This time, we are going to talk about ‘兼语句’ (Jiānyǔjù), Pivotal sentence, which is a special structure that plays an important role in Chinese. I believe many learners willhave or have had trouble while working with it. So, here I’ll…
Introduction: The word “help” can be translated as either “帮助” (bāngzhù) or “帮忙”(bāngmáng) in Chinese. But when you want to say “help him”, you will be corrected by your Chinese teacher if you say 帮忙他 (bāngmáng tā). There is a…
In everyday life, we usually compare different people or things by length, weight, size, age and so on. So, do you know how to say she is more beautiful than I am and She is much more beautiful than I…
Passive sentences make up a big and important part of modern Chinese. There are generally two types: Marked Passive Sentences and Unmarked Passive Sentences. We have talked about Marked Passive Sentences, as for Unmarked Passive Sentences, some learners may feel unsure…
In Chinese, the use of “passive sentences” is fairly common and foreigners who are not used to passive sentences are often confused by them when learning the language. So , to help foreign learners better understand this kind of sentence…
Here is a lesson that is a bit more advanced, and it involves two words that are often thought to have the same meaning and are sometimes used interchangeably. These two words are “通过(tōng guò)” and “经过(jīng guò)”. Even if…
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…
The idea for this article came when one of our users told us "我怕太多冷(wǒ pà tài duō lěng)" – a phrase that doesn’t make much sense in Chinese. The tricky thing is, when we directly translate "too much" or "too…