Chinese Textbook Reviews – Learning Chinese Characters
A year into my Mandarin studies and it is becoming harder and harder to remember what each character means and how to pronounce it. The only method that has proven…
Culture Wok with Kirsten: 大家好！
I remember it quite distinctly: Bus after city bus had been packed to sardine-can limits, and it was still too cold to comfortably walk the two miles back to my…
Learning with Written Chinese Serial Tools
Nora Joy is an American from Wisconsin that initially arrived in Sichuan, China alone and without any Mandarin skills. She quickly discovered that she needed to learn Mandarin fast! Four…
20 Questions to Get You from Zero Chinese to Basic Fluency (Part 3)
Part 1: Questions 1 ~ 5Part 2: Questions 6 ~ 10Part 3: Question 11 ~ 15Part 4: Question 16 ~ 20 #11: How to ask do you have a fork…
上 and 下 in Chinese: Beyond the Basic “Up” and “Down”
Have you ever stopped to consider how often you use the words 上(shàng) and 下(xià) in your daily life? These two characters are so ubiquitous in the Chinese language that…
Using Pleco as Your Guide to Daily Life in China
The Pleco app serves as a dictionary for the Chinese learner allowing them to search by pinyin, or by radical. While the dictionary part of the app is free, it…
The Many Uses of “Hand” in Chinese
If we say someone is clever and deft, we mean he or she is quick-witted and nimble-fingered and it is called “心灵手巧” (xīn ling shǒu qiǎo) in Chinese. “手” (shǒu)（hand）is…
Check List: Do You Really Use All the Online Tools for Learning Mandarin?
The development of internet technologies has been constantly changing the process of learning a foreign language, but are you sure that you use a maximum of the available online tools?…
Live in China, Live the Language —— “Sink-or-Swim” Education Experiment
Live The Language is a Mandarin school in Beijing, and it`s also the only school which focuses on immersion learning in China so far. Andreas is the founder and he…
Slang Similarities in English and Chinese
In the process of learning Chinese, you may find that many slangs or idioms between Chinese and English are similar, like in English “a piece of cake”and in Chinese “小菜一碟…