And as you would expect with a major family festival, it involves a big family meal and lot of trips to see relatives.

But there are other things about the Spring Festival that are less widely-known, so with the new year just around the corner, I want to take a look at some of the aspects of the festival I’ve found out since coming to China that you might not know about.

1. The traditions are different all over China

As China is such a huge and diverse country, some of the new year traditions are different in different parts of the country, and one of the biggest differences is in the food eaten at the New Year’s Eve meal.

In northern China, people usually eat dumplings as one of the main foods, and they will often hide coins in some of them. If you get a dumpling with a coin in the stuffing, then it is thought that you will be wealthy and prosperous in the year to come.

In the south of China, people often eat rice cake (called 年糕niángāo in Chinese), made of glutinous rice flour. The word ‘年糕’ also implies that you will rise in status with every year. In some of the southern provinces, like Guangdong, Guangxi and Fujian, people even put rice cakes in a hotpot, something that you don’t see in northern China.

2. There is a tradition of going home wearing new clothes

In China, it is traditional to buy new clothes before the New Year to wear during the festival, because it symbolises a new start for the new year. Ideally, everything you wear from head to toe should be a new purchase.

Chinese people also like to clean the whole house to prepare for the festival and welcome in the new year. Others will freshen up their appearance and get a new hair cut. Hair salons raise their prices dramatically before the new year to take advantage of this!

3. It can be incredibly difficult to get a train ticket

Chinese New Year is the time when all Chinese people go home to their families, and many people are living and working hundreds of miles away from their families, especially migrant workers who move from less developed areas to find work in the big cities. All of these millions of people travelling on the same dates puts huge pressure on the railway system.

Before I came to China, I had seen photos of crowded train stations and people travelling with huge amounts of luggage, but I had never thought about the practical issue of securing a train ticket.

In the last few years, you have been able to buy train tickets online, and as soon as sales open, all the tickets to key places are generally snapped up within just a couple of minutes. It’s like the biggest music festival or event in the world. Everybody is competing for the same thing!

I’m pleased to say that I have managed to get tickets every year in the end, waiting patiently for more tickets to be refunded or released.

4. You can rent a girlfriend to take home to your family

There have been a lot of posts online written by people venting their frustration about the pressure from their parents and extended family at New Year to find a girlfriend / boyfriend and get married. For single Chinese people in their 20s or even 30s in China, Chinese New Year can be a stressful time.

There have even been stories in the media of stressed-out bachelors ‘renting’ a girlfriend online for a large sum of money to take home to their family. I’m not sure if the families were convinced!

5. The animal sign for the year is everywhere

In the West, the Chinese animal signs are fairly well known, but if you come to China around the New Year, you will see the animal to the year to come wherever you look.

I remember when it was the year of the horse, there were horse toys on sale in all of the shops, and everybody was using four character phrases containing the character for horse. There were horses all over the television shows and parodies on social media.

This year (2025) is the Year of the Snake, and I have already seen dozens of soft toy snakes.

If your animal sign is the same as the one for the coming year, then it is traditional to wear red. A lot of people don’t want to dress fully in red, so they will just wear red socks or even red underpants. If you’re really traditional, you should wear red every day of the year, but I haven’t seen anybody doing that so far.

6. Everybody stays up to watch the same TV gala

On Chinese New Year’s Eve, it’s traditional to stay up late to see in the new year, and to keep everybody entertained, there is a major New Year Gala on Chinese state television.

When I came to China, I was surprised to find that all across the country, people are glued to the same show, which is a mixture of traditional performances, comedy and singing. Because it is on state TV, it also has a lot of political elements to it. The best way to describe it is something like a variety show, and it’s one of the most-watched programs anywhere in the world. To get on it is a huge achievement, and in recent years, I was surprised to see Western stars like Celene Dion make appearances singing Chinese songs!

7. Lucky money red envelopes have gone online

New year red envelopes with lucky money inside them (called 红包 hóngbāo in Chinese) are usually given by parents or older relatives to young children. Older children who are earning their own money also give them to elderly relatives and to the older generation.

But what you might not know is that red envelopes have now gone digital! In the last year or two, sending lucky money using the messaging app WeChat has become a craze, with people scrambling to snatch them up. You don’t have to send money directly to one person, either. You can set up a chat group with all your friends, send 100 yuan in total between 6 people, and everybody has to try their luck to see how much they get. It has become a new online game, and one that is highly addictive!

Major companies have also jumped on the bandwagon by offering thousands of red envelopes online to be snatched up in viral marketing campaigns, which have been huge successes.

8. It’s important to eat fish as part of the New Year’s Eve meal

I already mentioned that eating dumplings for the new year is important in northern China, but fish is also a crucial part of the New Year’s Eve meal, because the word for fish in Mandarin is 鱼(yú), and it sounds the same as the character 余(yú), which means surplus, and is used in the phrase 年年有余 (may you have a surplus every year).

For this reason, fish has an important symbolic place in the New Year’s Eve banquet, and it can’t be left out.

