 minutes. Then they took part in a series of language tests to see what they remembered.

Why Hungarian, you ask? Researchers said they chose Hungarian because not many people know the language. It does not share any roots with Germanic or Romance languages, such as Italian or Spanish. After the tests were over, the singers came out on top. The people who learned these new Hungarian words by singing them showed a higher overall performance. They did the best in four out of five of the tests. They also performed two times better than those who simply learned the words by speaking them.

Dr. Katie Overy says singing could lead to new ways to learn a foreign language. The brain likes to remember things when they are contained in a catchy or memorable tune.

Dr. Ludke said the findings could help those who struggle to learn foreign languages. On the University of Edinburgh’s website Dr. Ludke writes, “This study provides the first experimental evidence that a listen-and-repeat singing method can support foreign language learning, and opens the door for future research in this area.”

Handwritten Chinese characters (文字) can be beautiful. I still remember looking at Chinese and not understanding anything it said and yet feeling a strong attraction (吸引力). In fact, some students start learning Chinese because of the characters. After having studied Chinese for a while, I realized that handwriting in Chinese takes a very long time to learn.

Living as we do in a digital era (数字时代) with smartphones and computers, most students sooner or later ask themselves this question: Is it really necessary to learn how to write by hand in Chinese? When using smartphones or computers, we can use phonetic input (语音输 入) systems, which choose the characters we want for us as long as we can remember how they are pronounced. Since we enter different characters, we seldom need to be able to recognize the difference between characters in detail; the computer makes the right choices for us. Do we really need to write Chinese by hand at all?

I think most people agree that you should learn to write at least some characters at some point as a student of Chinese, although not necessarily straight away and not necessarily all the characters that you can say. But unless you don’t care about written language at all, you should learn the basics of handwriting. Without it, it will be very hard to understand characters. You don＇t need to be a calligraphy master (书法大师), but you do need basic handwriting skills to do this. Simply looking at things is, as usual, a bad way of learning.

I think learning the most common 500 characters or so is a good idea for all students. If you actually want to write by hand, increase that to 1, 000. Then learn to handwrite characters outside of the 1, 000 most common on a need-to-know basis.

Learning Chinese has never been more convenient now that everyone carries a smartphone in their pockets. There are a number of Mandarin Chinese learning apps for iPhone and Android out on the market, ranging from simple games and flashcard apps to full-blown language courses with your own virtual tutor.

Fluentu: Learn through Real World Content

Fluentu takes a novel approach to language learning by using real world Chinese language video content taken from the Internet. Vocabulary specific to each video is taught and every video has subtitles in Chinese. Videos are usually very interesting and range from commercials, music videos and so on — great for cultural education.

ChineseSkill: Language Learning Game

ChineseSkill teaches language much like the popular language learning app Duolingo. It starts off the basics through contained topical modules like numbers, food, directions etc. Instruction is laid out in an intuitive （直观的）way, slowly introducing grammar and vocabulary through a series of mini-games. Most of the tasks in Chinese Skill use pinyin and English but there are also some character recognition tasks as well. If you want to learn how to write Chinese, this app won't be enough for you. But for basic conversational listening, speaking, and vocabulary, this little app does the trick in a very entertaining way. Even better it's totally free!

Skritter: learning to write Chinese characters

Skritter is a powerful app that teaches you to write and recognize Chinese and Japanese written characters . The app is able to recognize your handwritten characters and correct for any mistakes. It is available for all major platforms -- iOS, Android, Mac, Windows and they currently offer a 7-day free trial. Check it out!