HelloChinese: Say “Ni Hao” To Chinese Language
Learning Chinese has many benefits. Millions of people around the world would like to give it a try, but there are so many excuses. Serious studies require serious time investments…
Learning Experience Sharing: Remembering Chinese Tones
I am from Spain and recently I lived and worked in Shenyang for 7 months where I learned Chinese by myself, including talking with my Chinese friends and coworkers. One…
These Flashcards Might Help You Learn Chinese
If you’re learning Chinese, then there is almost no way to avoid flashcards short of enrolling yourself in an extremely rural elementary school and starting from scratch. You need some…
Top 10 Most Common Chinese Characters
There are around eighty thousand Chinese characters, which can seem daunting to new learners. However, like many words in English, the majority of these characters are not used in day-to-day…
Tones Prefer Company! Part II – An exciting new audio-visual way to practice Mandarin tones
My last Digmandarin article “Tones Prefer Company!“ generated a lot of interest, prompting me to pen this follow-up. The idea that tones should not be studied in isolation, and the…
A Fun Tip to Master Chinese Characters Smoothly
Since I have a long history of learning Chinese, I can offer some of my own learning methods as tips on how to overcome the more difficult aspects of the…
Greetings other than 你好 (nǐ hǎo)
One of the first things that any Chinese lesson, book, or teacher will teach you is “你好 (nǐ hǎo).” 你好 translates into “Hello.” Funny enough, native Chinese speakers rarely use…
The Chinese Way to Use ‘make’
When I learned English, ‘make’ was a verb, which always confused me. For me, there are too many meanings of ‘make’ and some of them are quite different in Chinese…
Tones Prefer Company! – A New Way to Practice Chinese Tones
When you hear someone discuss the basics of Mandarin pronunciation, they usually start with the four tones and give an example like the famous (mā má mǎ mà). To be…