Listening skills are one of the most important elements in learning Chinese. It allows you to be able to actually communicate and make concrete interactions with Chinese people. To help smoothen your communication and improve your listening skills, here are…
Unlike English and some other languages, Chinese doesn’t have a specialized pattern of verb changes to indicate tenses. So how do the Chinese tell the different tenses apart? Well, we usually use time words to express different tenses, and these…
Why do we need to know how to read in Chinese? There are three main reasons: to be immersed in the country’s culture through Chinese books and newspapers; to be able to better communicate with the Chinese by enhancing your…
Flowers and trees are closely related to people’s lives. Because of this, for thousands of years, the Chinese people have coined many plant-related words and expressions. For example, Chinese people often associate “美女”(méi nǚ, a pretty girl) with a “flower”,…
Before we start our topic today on Chinese homophones, let’s first look at the following two sentences: (1)一朵漂亮的花儿。(Yī duǒ piàoliàng de huār. ) (2)他今天花了一百元。(Tā zuátiān huā le yībǎi yuán.) We can see that both of these sentences have“花”, whose meanings…
You may be looking for a way to say “Because” or “So” in Mandarin Chinese. Or perhaps, you have learned how to say “Because” (“因为” yīnwèi), and “So” (“所以” suǒyǐ), but you still want to find other more interesting ways…
You may be wondering, as someone studying Mandarin, if there is any difference in the learning methods of beginners and advanced students? If we use the same methods from the beginning level and up, does it work? As a Chinese…
A real question many Chinese learners will encounter early is how to express future events. In Chinese, we have a series of time words to address that: “将来”(jiānglái), “未来”(wèilái), “以后”(yǐhòu) and “后来”(hòulái). These words are used frequently both in elementary,…