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…
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…
There are lots of awesome resources for learning Chinese This may surprise some people but the quality and variety of resources available to Mandarin learners are really high. With the constant improvements in technology, the amount of a language that…
‘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,…
In Part 1 of Chinese idioms and slangs, we talked about the 龙（dragon） and the 凤（phoenix, two animals that are traditional symbols of Chinese culture. But of course, they are not the only two animals that are a part of…