In Chinese, you can use either “帮助” (bāngzhù) or “帮忙”(bāngmáng) to mean "help." But, if you say "帮忙他" (bāngmáng tā) to say "help him", your Chinese teacher will correct you.…
Comparing things or people is a common practice in daily life. We make comparisons using various attributes like length, weight, size, age, and so on. The most commonly used comparative…
Passive sentences are commonly used in Chinese and can cause confusion for foreign learners who are not accustomed to them. To assist in decoding this unique sentence construction, we will…
When it comes to mastering Mandarin Chinese, learning the nuances of vocabulary is a crucial step towards fluency. One such challenge involves two words that often perplex even advanced learners:…
If you're learning Chinese, you'll come across the character 把(bǎ) early on, and it's important to understand its uses. Besides its common role in sentence structure, 把 also functions as…
In my first year as a high school Chinese teacher in India, I noticed that sometimes my students giggled when I spoke. At first I thought it was my Chinglish…
Since the Chinese language and culture have been around for so long, there is a rich history. This is particularly true when studying chengyu, a four part Chinese idioms that…
The Chinese are famously pretty vague in giving answers. As most will readily admit, they prefer to offer estimations rather than specifics, especially if there may be consequences involved. Instead…
As you get a little more confident with learning Chinese, some of the initial problems such as tones, characters and strange pronunciations the mouth seems to refuse to make start…