I hope you enjoyed my round-up of lesser-known Chinese New Year facts. It’s almost time to start hanging up the lanterns and preparing provisions for the festival, so lastly, let me wish you a very happy Chinese New Year, and a prosperous year to come! 新年快乐(xīnnián kuàilè)!

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If you’re on this site and reading this post, then you’ve probably at least heard of the four tones, so I won’t go over what they are in detail here – but if not, I’ve explained them in detail in this video.

In this post, I’ll want to give you a strategy for practising the tones so that you can get them sounding right, and some tips for how to fix them in your head. A lot of beginners learn about the tones, but find they are difficult, give up on them and just try to speak Chinese pretending that they don’t exist at all. This is a really bad idea, because it’s so much more difficult to correct your pronunciation mistakes later on, and it’s really worth taking the time to get them right early on.

Learn to say the tones right by practising them in pairs

The key to getting ‘into the feel’ of how the tones work in words and sentences is to practice them in pairs and different combinations. Luckily, most ‘words’ in Chinese have just two syllables and therefore two tones, and with only 4 tones there are only a small number of different combinations (even when you factor in the syllables that are unstressed).

I’ve produced videos that will help you practise all the combinations of the tones. All you have to do is listen and repeat the examples to see how they work. The most important thing is to get your mouth moving and give it a try!

If you get used to what the different tone combinations ‘feel like’ to say, then you will become much more familiar with them and also be able to able to pick them out more easily.

When you are familiar with the tone combinations in two-syllable words, then it’s just the same for three-syllable words, there’s just an extra syllable on the front.

And full sentences can generally be divided down into two or three-syllable ‘blocks’, which makes them easier to say correctly.

Related Reading: An exciting new audio-visual way to practice Mandarin tones

Fixing the tones in your head

One common difficulty that beginner learners of Chinese face is remembering what tone each character or word should be.

This is also why many people decide to ‘give up’ on the tones.

Each Chinese character has a tone, and if a word is made up of two characters, then that makes two tones you have to remember.

The problem is that there aren’t normally any clues from the character or the word itself that will tell you the tone.

This is why you have to pay special attention to the tones of words right from the beginning, integrate them into your learning, and continue to reinforce them so you don’t forget them.

After all, native Chinese speakers wouldn’t normally ‘forget the tones’, except for really rare words, so it’s definitely possible to remember them, even though it might seem really tough on your brain.

My strategy for remembering the tones of characters and words

1. Be disciplined about using the correct tones whenever you say anything in Chinese

One of the best ways to remember the tones is not to try to remember them from a list of words but to simply use them.

It’s easy just to try to ‘muddle through’ by saying things without using the tones at all, but it’s important to try to be disciplined and pronounce every word and sentence you learn with the correct tones right from the beginning.

Even if it slows you down at first, it will pay off in the long run.

2. Analyse your use of tones as you speak Chinese

Don’t worry if you make tone mistakes, everybody does, and it’s normal for any learner, but try to recognize when you’ve made a mistake, and correct yourself, or go and look up the tones of the word again later if you’ve forgotten them.

3. Always learn the tones when you learn a new character or word

Whenever you learn a new character or word, always remember to learn the tones at the same time. Don’t just try to copy a native speaker roughly, always ask what the tones are or look them up in a dictionary.

4. When you learn a word, use that as an opportunity to reinforce the tones for the characters in it

Chinese ‘words’ are usually two or three characters. You might recognise the characters individually but have forgotten their tones.

For example, if you know that 法律 is law, and it is pronounced “fǎ lǜ”, but you only remember that the first character is in the 3^rd tone, then you could use it as an opportunity to refresh your memory about the pronunciation of the second character (lǜ in the 4^th tone).

5. Focus on tones during Chinese listening, rather than just trying to pick out words

You may find that native speakers speak very quickly and it is hard to pick out the tones of words from a constant stream of speech, but whenever you can, try to also listen for the tones of words, or at least for parts of the sentence.

Obviously not everybody speaks in a clear standard accent, so this tip works better for classes or when you are listening to TV/radio etc.

6. Keep double-checking the tones of characters/words in a dictionary as you speak

As I said, forgetting the tones of words is completely normal.

If I look back at myself a few years ago, I was constantly checking the tones of words in a dictionary because I had forgotten them, but the more you double-check words and then use them correctly, the more likely you are to remember them. It takes time, but you will get things right in the end.

Now, with smartphones, it’s really easy to look up a word quickly anywhere, using an app like Pleco. If you were unsure of the tones in the word for pencil, say, you could just type in /qianbi/, and see that it should be pronounced in the 1^st then 3^rd tone. Simple!

7. When you read, read out loud with the correct tones

Reading texts out loud in Chinese can be more difficult than other languages, because you have to remember all the pronunciations of the characters, and it can be quite slow.

However, it’s a great exercise to help you reinforce the tones, and it gives you a chance to look up any that you have forgotten. It’s a great memory exercise, and will help you improve quickly!

8. Use colours and mnemonics as well as the tone symbols

If you are the kind of person who likes to rely on visual prompts to remember things, then feel free to use mnemonics or different colour pens to represent the different tones.

Who knows, it might make things easier for you.

