In everyday Chinese conversations, animal-related slang expressions are indispensable. They show up frequently and are widely known among Chinese people nowadays. These words and phrases not only enrich the language but also reflect Chinese people’s feelings and values. So, slang…
In this article, we are going to take a look at a very practical part of vocabulary-prefixes and suffixes. You might find it a little bit odd because prefixes and suffixes sound like an English concept. However, it does appear…
I bet “老师”( lǎoshī), “先生”( xiānsheng), “女士”( nǚshì) or “小姐”( xiǎojiě) are familiar to all Chinese language learners, because you have most likely used these terms in introductory courses; these are the common honorifics to address people in China with…
In this article, we are going to explore some special Chinese idioms or figures of speech that involve numbers. Numbers can be used to express a lot of things, not just to count, and when they are used as idioms,…
Early in their studies, almost all Chinese learners are taught“有时候”（yǒu shíhou）, which means “Sometimes”. However, when you go deeper into learning Chinese, you’ll find that it cannot be used in all cases. Besides “有时候”, there are other words for “Sometimes”…
From textbooks, you can learn proper grammar, regular words and vocabulary, as well as sentence structure. You can also learn simple and ordinary conversations and dialogue. But what you can’t learn from textbooks are the slang, phrases, and buzzwords that…
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…
‘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…