So, you have been learning Mandarin for a long time, meticulously drawing and reading characters, day in and day out, perhaps for a few years now. But somehow, you don’t feel you are getting any more fluent in Mandarin. What…
Happy Chinese New Year! It’s now the year of the pig! As the zodiac cycle repeats every 12 years, if you were born within the Chinese Calendar year starting in 1923, 1935, 1947, 1959, 1971, 1983, 1995, 2007, and 2019,…
When you want to express “all of a sudden” or “suddenly”, there are two words that come to mind: 突然 and 忽然. Both of these words can be used before verbs as an adverbial modifier. For example, 今天突然/忽然冷起来了。(Jīntiān tūrán/hūrán lěng…
In English, the verb is usually the key to show the different aspects of an action in English, such as be / be doing / was / was doing / are going to / have done / had done, etc.…
From textbooks, you can learn proper grammar, regular words and vocabulary, as well as sentence structure. You can also learn simple and ordinary conversations and dialogue. But what you can’t learn from textbooks are the slang, phrases, and buzzwords that…
When it comes to learning Chinese, or any other foreign language, people will be quick to offer the “best” new method of studying. They will swear by these new learning systems, frequently guaranteeing you better results than prior methods could…
In our ‘Practical Chinese Level 1 course’, we studied the grammar structure of ‘是...的 (shì...de)’. In this article, we’re going to elaborate a bit more about it. The ‘是...的 (shì...de)’ combination has the function of emphasizing information. It’s similar 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 or Spanish alphabet; Chinese is constructed in pictographs composed of…