20 Questions to Get You from Zero Chinese to Basic Fluency (Part 4)
Part 1: Questions 1 ~ 5Part 2: Questions 6 ~ 10Part 3: Question 11 ~ 15Part 4: Question 16 ~ 20 #16: How to ask How are you doing in…
Dhruv’s Two Cents on Answering Direct Questions
After spending some time in China, one soon realizes that many things in your textbook were written in a foreigner-friendly way. In reality, from the perspective of a foreigner, the…
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…