Aside from remembering how to write them, writing ‘beautiful’ characters can be a challenge. Using the adjective ‘beautiful’ might seem strange, but there is a particular finesse that comes with writing Chinese characters that, when written correctly, can be beautiful. When I first began learning to write Chinese characters (yes, you’ve heard my story a… Read More
A couple of months ago, I sent out an email asking what people’s biggest problems were or are with studying Chinese. I was overwhelmed by the responses I received from users of all levels and I have managed to whittle down everyone’s replies down to these 10 questions. Some of these learning problems came up… Read More
Although there are many similarities between punctuation in written Chinese and English, there are some interesting additions within the Chinese language To write using Chinese characters and punctuation using your computer or mobile phone, you need to set up a Chinese keyboard on your device. You can find out how to do this on our… Read More
Learning Chinese already seems like a daunting task what with 5 (sort of) spoken tones and Chinese characters, and although the word ‘grammar’ might make you want to head for the hills, once you learn some basic sentence patterns, you’ll be well on your way to making sentences in Chinese. Obviously, there are other sentence… Read More
Food vocabulary in any language is probably the most fun and also most challenging to learn because there are just so many words to get to grips with. Although some food words share the same Chinese, most of the time this can actually make learning new words easier because you simply add an extra character… Read More
British people (myself being one) are known for their love of complaining about the weather. In winter it’s too cold, in summer it’s too hot (you may laugh), if it rains it’s too wet, when it doesn’t it’s too dry. In China, it is much the same; a downpour can produce a gaggle of 阿姨 (ā yí) announcing… Read More