Articles for Learning

Many Chinese learners complain about the difficulty in writing Chinese characters.  People have no clue about how and where to put the first stroke, or what order should be followed when writing the Chinese characters. Actually all characters are composed by simple strokes, and there are only a few rules when writing them. 

Watch out! One criticism that many Westerns have about Chinese is that everything sounds the same. There is some truth in that complaint given that “shì” (one of the most common sounds in Chinese) takes up 41 pages in a standard Chinese dictionary. Chinese is a very contextually dependent language, meaning that the exact same sounds can have a completely different meaning when used in a different context. As a tone based language, pronunciation is definitely the most important part of ...

Hi, my name is Xiaohong, and I teach Mandarin at Hills Learning. Here is an article about Hanzi, a topic that comes up quite frequently in my classes. Have you ever noticed the tattoo that David Beckham has on his body? Do you know where it is from? If you guessed China, you’d be correct! Chinese characters have more than a 5000 year history. There are more than 90,000 Chinese characters in existence! But don’t worry… if you know about 1000 commonly used Chinese characters, they can cover ...

TRADITIONAL AND SIMPLIFIED CHARACTERS Written Chinese is a pictographic language in that each character or "letter" of the language depicts a word rather than a sound. Traditionally, the characters were the same for all readers. However, in the 1950s China instituted an overhaul of the language, creating a Simplified character set and making the use of the Simplified set mandatory throughout the country. The government has promoted Simplified characters for use in printing along with an ...