As with all aspects of learning a language practice makes perfect. The more you practise the tones, rather than wishing they didn’t exist, the more you will remember them. You might forget the tones of a word 5 times, but if you accept that, and the result is that you remember it forever, then it’s definitely worth it!

Related reading resources

Back to Chinese Pronunciation Foundation: The Complete Chinese Pronunciation Guide

Experience sharing:

• From Frustration to Fluency: Master Chinese Pronunciation with 6 Techniques
• How to Master Tones without Using Tone Marks
• Recommended Chinese Songs for Perfecting Your Accent
• How to Improve Your Mandarin Chinese Pronunciation
• Top Tools to Help You Learn Chinese Pronunciation and Pinyin

The post How to Get the Tones in Chinese Right, and then Fix Them in Your Head! appeared first on .

Mandarin is actually made up of individual syllables. Every Chinese character is pronounced as one syllable. The good news is that there are not as many sounds in Chinese as in some other languages. However, Chinese is a tonal language, and there are 4 ways of pronouncing each syllable.

When you start learning to speak Chinese, I recommend learning Pinyin(The Illustration of Pinyin System). This is the official way in China of writing the sounds of Mandarin using the Western Roman alphabet. Each syllable or character can be written out, with a little accent above the letters to indicate the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th tone. Pinyin was devised by a Chinese man, not a Westerner. Some of the sounds are not spelled out in the way that you expect them to be.

To help you learn Pinyin and the sounds of Mandarin, I recommend that you try the free  Pinyin Chart tool. When you use it, you can click on any of the syllables and a corresponding tone. Try to learn to say all of the different sounds and practice using the four different tones. Using the software, you can practice all the sounds in Mandarin Chinese.

As you continue to study Mandarin, pay attention to the tones of each character and word. In my course Survive in Chinese. I stress this right from the beginning. It is important that you learn the tones of each character and practice saying them right from the beginning. If you have to speak very very slowly at the beginning, that is fine, accuracy is the most important thing. You should always study from courses that have audio recordings and copy the native speaker as closely as you can, following along with the Pinyin pronunciation guide. You can speed up gradually, although it is important to keep your tones accurate. Make a point of noting down the tones of vocabulary and jotting down mistakes when people point out your mistakes. At the earlier stages of your learning, it is a good idea to listen and follow along with texts in textbooks. At the intermediate stage, there is quite a big jump between textbook texts and authentic Chinese audio, so you will probably want to consider using listening courses and intermediate textbooks.

For more intermediate or advanced learners who want to improve the accuracy of their pronunciation, I recommend listening to a lot of TV and radio. Broadcasters in China are tested on the accuracy of their pronunciation before they can go on the air, so you know that they will be speaking very accurately. Try to note their intonation. For listening to Chinese radio, one site that I like to use is tunein, and you can also download the TuneIn app on your Android phone or iPhone/iPad. On the site, you search for radio stations from Mainland China or Taiwan. I sometimes listen to Beijing News Radio (北京新闻广播) or Beijing Communications Radio (北京交通广播). You can find both of them by searching on the site. The second one is designed for taxis and drivers to listen to, and it has more music and light-hearted discussions on everyday topics. For music lovers, there is also Hit FM , which plays both Chinese and Western music. These are just some of the stations in Beijing, and there are loads more that you can choose from!

Most Chinese TV has subtitles, so you can read along at the same time. You can even stop the recording and try repeating sections, following the pronunciation of the speaker carefully. To watch TV from China online, you can download the Chinese CCTV app from here. The website is in Chinese, but just click the dark blue button to download. Once you install it, it is pretty easy to use. Open the program and click on the second button along on the top bar that says 直播中国, then you will find a list of channels. As well as having the national TV channels, you can also watch some of the major local satellite channels using the program. CCTV 1 and 2 have a lot of news and also entertainment programs, CCTV 5 has sports and CCTV新闻 is news. For advanced learners, I also recommend Phoenix TV News.

If you can speak to native Chinese speakers or a teacher, ask them to point out specific problems with your pronunciation. This will help you to correct some of your more common mistakes. It may be discouraging sometimes to hear about your mistakes, but you will learn from them very quickly and it will help you to improve fast.

Also, you can grab a voice recorder or your smartphone and record yourself reading out a text from a textbook or talking about a certain topic. Then play the recording back to yourself and try to listen for any Chinese pronunciation or tone mistakes. They will be more obvious when you are listening back. Write down some notes for the next time you speak or ask a native speaker to give you some pointers.

When I was first learning Chinese, I found that I made quite a lot of mistakes with tones, however through people correcting me, listening to a lot of standard Chinese, listening to myself, and taking care with Chinese pronunciation, I have managed to iron out most of my mistakes over time. Don’t worry if you make mistakes with pronunciation. Try to pay attention, but speaking out is the most important thing, and you can improve over some time.

Recommended Resource：

• From Frustration to Fluency: Master Chinese Pronunciation with 6 Techniques
• Learning from scratch: Chinese Pronunciation Guide
• Learning step by step in 16 days: systematic Pinyin Course

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