Chinatown is a great way to begin looking for Chinese characters in your home country. You’ll find useful characters or bigrams (2-character combinations) repeated frequently, which is handy if you’re a beginner studying Written Chinese! Most of these common Chinese symbols are found as traditional Chinese characters, but it’s often helpful to look at the… Read More
At the end of each year, a list of the ‘hottest’ words and phrases from the year are posted on Chinese social media. Just like trending memes on Twitter, Chinese social media has its own version of scathing cultural remarks and self-mockery. Here are some 5 of the hottest Chinese slang of 2017 with an… Read More
When I first started to learn Mandarin, I really couldn’t get my head around the idea that there wasn’t really a word for yes in Chinese. The ones that I initially picked up and used were 是的 (shì de) and 对 (duì), but there are quite a few more that you can use in order… Read More
Chinese opera 中国戏剧 (zhōng guó xì jù) has existed for hundreds of years, and has its own conventions and individual style. Whilst there are various different types of Chinese opera, in the modern-day, Beijing or Peking Opera is the most common type of opera and is said to be an amalgamation of the different opera… Read More
This is the second half of our article on how to handwrite Chinese characters addressing some more complex strokes. If you haven’t already, don’t forget to take a look at the first part of our post: How to Handwrite Chinese Characters with Finesse. 钩画的写法 (gōu huà de xiě fǎ) How to write the ‘Gou’ Stroke… Read More
In China, there is an old saying: 药补不如食补 (yào bǔ bù rúshí bǔ) ‘the benefits of medicine as not as good as nutrition.’ Consuming an appropriate amount of certain foods is often found to have health benefits and this is strongly connected with Traditional Chinese Medicine. Whilst the word ‘superfood’ seems contemporary and faddy, food… Read More