Have you ever wondered where idioms come from? Well, being one of the oldest civilizations on our planet today, it is no surprise that the source of many English sayings is China! The Mandarin word for idiom is 成语 and…
Since the Chinese language and culture has been around for so long, there is a rich history. This is particularly true when studying chengyu, a four part Chinese idioms that arise from a cultural story. Often without knowing the story…
Stop sniggering at the back! When you saw the title, did you think we were learning about how to pick up a man or woman in Chinese class today? We are strictly talking about the Chinese translations of the English…
It has been very cold in Beijing recently, and out on the streets, you might hear some Chinese people saying: “冷死了(lěng sǐ le, I’m freezing).” "死 (sǐ)" literally means “to die,” or “death,” and is generally a taboo word with…
Once your Chinese learning reaches an intermediate level, you may find that you have some difficulty with synonyms. Most Chinese learners wonder if these synonyms are interchangeable, or wonder which particular word(s) to use in a situation where a couple…
Chinese is a rich language with a vast vocabulary - every nuance of a given concept or object is expressed by its own word. This can get confusing, as there are many examples of words in Chinese that initially seem…
In my posts, I've touched before on how important it is to approach language as a structure, not as a laundry list. When you learn phrases and sentences, rather than piecemeal words, you learn faster, and better. The analogy I like best…
When I learnt English, ‘make’ was a verb, which always confused me. For me, there are too many meanings of ‘make’ and some of them are quite different in Chinese. So today let’s look at the usages of ‘make’ in…