Chinese Characters: to Challenge or to avoid?
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…
How to Write Chinese Characters (Quick Start Guide)
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…
多音字(duō yīn zì): Understanding Polyphones in Mandarin Chinese
Learning Mandarin is an exciting journey filled with countless characters, tones, and nuances. As you delve into the language, one fascinating feature you’ll encounter is the concept of polyphones. Polyphones,…
For the Love of Characters! Introducing the Block-Headed Hula Girl and Other Useful Silliness
Chinese characters are beautiful, but there are just so damned many of them. And only very few are true pictographs that actually look like the thing they represent. 人 (rén) is…
Chinese Characters: Are they worth learning? How do I get started?
As we all know, Chinese uses characters as the basis of its written system. This aspect makes it quite different from most other languages. This characteristic has also become a…
Mastering Chinese Characters Through Radicals – Exploring the Bow Radical in Chinese Characters
One of my favorite Chinese radicals is the bow radical, 弓 (gōng). It is an elegant character that must be written correctly. Despite looking complex, it consists of only three…
Mastering Chinese Characters Through Radicals – Illustrating the Walking Radical in Chinese Characters
The radical 辶 is commonly associated with “walking” (走 – zǒu) in Chinese. There are over 380 characters listed under this radical in the Kangxi Dictionary, most of which are…
A Beginner’s Guide to Chinese Question Words and Sentence Structures
As you embark on your journey to learn the Chinese language, you’ll quickly realize that asking questions is a fundamental skill that opens the doors to effective communication. While simple…
Beginner Building Blocks: A Comprehensive Overview of Chinese Pronouns
For the majority of Chinese learners, the first greeting they encounter is “你好” (Hello). This initial step reveals that Chinese learners become acquainted with Chinese pronouns sooner than they might…