How many Chinese characters do you need to know in order to be “fluent”? Well, on average, native Chinese speakers will have a vocabulary of approximately 8,000 characters, and the…
“Should I learn to handwrite Chinese characters?” This is a question most Mandarin students ask themselves at the beginning of their learning journey because it is perhaps the biggest challenge…
The number one rule for truly learning something is understanding it. Chinese Etymology is the study of the origin of Chinese characters. The more knowledge you can apply to a…
A lot of Chinese learners may think that Chinese characters just look like a bunch of lines and squares that makes no sense to them. For most beginners, writing Chinese…
Any student of Mandarin Chinese can agree that at the start of your learning, memorizing characters is a daunting task! Modern dictionaries will have in excess of 50,000 characters where…
The Chinese language has a reputation for its complex grammar and difficult writing system, not to mention its deep culture background. Only a few brave souls go and attempt to…
Many foreigners are often confused with how the Chinese people type out Chinese characters on their cellphones or computers. Chinese, after all, is not composed of letters like the English…
Chinese characters are complex and difficult to handle for beginners. Many educators choose to avoid them and teach pinyin instead. However, pinyin is only an auxiliary tool for denoting the…
I`ve been a Chinese teacher for a long time and I’m frequently asked about writing Chinese characters. This article will summarize my thoughts on this issue which I hope will…