In this article, we are going to explore some special Chinese idioms or figures of speech that involve numbers. Numbers can be used to express a lot of things, not just to count, and when they are used as idioms,…
Early in their studies, almost all Chinese learners are taught“有时候”（yǒu shíhou）, which means “Sometimes”. However, when you go deeper into learning Chinese, you’ll find that it cannot be used in all cases. Besides “有时候”, there are other words for “Sometimes”…
Are you planning to go on a short trip to China? How about staying in China for the long term? Either way, you would need to have knowledge of the apps that are used in China in order to make…
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…