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,…
You may have hit a wall in the study of Function words in Chinese. Maybe you have mastered Function words like “着”, “了”, “过”, but the next step is to deal with the myriad words of Associated Constructions, such as…
You may have already learned the how to use the Directional Verbs “……起来” and “……下去”， but in some situations, how they are supposed to be used doesn’t work very well, for example: “唱起来(chànɡ qǐlái)” and “唱下去(chànɡ xiàqu)”. Of course, this…
What is a Chinese idiom/Chéngyǔ? Briefly speaking, Chengyu (成语, Chéngyǔ) are Chinese idioms that are normally made up of four Chinese characters. Chengyu are usually handed down from way back in Chinese history, and thus, over this long periodof time,…
When I first came to China, I knew all of two words, “nǐ hǎo” (你好, “hello”), and “xièxie” (谢谢, “thanks”). It took me over three years to get from there to a level of proficiency where I was confident enough…
If you need to express an “Approximate Number” in terms of time, weight, age, or any other term that involves a number, there are a number of ways to do it in Mandarin. This is a fundamental and important language…
This time, we are going to study 12 Chinese proverbs about Work. The Chinese people have accumulated many vivid proverbs that are thought-provoking and which reflect the attitude and point-of-view of the Chinese towards work. May they inspire and stimulate…
A little pre-review ramble: I am located in Shanghai behind the Great Firewall, so I was not able to simply take a stroll in the Google Play Store like many of you may be able to do. Instead, I used…