Why Chinese Stroke Order is Important and How to Master it
What is stroke order? The Chinese stroke order system was designed to produce aesthetically pleasing, symmetrical and balanced characters written with brush and ink on paper. It allows for the…
How to Find a Really Good Approach to Guide Your Chinese Learning
Hello, Mandarin diggers! This is Frank Geng and I hope my articles, How to Find a Really Good Chinese Teacher to Guide Your Learning and How to Find a Really…
Why Chinese Idioms Are a Waste of Time
A while back, I asked a Chinese teacher for a letter of recommendation, and received this email in response, written in English: I'll be very glad to write one for…
Essential Phrases for your Online Chinese Class
For most of us, a driving motivation to learn spoken Mandarin is its practical application. During a Chinese class, we typically want to focus on language we can actually use…
Basic Verbs that are Different in Chinese and English
When I learned English, I always made some mistakes which known as ‘Chinglish’ where I would use English in a Chinese way. Now as a Chinese teacher, I know the…
Magikid Nian: Guaranteed Spring Festival Fun for kids
Hey everyone! 新春快乐！The Chinese New Year is upon us, bringing in the Year of the Goat and its time to celebrate with other Mandarin learners, including the little ones. Here…
Peeling the Chinese Onion – Practical advice on how to approach the study of Mandarin
As a student of the Chinese language, I constantly find myself searching for metaphors to describe the learning process. Metaphors — ok, similes in this case, technically speaking — not only serve as a…
Monthly Digest of Chinese Learning – Feb 2015
There is an abundance of wonderful Chinese learning blogs and articles on the Internet. Sometimes it is just impossible to filter through every single one. Don’t you wish you had…
The Doorknob Theory of Chinese
A few years back, Nicholas Kristof wrote a New York Times column about the Peace Corps that might have gone unnoticed—as much as a Nicholas Kristof column can go unnoticed—if…
How to Find a Really Good Chinese Teacher to Guide Your Learning
Hello, Mandarin learners! This is Frank Geng again and I wish you a happy new year! In January, I wrote an article on How to find a really good Chinese…