Chinese Radicals This is another in a series of articles that takes a closer look at a specific Chinese radical. Radicals are the ‘building blocks’ of the Chinese language and help students of Chinese to learn to read Chinese characters. The root radical shows us the meaning behind the character. For example, if a character… Read More
Written by Sarah Li Cain You ought to know by now that Chinese slang is changing frequently. Yeah, we have a list we mentioned before, but there are just so many more waiting to be discovered! If you truly want to be part of Chinese culture, you need to learn slang. No WeChat conversation can… Read More
When I first came to China, one of the first phrases I had to learn (much to my embarrassment) was 听不懂 (tīng bu dǒng) . Which, literally translated being ‘listen no understand’ or ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying’. Since then, I’ve learned a few more ways to say that I do (or don’t) understand… Read More
It will only take [est_time] to read this post! What is a Bigram? A bigram, is according to the Oxford Dictionary, “A pair of consecutive written units such as letters, syllables, or words” In the English language, an example of a letter bigram would be ‘th’, as found in ‘the’, ‘their’ and ‘there’. Bigrams also… Read More
The first thing I asked when I arrived in China over 4 years ago was how to say ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’. I insisted on saying ‘谢谢’ for everything and got upset when people didn’t say it back to me when I held a door or did some other trivial deed. I tried to ask… Read More
It will only take [est_time] to read this post! Videos and audio lessons are brilliant for learning Chinese, especially when you’re on the go. You might already know how to say you already know how to say ‘我喜欢打篮球‘ (wǒ xǐ huan dǎ lán qiú) ‘I like to play basketball’ and really want to get to… Read More