Being able to speak fluently and interact with native Chinese easily is the ultimate goal of many Chinese learners. However, it can also be seen as a great weakness. Based on my observation of students, the reasons were either they…
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…
Chinese characters are complex and difficult to handle for beginners. Many educators choose to avoid them and teach pinyin instead. However, pinyin is only an auxiliary tool for denoting the pronunciations of the characters. It is not the Chinese language…
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…
‘好(hǎo)’ in its original definition means ‘good’, and when it’s used as a response or reply, it automatically transforms to mean ‘fine’, ‘sure’ or ‘ok’. Yet, with various words and interjections following ‘好hǎo’, it changes to show different emotions or…
Songs are a great way to learn a new language as well as mandarin Chinese, because through music you can learn words and phrases from the lyrics. What is particularly great about songs is that they make the content stick…
An interjection is an exclamation, especially as a part of speech. An example of an interjection in English would be “Ah!” or “Oh!” Many of you may already know it’s a common phenomenon for Chinese sentences to end with interjections,…